Call it Street Art, Call it Fine Art, Call it What You Know
Politics are inherent in street art. The fact that the art form sidesteps established museum and gallery circulations is a political statement in itself. Thus, it may seem a curious amalgam for an exhibition of street art to be brought indoors, but such is the case with the Station Museum’s latest show Call it Street [...]
Read MoreThe Tool at Hand
No one likes being told what to do, but what if the instruction comes in the form of an invitation? That very question is addressed in The Tool at Hand, a traveling exhibition currently on view at Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum in collaboration with the Chipstone Foundation, which [...]
Read MoreAstrodome Rising? (UPDATED)
Proposal for Moldering Stadium Shows Promise Amid Logistical, Access Issues Update to story posted April 27, 2013. Earlier this spring, a proposal to partially demolish the Astrodome and keep its steel skeleton as a monster-sized gazebo to shade NFL tailgaters, rodeo livestock and carnival-goers, and sports practice fields became a local viral sensation. It was [...]
Read MoreRoom for Improvement
Theater’s Proposed Renovation Includes Overdue Improvements But Needs a Lighter Touch In contrast to Houston’s other major theaters — Jones Hall, The Wortham Center, and The Hobby Center, which are bland, boxy affairs — the Alley Theatre is an utterly memorable building. Originally designed by Ulrich Franzen, its [...]
Read MoreSuspended Animation
The Bridge Club Heads to Currents New Media Festival If the medium is the message, as philosopher and media analyst Marshall McLuhan famously proclaimed, then The Bridge Club performance collective reveals the (digital) writing on the wall with their performance of Medium at Currents: The Santa Fe International New Media Festival. Currents is the first [...]
Read MoreA Plethora of Prints
PrintHouston Returns, Leaving Its Mark on Spaces Large and Small Although it’s only in its third year, PrintHouston, the annual citywide extravaganza of workshops, demonstrations, lectures, and exhibitions celebrating printmakers and their work, has already become a Houston art-scene fixture. So much so that, although it’s known as a summer festival, PrintHouston’s 2013 event schedule [...]
Read More8 Kids, 2 Punk Rock Fans, a Probation Officer & a Dream
Ben Tecumseh DeSoto’s Whole Mind Workshop Brings Art Where It’s Needed Most Having signed an agreement with the Harris County Juvenile Probation Department not to photograph the kids or use their real names in this story, I ask the three 16-year-olds at the Raul Yzaguirre School for Success’s high-school campus on [...]
Read MoreMFAH Inflated Attendance Figures for Years
General Admission Visits Are Less Than 19% of Beck, Law Building Tallies Having spent two weeks poring over annual reports and attendance data, I’ve got good news and bad news about the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston that couldn’t be more timely or relevant to our art scene’s conversations about the image it wants to [...]
Read More‘Round 7’ at Lawndale Art Center
Why do we copy? Why do we appropriate imagery? Is it inherently different from the source? Perhaps these questions aren’t all asked overtly or even consciously in the Round 7 Lawndale Artist Studio Program Exhibition, but these themes percolate when considering the three artists together. The exhibition features work from [...]
Read MoreSteve Brudniak: The Science of Surrealism
Comte de Lautréamont was a 19th-century poet whose famously cryptic line – “beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table” – was adopted as one of Surrealism’s aesthetic credos. Nearly sixty years later, André Breton, one of the founders of Surrealism, would similarly define surrealist art as [...]
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