Review: Women@Art
Houston Ballet Women@Art September 20-30, 2012 The lady dance-makers rocked the Wortham during Houston Ballet’s Women@Art, an evening of work by Julia Adam, Aszure Barton and Twyla Tharp. Barton’s Angular Momentum proved to the big news of the night. Barton, a rising star with an original choreographic voice, has made her mark across a great [...]
Review: Eric Zimmerman
There’s a lot going on in Eric Zimmerman’s latest Art Palace exhibition, which is itself part of larger goings-on: a dialogue with another, now-closed Zimmerman exhibition at the Reading Room in Dallas and with the website endlessdisharmony.tumblr.com [...]
Review: James Drake
Now based in Santa Fe, James Drake is perhaps best known for his dark, large-scale drawings and for his engagement with the politics of his former residence on the Juarez-El Paso border. That darkness has given way to an airy, ethereal lightness in James Drake: Red Drawings & White Cut-Outs now on view at Moody [...]
Review: 2 Pianos 4 Hands
Stages Repertory Theatre September 5-October 28, 2012 Before I begin this review I should let it be known that my piano teacher fired me as a student, due to lack of skill and natural talent, as well as an inability to remember to practice. So it’s no wonder that 2 Pianos 4 Hands at Stages [...]
Review: NobleMotion Spitting Ether
Lights flash, arc, blind, blink. Arms, legs, faces appear, disappear. Shadows bend, swallow, haunt.
Spitting Ether: A Reality Bending Dance, created in collaboration by NobleMotion Dance and lighting designer David J. Deveau, is an evening of light and dance, yes, but perhaps the strongest element of the show is shadow [...]
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 [...]
Review: 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 [...]
Review: 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 [,,,]
Review: 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 [...]
Review: 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 [...]
Review: 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 [...]
Review: 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 [...]
