Arts + Culture Magazine Houston

Review: The Abstract Impulse at the MFAH

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Amidst the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s high-profile goings-on – the Prado exhibition (through March 31), the Picasso show (through May 27), WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY’s U.S. tour and the MFAH’s participation in South Korea’s first historical American art survey [...]

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Review: Gunilla Klingberg at Rice Gallery

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It’s no secret that corporate logos abound in the modern consumerist landscape of America. It’s not every day that you see them transformed into the grist of art, and yet in the wake of Pop Art, it can’t be said to be that uncommon either. With her new installation at Rice Gallery, Wheel of Everyday [...]

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Review: The Language Archive

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“I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me,” Mary says to George in Julia Cho’s The Language Archive (at Stages Repertory Theatre through March 3). “I’ve never understood what you’re trying to tell me.” And right there brings us to the crux of the problem in this endearing drama [...]

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Review: Verdi’s Macbeth

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Heavy is the head that wears the crown—especially when you murdered your predecessor. Set in post-apocalyptic Scotland, Opera in the Heights’ production of Verdi’s Macbeth captures something new in Shakespeare’s classic from neon purple, lime, and yellow-wigged witches to shopping carts and barbed wire. Pulled off with passion, Macbeth [...]

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Response: Performance Response to Tony Feher Free Fall

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Performance installation puts people in a state of unease, possibly because they don’t know where they are on the continuum observer and participant. Most people got there early enough to have some fun with Tony Feher’s hanging tiny water bottles, warming up the space, getting [...]

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Response: The Submission

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House lights go out on dim blue work lights as the actors take their places. Scene lights come up stage left on a set platform. Two males, seated, at a coffee shop. One jabs away at a logo-glowing Apple laptop while the other plods through a pre-digital paper manuscript. For a moment I imagine that [...]

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Review: Wittenberg

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Stages Repertory Theatre’s rendering of David Davalos’s delightfully quirky Wittenberg may be the one show in Houston you shouldn’t miss. As director Josh Morrison says in his program note, “I would love audiences to experience a debate of faith versus reason in a witty, fun [...]

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Review: Don Giovanni

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Women large and small, old and young, from Spain to Turkey— the seductive Don Giovanni has conquered them all. And beyond the lecherous main character  is laughter, love, jealously, and fiery hell for those who do evil. Widely thought to be the best opera ever written, any production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni is held to [...]

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Review: Camelot

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The reasons to head out to the Hobby Center to see the Theatre Under the Stars’s production of Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot are the songs and the assembly of talent. Adultery in castles is always a fun subject too. Sure, it’s a chestnut — dated, showing its age on several fronts — but come on [...]

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Response: The Menil’s fake deaccessioning scandal

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Most Houston artists – for that matter, most artists living anywhere – would be thrilled to have an artwork acquired by the world-renowned Menil Collection and displayed for nearly two years before it was rotated off view. They certainly wouldn’t take to the homepage of a statewide nonprofit visual arts website – whose founder and [...]

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