Christina Rees and Brandon Zech present Glasstire’s top Texas picks for the coming season.
1. Common Currents
Various Venues across San Antonio
January 18 – May 7
Common Currents features works by 300 artists across six San Antonio venues: Artpace San Antonio, Blue Star Contemporary Arts, the Carver Community Cultural Center, the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, the Mexican Cultural Institute, and the Southwest School of Art. The exhibition is organized around the theme of the city’s Tricentennial (1718-2018). Each of the 300 artists is assigned a year in San Antonio’s history “on which to reflect the development of their artwork.” For a full list of participating artists, go here.
2. Rodney McMillian
The Contemporary Austin
February 1 – August 26
An exhibition featuring works by Rodney McMillian, the winner of The Contemporary Austin’s inaugural Suzanne Deal Booth Art Prize. McMillian’s works deal with themes of social and political history, the body, abstraction, and architecture. Along with McMillian’s other pieces, the show will feature a new video work by the artist, commissioned by The Contemporary Austin.
3. Laura Owens
Dallas Museum of Art
March 25 – July 29
An exhibition featuring over sixty works spanning Laura Owens’ 20-year career. Owens’ pieces “challenge traditional assumptions about figuration and abstraction, as well as the relationships among avant-garde art, craft, pop culture, and technology.”
4. Between Love and Madness: Mexican Comic Art from the 1970s
Lawndale Art Center (Houston)
January 18 – March 25
Between Love and Madness: Mexican Comic Art from the 1970s features original interior art, cover art, and ephemera related to the micro-cuentos (mini-tales) that were popular in 1960s and ’70s Mexico. This show is organized by Christopher Sperandio in collaboration with students from Practical Curation at Rice University.
5. FOCUS: Nina Chanel Abney
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
January 27 – March 18
An exhibition featuring paintings by artist Nina Chanel Abney. The pieces in the show touch on pop culture, world events, sexuality, race, police brutality and art history using bright, Matisse cut-out-like forms.
