Vital film document, Come Back, Africa screens at the MFAH. “This film was made secretly in order to portray the true conditions of life in South Africa today. There are no professional actors in this drama of the fate of a man and his country.” So begins Lionel Rogosin’s fascinating 1959 film, Come Back, Africa. [...]
There is a proliferation of exhibitions featuring abstract painting in Houston right now. Gallery Sonja Roesch, Sicardi Gallery, and Hiram Butler Gallery have group exhibitions featuring abstract painters, and there are several galleries featuring solo exhibitions by painters– Zachariah Rieke at Wade Wilson Art, Michael Kennaugh at Moody Gallery, Geoff Hippenstiel at Devin Borden Gallery, [...]
There are few times that I complain about living in Mexico. There are even fewer things that bother me about living here. Generally, I love everything about the country and the city. However, at times living in Mexico is like confronting gender roles as they were in the 1960s. Here it is normal to live [...]
Hello, and thank you for joining me for this, the inaugural blog post for the Chupacabrona Tour. (For some background info on the tour’s mission and plans, you can read this post if you want — in recap, I wanted to travel around South and West Texas and document art making in places with [...]
Here are some brief thoughts on the Virginia Overton show, called Deluxe, at the Power Station — my sort of parenthetical reading to Overton’s larger themes here of memory, labor and spectacle. I was at first, as many were I suspect, a little underwhelmed by Overton’s installation in the space. I guess I was sort of expecting some [...]
A few months back while at Artpace I saw the work of Scottish artist Graham Fagen and connected with his installation. Teeth have been a constant in my own work and seem to always upset, surprise and confuse viewers. They are loaded with emotion and power whether it be visual or in written phrases such [...]
“It’s Just Meant to Be” is remarkably barebones for a film nerd’s nirvana. It is also visual art for people who wanted Walter Isaacson’s biography Steve Jobs for Christmas and got it. And it’s a little like standing in the much-missed And/Or Gallery once again – smart new media-type stuff in a tiny space that [...]
This Mughal Dynasty (mid-18th c.) fly whisk is on view in the MFAH’s Indian art galleries. It’s an outstanding object which alone merits a visit to the museum. The MFAH purchased it in 2009, at the time of the opening of the Indian art gallery. The handle is a remarkable example of ivory carving, but [...]
I had the incredible privilege of visiting the community of Tlatelolco last week. Tlatelolco is one of the places in the city that has long been avoided, was falling apart, and known more for its infamous, sordid history rather than its current potential. Tlatelolco literally sits a few miles north west of the original site [...]
It takes a lot of creativity to make a new idea happen and quite a bit of sacrifice to keep it going. Inspired by Glasstire’s remarkable eleven years on the scene, this series of interviews on sustainable practices will profile artists, writers, and curators who broke out of the box, started an original project, and [...]
Like many artists, I make the majority of my living teaching art. But not, mind you, in some fancy full time tenured sort of way. That, dear reader, is another post entirely. This semester I decided to shake up my Intermediate and Advanced Ceramic Sculpture class beyond teaching them skills, and there is a lot [...]
Disambiguation/Red Space Gallery/Closes February 12th Happened There are a lot of great images in Disambiguation, an exhibition currently on display at Red Space Gallery in Austin (the show closes on Feb. 12th). Max Marshall and Andrea Nguyen collaborated to create a suite of photos inspired by images that illustrate scientific processes and that the [...]
Josh Bernstein‘s exhibition “Man Corn” is the third exhibition in Rice University’s newest art venue– EMERGEncy Room. Located on the second floor of Sewall Hall, where Rice Gallery is also housed, the project space is dedicated to showing emerging artists in a small room with a front, glass wall through which one can see the [...]
Did you go to this thing? Houston’s Art Ball — aka Disaster Ball, a fundraiser for this here publication, it was. I went all the way from San Antonio. I was impressed by the breadth and inventiveness of the costumes, the tipsy friendliness of the crowd, and the funky hauteur of the Colombe D’Or. There [...]
This past Saturday was a good day. A lovely day to be exact… In the spirit of John Cage I took a chance and went to the Blanton to honor the man whose 100th birthday is being celebrated this year. Steve Parker, the Blanton Museum’s artist in residence and current graduate student in performance art [...]
Four years ago, Sasha Dela and Ariane Roesch opened a studio on an upper floor of an outdated and slightly ominous looking office building across from Montrose Krogers and the Chinese Consulate after the artists were both in the 2008 Houston Area Exhibition at Blaffer Art Museum. They decided to curate small exhibitions in [...]
February 2, 2012. By 6:30 pm, the line waiting for the Shepard Fairey talk was already a block long. Thankfully, my RVSP and press status allowed me instant entry. After securing a seat, I went in search of a beer—finding instead another long line of people waiting for Fairey to sign their books. I spoke [...]
My blog, Wax by the Fire, is sort of a love letter to Houston and the intelligent, diverse, and friendly community of creative people who live here. Now that the blog is part of Glasstire, I would like to continue what I have been doing on my own site for the past four years, namely [...]
Russian-born Mark Cheikhet is a master violinist who also paints, seeking to fuse the arts into something that Wassily Kandinsky called “Gesamtkunstwerk,” or the total work of art. With a palette that conjures Marc Chagall, Cheikhet creates abstract paintings of shimmering colors and vibrating bands of white that he considers part of his struggle for [...]
The vertical lines of factories electrify the sparse mechanical sensibility of Mark Manders, even as the DMA’s gallery space is drained of color to fit this factory’s demand for the weird: sundry dog-creatures, a black cat split in half, mice in odd places, and limbless human figures frequently sliced into vertical planks. The dynamics of [...]
