Glasstire counts down the top five art events in Texas.
For last week’s picks, please go here.
Rhonda Urdang, Georgia O’Keeffe (Presidential Medal of Freedom, 1977), 2020, Mixed Media collage, historical elements, NY Times, ink. Image: Amarillo Museum of Art
1. AMoA BIENNIAL 600: Justice•Equality•Race•Identity
October 23 – January 2, 2022
Amarillo Museum of Art
From the Amarillo Museum of Art:
“AMoA BIENNIAL 600: Justice•Equality•Race•Identity is the ninth in an ongoing series of juried biennial exhibitions exploring specific areas of artistic practice, material, and content. This year, the AMoA staff and Board of Trustees are excited to offer the museum’s exhibition spaces to artists with a socially engaged practice. The exhibition will be a collection of artworks submitted by artists residing within a 600-mile radius of Amarillo, Texas. On view will be more than 120 artworks in a variety of media from 46 artists.
The juror, Leslie Moody Castro, is an independent curator and writer whose practice is based on itinerancy and collaboration. She has produced, organized, and collaborated on projects in Mexico and the United States for more than a decade, and her repertoire of critical writing is also reflective of her commitment to place. The exhibition will be on view from October 23, 2021—January 2, 2022.”
Ciara Elle Bryant, Server: Checks On The Block, 2021, Installation view at New Stories: New Futures at Pioneer Tower. Image: Ciara Elle Bryant
2. Ciara Elle Bryant: Server: Love Ta, Love Ta Love Ya
October 16 – January 8, 2022
McKinney Avenue Contemporary (The MAC) (Dallas)
Learn more about Ciara Elle Bryant here.
From The MAC:
“Ciara Elle Bryant’s Server: Love Ta, Love Ta Love Ya puts forth a dynamic culmination of the Dallas artist’s recent artistic projects. Encompassing each gallery space of The MAC, the exhibition serves as a visual bibliography of Bryant’s personal histories as they relate to the wider experience of being Black in America. Utilizing a wide range of media, from video to photography, collage, and ready-made objects, Bryant manifests her encyclopedic collection of digital ephemera from Black popular culture into large-scale installations. Social media posts, news stories, memes, viral videos, and the like are presented en masse, offering a physical space for Black identity and self-actualization to take center stage.”
A piece by Raul Rene Gonzalez
3. Raul Rene Gonzalez: Artist of the Year Exhibit
September 12 – November 6
San Antonio Art League
From San Antonio Art League:
“The eclectic, exciting work of Raul Rene Gonzalez, chosen by a national panel of jurors as the venerable San Antonio Art League’s Artist of the Year, will be on exhibit at the Art League’s Gallery Home in the King William Historical District beginning on September 12.
Gonzalez is a multidisciplinary artist who incorporates an astonishingly wide range of mediums and methods in his paintings, drawings, sculptures, clothing, murals, installations, live and recorded dance and other performance-based work. Largely autobiographical in nature, his work explores topics such as fatherhood, gender roles, labor, identity, pop culture and abstraction.”
A painting by artist HJ Bott
4. HJ Bott: a Baroque Minimalist
October 23 – November 27
Anya Tish Gallery (Houston)
Opening October 23, 12-5 PM
From Anya Tish Gallery:
“Anya Tish Gallery is honored to present HJ Bott: a Baroque Minimalist, the gallery’s fifth solo exhibition of legendary Texas artist, HJ Bott, whose career stretches over six decades. The exhibition will feature selected paintings and sculptures created between the 1970s and 2000s. Methodical yet intuitive, this body of work, stemming from a self- created system, displays the artist’s signature geometrically abstract shapes of rich and textured surfaces.
Making his own polymer vinyl paints, Bott’s use of this industrial material gives the work an arduous layer, while color and movement give a sense of playfulness that speaks to the inventive nature of the work. A proponent of the cross-disciplinary use of geometry, math, and science within a visual medium, Bott, in 1972, created a system he named the Displacement-of-Volume (DoV), which employs a combination of basic and universal archetypes to make way for a “new” archetype system. This formulaic method of working results in the ornate patterns that are always present in Bott’s sleek polymer-etched paintings and playful, curvaceous industrial wire sculptures.”
A photograph by Nic Nicosia
5. Nic Nicosia: homemade stories 2020-2021
October 9 – November 13
Erin Cluley Gallery (Dallas)
From Erin Cluley Gallery:
“Nic Nicosia’s cast of mischievous bug characters, titled dreamboats, return in his newest solo exhibition, homemade stories 2020 – 2021. First appearing in his 2019 exhibition, they symbolize the bugs of daily life that take various forms, based on subconscious doodles of whimsical insects born from the artist’s imagination. Many of the newer creatures in this exhibition, although clearly bug-like, display anthropomorphic qualities like that of Nicosia’s earliest dreamboat sculptures– bearing hands, feet, or human facial features and expressions.
A particularly exciting component of the exhibition is a suite of photographs reminiscent of Nicosia’s early work. Though he has continued photography throughout his extensive career, the new photoworks mark a reemergence of the particular manipulation process that he became well known for in the 80s. Nicosia begins by capturing an image to serve as the setting of a particular piece and manipulates a physical print of the image by hand, using drawing, painting, and collage. The artist then rephotographs the product to capture it as the final image.”
