Houston Artletter

I won the Yankee Candle Company pumpkin-carving contest in 1989. I was in grad school. It was a break from deconstructing the political subtext of [...]

Downstairs at the CAM, there's a big box full of white, gelatinous stuff with the consistency of grits (without the butter). But where grits are [...]

Koelsch Gallery is just around the corner from my house. Although I've never visited their new location (until now), I watched with interest in 2006 [...]

At parties, we talk about Houston and our observations always match: it’s an easy place to live, we never expected to stay, two years and [...]

I’ve had several people comment on the deer-head blog, pointing out additional artists who use deer-head trophy imagery. In order to stay focused, I consciously [...]

Tucked into one of the cargo-container annexes of the new Apama Mackey Gallery, Lisa Marie Godfrey’s Haunt exudes an introverted pathos, rehashing the well-trodden contrast [...]

RE: Deer Head Debacle ICON: trophy deer head SUBGENRE: ornate HOOK: masculine/feminine Jennifer Khoshbin, San Antonio, 2008 Elaine Bradford, Sweatered Elk, 2004   Ethan Moore, [...]

Over at UH’s Blaffer Gallery, it was summer vacation. A half-dozen student gallery attendants were chatting companionably at the front desk, and had to spread [...]

Parking was a hike for those of us not willing to pony up $10 to use the underground garage. It’s like the future civilization described [...]

I got an email a couple days ago asking me to get angry about The Orphan Works Act of 2008, Bill # H.R.5889, now in [...]

I went to the Hunting Art Prize event last night as a "finalist". I was expecting the worst, having been warned about the baloney sandwiches [...]

Last Saturday I finally squeezed in a visit to the Menil’s drawing show between naptime and a beautiful, still mosquito-free spring evening watching the kids [...]

Continuing on the fraught-drawing, booze-and-bodily fluids theme, here’s a little gem I picked up at a thrift store years ago. It’s got a lot in [...]

Obsessive Compulsive Awesome at ArtStorm is a mixture of counterculture cheek and adolescent bathos by two artists whose work is hard to sort out until [...]

Since modernism’s beginnings, obscurity has been a useful strategy for confounding the bourgeoisie, twitting the elite, and excluding the peasants. Every utterance is meaningful, and [...]

When you’ve followed an artist’s work for as long as I’ve followed Aaron Parazette’s the first artist you compare him to is himself, and he’s [...]

Jeff Wheeler organizes picture after picture as sort of pared-down panhandle landscape in his signature orange and yellow stripes, using it as stage set for [...]

Regarding the whole Christian Viveros-Faune/Village Voice thing : Tyler Green’s finger of shame is pointing the wrong way. Instead of scolding Christian Viveros-Faune for failing [...]

From a recent press release about a symposium in Karlsruhe, Germany. Maybe it was translated poorly: "OUR LITERAL SPEED manifests the imperatives that materialize the [...]

The earliest pieces from Perry House’s most recent series "The Aftermaths" take the typical cloud of brooding fragmentary forms and let them settle to the [...]