Sticks and Stones: Works by Helen Altman at the Tyler Museum of Art
This is the best exhibition of Altman’s work I’ve seen to date, partly because her art works especially well when it’s in dialogue with itself.
The Story of Houston’s FIX OVEN A/C Signs
If you're unsure if the signs are still active or not, there's one simple way to resolve that: there's a phone number painted right on them. You can call it.
Highlights from UH’s 40th Annual Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition
Every year, the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston hosts the school's exhibition of graduating MFA candidates. Here's some of the things I liked.
The Unexpected Art of North Houston’s Auto Shops
The painted tires and sculpture-like assemblages fronting the small businesses along North Shepherd are so readily visible because that's their function — they’re signs that can be grasped in a drive-by moment, symbols of the businesses from which they spring.
Paul Horn’s Pop-Culture Overload
Embedded in Horn's glitter-covered Barbie heads and fake dog poop are profound critiques of power structures, complacency, the history of art, and high and low culture.
Let’s Go to the Art Mall: Amarillo’s Galleries at Sunset Center
Amarillo has an art mall. You have to see it to believe it.
Ten Texas Artworks About Love
The works that artists make about love can communicate something deeper than a Hallmark-card reflex — they can conjure the earnest, heartbroken, brooding, obsessive, disappointed and joyous — sometimes all at once.
New Year, New Eyes, Same Art
We can’t fault galleries for doing what they have to to stay in business any more than we can fault artists for creating sellable work. We can, however, reexamine our expectations about the art we come across.
Back and Better: Day for Night 2017
On most fronts, Day for Night has grown into a successful, enjoyable experience.
Killer Zines
This is the second post in a series of zine roundups where I pull some zines from my library—some old, some new, some from Texas and some from abroad—and give you the lowdown on who made them and what they’re about.
Gabriel Martinez at the Blaffer Art Museum
Martinez’s work stems from the physical interactions he has with the city.
Christie Blizard’s Strange Signs
Since 2014, San Antonio-based artist Christie Blizard has been interrupting the over-the-top normalcy we expect in the crowds of the "Today" show and "Good Morning America."
Sandy Carson: We Were There
The relatability of the images is broadened by the sheer number of venues and types of people Carson has captured.
Julie Green at Texas State University
It’s easy to overlook people being killed in state-sanctioned executions when they are just numbers on a page. It’s much harder to ignore the system when you humanize an inmate and grasp him or her as an individual.
Sean Starwars: Woodcut Funhouse
In Starwars’ work, you get exactly what you’d expect from a Laurel, Mississippi-based artist: melting ice cream cones, gators, wood-paneled interiors, and banjo playing goats.
‘Daydreams and Other Monsters’ at UTSA
The artists in 'Daydreams and Other Monsters' turn their social critique back onto us to expose the demons lurking within our society.
Why this Year’s Galveston Artist Residency Exhibition is Different
For three artists so deeply tapped into the cultural consciousness to collectively experience an event as monumental as the election of Donald Trump, bonding and the sharing of a common sense of urgency seems inevitable.
Andres Serrano at the Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston
While Serrano’s photos didn’t have the impact I expected, in the end, they forced me to rethink torture overall—by looking at the fake, I had to confront the real.
