Glasstire counts down the top five art events in Texas.
To see our 2022 Spring Preview picks, please go here.
Eric Avery, “The New Face of Liberty,” 1983, Linocut over offset print, 35 1/6 x 23 1/4 Inches. Blanton Museum of Art
1. Pop Crítico/Politcal Pop: Expressive Figuration in the Americas, 1960s-1980s
Blanton Museum of Art (Austin)
October 31, 2021 – January 16, 2022
Read our review here.
From the Blanton Museum:
“In the 1960s Pop art in the Americas took a turn to the dark side. Artists working in both the United States and Latin America increasingly manipulated Pop’s colorful and flashy representation of the familiar into a tool for social and political critique. Juxtaposing works by American and Latin American artists in the Blanton’s collection, this exhibition explores how artists adopted Pop artistic language to voice a political conscience, often veiling messages within their art.”
Angela Faz, “Feeling Tender might go on Grindr later,” 2021, Plush and embroidery thread, 12 x 6 Inches. Image: 500X Gallery
2. 2021 500X Annual LGBTQIA+ Exhibition
500X Gallery (Dallas)
December 18, 2021 – January 16, 2022
From 500X:
“This year’s Annual LGBTQIA+ Exhibition is juried by Odyssey Studios, an artist-run event space and collective studio. The exhibiting artists are: Addie Rule, Angela Faz, Christopher Sonny Martinez, Christopher Nájera, Darren Dobson, Derrick Hamm, Dre Burciaga, Enrique Nevarez, Gibson Regester, Henry Thomas, Jesus Lopez, Joey Brock, Krista Chalkley, Matthew Weimer, Morgan Grasham, Sean McGuire, and Teresa Foster.”
Nómada Lab, “El Regreso Responsible,” 2021. Image: Rubin Center
3. The Fund for Ethical Practices of Transborder Art
UTEP Rubin Center for the Visual Arts (El Paso)
November 12, 2021 – February 25, 2022
From the Rubin Center:
“This exhibition documents the inaugural projects funded by The Fund for Ethical Practices of Transborder Art. The fund itself emerged out of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Border Tuner | Sintonizador Fronterizo in 2019. It was created to give voice and visibility to transborder projects produced by artists living in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua and El Paso, Texas. This exhibition features the six projects currently supported by the Fund, with work-in progress videos highlighting the artists’ voices as they talk about their experience creating work on the MX-US border during the global pandemic, which has greatly limited the cross-border movement of fronterizos.”
Nick Barbee, “Believers: Rudolph,” 2018, Cut paper, 9 x 7 Inches.
4. Nick Barbee: Undeniable
Galveston Arts Center
January 15 – April 17, 2022
From the Galveston Arts Center:
“The exhibition, a ten-year survey of Galveston-based artist Nick Barbee, will open in conjunction with Galveston ArtWalk on Saturday, January 15, 2022 from 6 to 9 PM. Barbee describes his work as an examination of ‘the role of representation in the construction of culture and meaning.’ His studio practice centers around historical figures and narratives, often through mundane objects and with some personal connection to these histories.”
A painting by artist Ray Smith
5. Ray Smith: Pansy Pensamientos
Brownsville Museum of Fine Arts
December 29, 2021 – January 28, 2022
Read our review here.
From the Brownsville Museum of Fine Art:
“Ray Smith is a trans-border artist, migratory in every way, Texan-Mexican, resident in NYC and Cuernavaca (Mexico) for more than three decades, forged in the arduous waters of postmodernity and the transition from the analog universe to that of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century, what sociologists call ‘the hybrid generation’, who experienced the Cold War and the birth of the virtual universe, he is an artist who, migrates with great ease from one language to another, from pictorial to sculptural, from sculpture to drawing, and from drawing back to pictorial, in an infinite loop, perhaps due to the transitory juncture in his DNA.”
