Gabriel Martinez and Brandon Zech discuss their anticipated exhibitions in Texas, including a retrospective of works by Ruth Asawa at the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston, an intergenerational show dedicated to Caribbean and African diasporic art at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, a collection of fabric and print works by Anni Albers at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, and more.
Ruth Asawa, “Untitled (ZP.16B, Twelve Looped-Wire Sculptural Forms),” c. mid-to-late 1950s.
Ruth Asawa Through Line
Menil Drawing Institute (Houston)
March 22, 2024 – July 21, 2024
“Ruth Asawa Through Line is the first exhibition to focus on the artist’s lifelong drawing practice. Widely recognized as a sculptor, Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) drew daily, referring to the act as her ‘greatest pleasure and the most difficult.’ For her, drawing played a foundational role as she experimented with diverse materials and processes to develop a distinct visual language. Through drawing, Asawa explored the world around her and the boundaries of the medium itself, turning everyday encounters into moments of profound beauty, endowing ordinary objects with new aesthetic possibilities. Drawing emerged as a cornerstone of Asawa’s artistic quest in San Francisco, and later became a key component of her role as an arts educator and community leader in the Bay Area.”
Eliot and Erick Jimenez “Set of 4 Blue Chapel.”
Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists since 1940
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
March 10, 2024 – July 28, 2024
From the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth:
“Organized by Curator María Elena Ortiz, Surrealism and Us is inspired by the history of Surrealism in the Caribbean with connections to notions of the Afrosurreal in the United States. Representing a global perspective, this exhibition is the first intergenerational show dedicated to Caribbean and African diasporic art presented at the Modern.
Inspired by the essay ‘1943: Surrealism and Us’ by Suzanne Césaire, the presentation includes over 50 works from the 1940s to the present day, in a wide range of media such as painting, sculpture, drawing, video, and installation. Centered on the intersection of Caribbean aesthetics, Afrosurrealism, and Afrofuturism, Surrealism and Us explores how Caribbean and Black artists interpreted a modernist movement. Artworks, framed within a pre-existing history of Black resistance and creativity, illustrate how Caribbean and Black artists reinterpreted the European avant-garde for their own purposes.”
Anni Albers, “Red Lines on Blue.”
Anni Albers: In Thread and On Paper
Blanton Museum of Art (Austin)
February 11, 2024 – June 30, 2024
From the Blanton Museum of Art:
“Anni Albers (1899–1994) is considered the most important textile artist of the 20th century. Known for her wall hangings, weavings, and designs, she was also an innovative educator and printmaker.
Anni Albers: In Thread and On Paper highlights how nimbly Albers moved between mediums — including her shift from weaving to printmaking in the 1960s—and transitioned between making art and designing functional and commercial objects. Drawn from the collection of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, the exhibition focuses on groundbreaking work from the last 40 years of her life. In addition to Albers’s woven rugs, tapestries, drawings, and prints, the exhibition features her loom and wallpaper based on her designs.”
A work by Hayv Kahraman
Hayv Kahraman: The Foreign in Us
Moody Center for the Arts (Houston)
January 12, 2024 – May 11, 2024
From the Moody Center for the Arts:
“The Moody Center for the Arts presents the work of Hayv Kahraman (b. 1981, Baghdad, Iraq), opening January 12, 2024. The Foreign in Us, on view through May 11, 2024, is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Texas. The presentation includes new and recent works informed by the artist’s Iraqi-Kurdish heritage and experience as a refugee while highlighting her research-driven practice. Through her profound imagery and investigation into the decolonization of the body and nature, Kahraman challenges fear and apprehension of otherness, advocating instead for compassion and acceptance.”
Sarah Sze, “Detail of Times Zero,” 2023.
Sarah Sze
Nasher Sculpture Center (Dallas)
February 3, 2024 – August 18, 2024
From the Nasher Sculpture Center:
“For her solo exhibition at Nasher Sculpture Center, artist Sarah Sze invites viewers into a collection of new, site-specific works across three intrepid gallery spaces. Always attuned to the built environment, Sze’s new installations will integrate painting, sculpture, images, sound, and video with the surrounding architecture to create intimate systems that reference the rapidly changing world. This extraordinary new exhibition will blur the boundaries between making and showing, process and product, digital and material ultimately to question how objects acquire their meaning.”
A work by Adán Vallecillo
Adán Vallecillo: Tiempo Libre
Rubin Center for the Visual Arts, El Paso
January 25, 2024 – April 20, 2024
From the UTEP Rubin Center:
“In the first U.S. museum solo exhibition of work by Honduran multidisciplinary artist Adán Vallecillo, the Rubin Center presents a mid-career survey of the artist’s work from 2010 to the present.
Vallecillo makes site-responsive and research-driven projects, many of which think about political economies and the natural world. Trained in visual art and sociology, Vallecillo considers the connections between abstraction and daily experience in his work, untangling the visual and historical relationships between Central America and the West. Within the legacies of extraction and exploitation embedded in Modernism, Vallecillo’s work finds a poetics of the quotidian. ‘Very simply, I try to facilitate these mediating encounters between material resources and symbols, in order to provoke changes in how we make sense of both the beauty and imperfections of the world,’ he writes.”
