Jackie Tileston’s latest exhibition Freefall at Holly Johnson Gallery in Dallas includes paintings from 2007 to present. I’ve followed Tileston’s work for the past ten years and I never get tired of looking at it. The artist draws inspiration from a variety of sources including abstraction, physics, traditional eastern imagery and contemporary visual culture. Co-mingling [...]
Portrait of Waltercio Caldas, image from http://blogs.elpais.com/el_rincon_del_distraido/2011/02/levedad-y-exactitud.html Waltercio Caldas is one of Brazil’s leading contemporary artists. His work is often linked to Neo-Concretism, a movement in Rio de Janerio in the 1960s that included artists such as Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, Caldas is currently planning a retrospective spanning four decades of his work to [...]
Colette Copeland and her video camera visit Dallas artist Ryder Richards in his studio.
It’s a Phase, curated by Divya Murthy, features work by Lina Dib, Ned Dodington, Tobias Fike, Allison Hunter, Barna Kantor, Gabriel Martinez, Abinadi Meza, Emily Sloan, Annie Strader, Raishad JarBar Glover and Matthew Weedman, each of whom have inserted their art in Russ Pitman Park in Bellaire, TX, in acts that are somewhere between intervention and [...]
Ron Berry is the founder and director of the annual Austin performance festival Fusebox. Katie Geha (who with Sterling Allen and Travis Kent organized Files Desks Chairs for the Fusebox Festival Hub) sat down with Berry to discuss hybridity in arts, difficult works and the importance of starting conversations in Austin. Fusebox runs from April [...]
At least one person in the crowd at the opening of John Waters’ exhibition “Neurotic” at McClain Gallery appeared to be angling to be the next Divine. Waters was in attendance, wearing a natty blue suit with stripes “painted” across it. The work he presented was as sly and smartass as his pencil-thin mustache. His [...]
…and motion matched with motion, song with song– a song that, sung by those sweet instruments, surpasses so our Muses and our Sirens as firstlight does the light that is reflected. – Dante Alighieri, “Paradiso,” XII (6-9) “…the melody which, at intervals unequal, yet differing in exact proportions, is made by the impulse and [...]
First off, let me just say that El Rincón Social is where it’s at. It’s my answer when people talk about the glory days of Lawndale, or how underwhelming the Joanna is. Patrick Renner is in good company at El Rincón with Matthew Sullivan, who works at Third Ward Bike Shop and makes perpetually seductive [...]
Continued from Part I… V. Reynosa, Narcolandia and sad, sad data It’s important to point out that Rigoberto Gonzalez is not a Chicano artist, though he shares a lot of the same concerns, and is deeply interested in Chicano art and culture. But he’s a Mexican artist living (legally, understand) in the United States. He [...]
I. Some Art Context I have so much to show you. This is the first painting I ever saw by Rigoberto Gonzalez. It appeared in the Virginia Rutledge-curated Texas Biennial show of 2011, and it stopped me cold. The marriage of subject matter and technique felt shockingly fresh. This is a hell of an accomplishment; [...]
In honor of the FotoFest 2012 Biennial, we’re republishing this 2008 classic from the inimitable Clint Willour… Just in in time for FotoFest‘s Meeting Place, veteran portfolio reviewer, curator and collector Clint Willour has: Some Advice on Portfolio Management Do your homework and know who I am and why I’m doing this. Don’t show me [...]
When Richard Serra’s drawing retrospective opened at the Menil Collection, it was SERRAPALOOZA. Throngs of people congregated at the Menil, many of us on the outside lawn in festival fashion, to hear Serra in conversation with the Menil’s Michelle White, one of the exhibition’s curators. Having just spent the last few months working with the [...]
Last December, before my visit to Crystal Bridges, I wrote about the challenges of being a museum funded by Wal-Mart money and located in Bentonville, Arkansas. I had interviewed the museum’s director, Don Bacigalupi, and I was taken with his brand of populism — which did not equate inclusion with dumbing down content and pandering [...]
I have followed Glenn Ligon’s work over the past twenty years. He’s not known for his subtlety. In fact, he deliberately provokes his viewers. Given that his work examines race, gender and politics in such raw and unblinking ways, I admit I was pleasantly surprised that The Modern was willing to take the risk of [...]
The exhibition In the Interest of Time presents three projects by the Brooklyn collaborative Smudge Studio, comprised of artists Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse. Their primary subject is the landscape, and their approach includes embodying the roles of scientist, historian, anthropologist and, of course, artist. Their process is a performative journey, navigating, investigating and documenting [...]
Julieta Aranda, Hills Snyder and Regine Basha at Sala Diaz Regine Basha was recently appointed Executive Director of Artpace, San Antonio, a position she’ll assume less than a month from now on March 1, 2012. In anticipation of her return to Texas, Claire Ruud caught up with her to ask about her plans. Claire Ruud [...]
W.E.B. Du Bois created the term “double consciousness” in 1897 to describe the way African Americans split themselves into two personas, one for each side of the color line. The persona that existed in the white world was subservient and informed by the images and stereotypes of racism. Du Bois saw this doubling as a [...]
“The Deconstructive Impulse: Women Artists Reconfigure the Signs of Power, 1973-1991” on view at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston through April 15 is a rare opportunity to see some of the most important and underrecognized artists of the late twentieth century. The exhibition assembles a group of women who were making art in the 1970s [...]
My former landlord in Williamsburg, Brooklyn—a sphinx-like Teutonic manchild who sublet me one of the ad-hoc drywall sleeping lofts in the colossal warehouse he leased near the Bedford Avenue subway stop—still owes me $1200. It was my security deposit from 2008 and I don’t expect to get it back. I don’t mean this story as revenge [...]
El Anatsui has been a superstar in the art world ever since the 2007 Venice Biennale, where he received international acclaim for his large-scale sculptures made from thousands of discarded metal liquor bottle tops. In these pieces, the tops are flattened and stitched together with copper wire to form lush, shimmering canvases of intricate pattern [...]
