Gene Fowler

At Texas State University’s Wittliff Collections in San Marcos, a variety of historical research materials illumine writers’ methods and explore the mysterious places where stories originate.

A half-century of anyone’s artistic activity is a lot of ground to cover, and Hester describes the upcoming show as a collage of his work, with all the variation one might expect in art produced for commerce and culture over such a span of time.

As a panorama moving through the decades, the images present a rolling chronology of style and pastime that brings our collective memory into the glimmering yet gawky end of the previous century.

Leissner shot some 3,500 rolls of film of '80s Austin, artfully documenting the city’s tribal beat, performing arts, and body politic.

Webb has come to 100W to conjure and divine the history and lingering presence of Navarro County African-American psychic Annie Buchanan.

There is great value, Hudnall stresses, in creating artistic documentation of the everyday people and activities in one’s own community.

“I knew right then I had to find out what was really going on in this place. I had to stay right here. Never made it to California.”

Featuring some 150 artworks and artifacts, the exhibition also includes Ruscha paintings, drawings, and photographs that were produced as material for the books or were later instigated by and/or retooled from book project contents. 

“It’s like when a writer finds a voice that is uniquely theirs. Mine was to be an empowered citizen witness, and the camera provided me with a technical shortcut to that voice.”

If we agree that artistic inspiration, in the formal art world context, springs from mysterious sources in the mind, emotions, and senses, then creative impulses that find an outlet outside that context are mystery ad infinitum.

Artists throughout Latin America engaged in revolutionary DIY art as their own particular expressions of the conceptual art-think that zoomed around the continents in the 1960s.

It’s clear that Schenck has soaked up more of the big-sky psyche than the fella called Drella. But there wouldn’t have been a Billy Schenck if there hadn’t been an Andy Warhol.

Altering her appearance to draw from a deep well of informed imagination and fierce and graceful determination, the artist floats in space as a character emerges from her mortal force.

Some 200 vintage photographs, artifacts, and recordings from the Center’s expansive theater history collections bring into focus the amorphous, sprawling mega-genre of American entertainment called vaudeville.

“Texas painters and sculptors saw themselves as avant-garde artists in the pursuit of identifying a truly American art."

As hour after hour of 'S. S. Hangover,' Ragnar Kjartansson’s Fusebox Festival performance, sailed across the placid lagoon at The Contemporary Austin at Laguna Gloria, I couldn’t help musing about the somewhat random yet enduring history of endurance performance art.

San Antonio is where it makes the most sense for some contemporary art content to explore the past and its powerful hold on the present.

Comprised of works — many previously unseen in the United States — from nearly two dozen institutions and private collections throughout Mexico, this exhibition in San Antonio is a stunning assemblage.

The 16 images in the exhibition offer a compelling view of life for the black residents of Central Texas from the early 1940s to the early 1960s.

Historic waterways in San Antonio and Austin are the settings of ongoing improvement and restoration projects that include components of contemporary art.