Review: The Art of Exaggeration
Walking through The Art of Exaggeration at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston feels like being privy to an inside joke. From simple caricatures to controversial political satires, viewers are engaged in a comedic, intimate, and disturbing discourse between artists like Francisco Goya, Man Ray, William Hogarth, and Robert Crumb. Organized by Dena M. Woodall, MFAH [...]
Read MoreReview: Alvin Baltrop
The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston prides itself on “exhibitions that exemplify the art of today.” What, then, to make of a CAMH show dominated by black-and-white pre-digital-era photographs taken by a deceased, virtually unknown artist to document a demi-monde that no longer exists? Organized by the museum’s senior [...]
Read MoreReview: Museum of Dysfunction V
Mildred’s Umbrella’s Museum of Dysfunction V August 9-18, 2012 Mildred Umbrella opened their celebrated annual showcase of short plays, Museum of Dysfunction V, on Thursday, August 9. The selection, which is split into two sections, runs through August 18, with alternating performances. Mildred’s Umbrella received [,,,]
Read MoreReview: Silence
The Menil Collection Robert Rauschenberg’s 1951 work White Painting (Two Panel) — two side-by-side canvases coated in white oil paint with a roller — is the kind of eyeroll-inducing stuff that gives contemporary art a bad name. It’s hard to validate such a work without sounding like a pretentious jerk, smugly courting controversy. Mainstream-minded musicians [...]
Read MoreReview: Jonah Bokaer
Jonah Bokaer Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival August 5, 2012 If I had to label the genre of Jonah Bokaer’s new work, Curtain, premiered at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, I would say it’s a thriller, more in genre of Inception than any garden [...]
Read MoreReview: Next to Normal
Stages Repertory Theatre May 16-June 24 If someone told me that the minute the curtain came down after the first time seeing Next To Normal, that I would voluntarily see it again, I would have responded, “Honey, go take your meds.” But there I was, along with a packed house at Stages Repertory Theatre, going [...]
Read MoreReview: Hilary Wilder, A Northern Tale
J.M.W. Turner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Hudson River School understandably come up a lot in discussions of former Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Core Fellow Hilary Wilder’s work. Visiting her current exhibition at Devin Borden Gallery, I thought of James Abbott McNeill Whistler, a 19th-century painter. It wasn’t because of how he painted landscapes [...]
Read MoreReview: David Katz, Systemic Expansion
Spindles and webs of organic shapes span the hallway like an alien garland, interlinking peculiar bulbous nodes. Hard ceramic cages squinch and shape the interlinked tumorous forms. The bone-like lattices that festoon the hallways of the Artists Gallery at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft comprise Systemic Expansion, the latest [...]
Read MoreReview: Oscar Muñoz
at Sicardi Gallery Fire, water, dust, and light. Though modern science has moved well past the classical theory of elements, there remains some category of pure substance [...]
Read MoreReview: The Turin Horse
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Béla Tarr claims The Turin Horse will be his last film, and unlike American celebrities who use retirement as a PR scam, he’ll probably stick [...]
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