The 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 [...]
Deep in the Marrow
Stark Naked Ends Season with Macbeth Stark Naked Theatre co-artistic directors Kim Tobin and Philip Lehl tackle the roles of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth in their first production of Shakespeare’s tale of ambition run amok. Tobin and Lehl sat down with A + C editor Nancy Wozny to discuss the iconic Scottish play. A + [...]
Close Up Space
When we first meet editor Paul Barrow, the protagonist of Molly Smith Metzler’s Close Up Space, making its regional premiere at Main Street Theater (MST), he’s self-righteously ripping through a series of emails from the headmaster at his rebellious daughter’s boarding school, tearing apart extemporaneous words and phrases, “emaciating the prose,” and “making it obey.” [...]
‘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 [...]
Steve 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 [...]
Clarissa Tossin at Window into Houston & Sicardi Gallery
A common undergraduate exercise for architecture and design students tasks them with going out and taking pictures of “things used as other things.” Jack Lemmon’s character in The Apartment famously used a tennis racket to strain pasta, and I not so famously use an old sewing table [...]
No Paint at Gallery Sonja Roesch
In the 1970s and 80s modern land art was in its infancy, the steel industry was at its peak, and holograms were stunningly cool. No Paint at Gallery Sonja Roesch features a group of six artists whose art practices stem from this era with surprising relevancy and impeccable curation [...]
Review: Diotima Quartet
In acknowledgment their commitment to modern and contemporary music, the Diotima Quartet takes its name from Luigi Nono’s work, “Fragmente-Stille, an Diotima.” The French ensemble’s concert at Houston’s Menil Collection was presented by Da Camera Houston [...]
Sean Shim-Boyle: Salt House
Rarely does such a potentially disruptive, even violent architectural intervention feel as organic and sensitive as Canadian-born, Los Angeles-based artist Sean Shim-Boyle’s response to one of the historic Holman Street shotgun houses in Project Row Houses’ Round 38. Reacting to [...]
Review: Roscoe Mitchell with Nameless Sound
On March 29th, Roscoe Mitchell’s Houston residency with Nameless Sound came to a joyous end at the Eldorado Ballroom. The quartet, featuring trumpeter Hugh Ragin, bassist Jaribu Shahid, and drummer Tani Tabbal, played two solid sets, each of which felt fully-fledged on its own. Roscoe Mitchell is chair of composition at Mills College in Oakland, [...]
Mark Fox: If That Then This
Grids are nearly synonymous with the concept of order. Spreadsheets compartmentalize data into cells of information. Graph paper structures the organization of schemas and equations. Even if one does not deal in [...]
Robert Ruello: Open Other Side
Visiting Robert Ruello’s third solo exhibition at Inman Gallery, I was reminded of the term “abstract illusionism,” which critic Barbara Rose coined in the late 1960s to describe painters using trompe-l’oeuil devices to create spatial [...]
