Glasstire counts down the top five art events in Texas.
For last week’s picks, please go here.
Las Nietas de Nonó, “Especie: archivo natural,” 2022, sounds, lamp, phone booth, phone booth hotline, fish tanks, atmospheric water, yucca, corn, dracaena, snake plant, dragon tree, tree trunks, handmade lyca garments for tree trunks, mirror pond, Dimensions variable. Photograph © Filip Wolak. Courtesy of the artist.
1a. Las Nietas de Nonó
UT Visual Arts Center (Austin)
January 26 – March 2, 2024
From UT Visual Arts Center:
“Over the past ten years, Afro borikua sibling duo Las Nietas de Nonó has evolved a creative process that evokes ancestral and communal memory through personal archives of the everyday. Their practice incorporates performance, found objects, organic materials, ecology, fiction, video, and installation. The specific character of places and the people that occupy them are critical to their process. The collective spends considerable time immersing themselves in a geographic, ecological, and social space before presenting work that responds to the context in which they find themselves. Each intervention becomes a playful, richly associative archive of a specific place at a specific time holding specific communities.”
Ariana Gomez, “Rest Stop Flowers,” 120mm film photograph, 10 × 10 inches.
1b. Somos Recuerdos
UT Visual Arts Center (Austin)
January 26 – March 9, 2024
From UT Visual Arts Center:
“By offering a platform that emphasizes rediscovery, recollection, and reconciliation, SOMOS helps navigate the intricate web of Latinx identity. Each artist within the collaborative communicates their unique relationship with Latinidad, serving as a compass to illuminate aspects of identity, place, belonging, and the critique and challenge of Latinidad as an evolving idea.”
Anthony Almendárez’s “Hello, My Name Is ___”
2. Hello, My Name is ____
DiverseWorks (Houston)
March 1 – 16, 2024
Opening reception March 1 at 6 p.m.; Live performance March 8 at 8 p.m.
From DiverseWorks:
“DiverseWorks is pleased to announce Hello, My Name Is ___, a multi-channel video and sound installation about art and work by artist and composer Anthony Almendárez, open to the public from March 1-16, with a live performance at 8 p.m. on March 8, at the Midtown Arts and Theater Center Houston, 3400 Main Street, Houston, TX, 77002. There will also be an Opening Reception at 6 p.m. on Friday, March 1. The video & sound installation public hours are 5-8 p.m., Thursdays-Saturdays from March 1-16.
Parallels and contradictions between predominantly accepted notions of work vs. artistic labor are explored in Hello, My Name Is ___, a multi-channel video and sound installation for which Almendárez asked performers to recite survey questions related to employment and labor policies in the United States as a lead up to an interpretative sound performance using their instruments of choice.”
Michael K. Bisbee, “Untitled,” 2020, oil on canvas, 60 x 44 inches. From the Collection of Ray Graham.
3. The Collecting Eye of Ray Graham
Amarillo Museum of Art
January 20 – March 24, 2024
From the Amarillo Museum of Art:
“Ray Graham is more than a collector of artworks. His longstanding and generous support of visual art has positively impacted artists and arts organizations throughout the country. It was as an anthropology student at the University of New Mexico that Ray befriended, and began to support, artists who were beginning their careers. As a result, many of the artists in the Graham collection live, or have lived, in proximity of his hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico. The artworks on view in this exhibition reflect Ray’s curiosity and continuing commitment to supporting emerging artists, artists from within his community, and artists who may be underrecognized in their time.”
A work by Cynthia Mulcahy, on view in “Reclamation”
4. Reclamation
Various Small Fires Texas (Dallas)
February 24 – March 30, 2024
From Various Small Fires:
“Various Small Fires is proud to present Reclamation, a group exhibition featuring Ari Brielle (Dallas), Zoë Buckman (London/New York), and Cynthia Mulcahy (Dallas). Presented at VSF Texas, the exhibition is borne out of the ever-urgent conversations surrounding access to reproductive and gynecological care in the state and beyond. The urgency is heightened in a post-Dobbs Texas, where the lives of those able to conceive are put in precarious danger on a daily basis. The three artists in the exhibition span generations, race, and geography, providing unique perspectives on reproductive health, as well as gender and racial biases in healthcare.”
A work included in “Elizabeth Chapin: Treespell”
5. Elizabeth Chapin: Treespell
Women & Their Work (Austin)
January 27 – March 7, 2024
TalkAbout: Treespell: February 29, 10-11 a.m.
From Women & Their Work:
“Women & Their Work presents Treespell, a solo exhibition of multi-sensory works in an immersive installation by artist Elizabeth Chapin. In Treespell, Chapin delves into the natural and mythological realms to comment with dark whimsy on the transformative power of the gaze, and the interconnectedness of all living things. Her work draws on personal, historical, and imaginative elements, which she uses to alternately wield and subvert notions of viewership and voyeurism. Chapin will be in conversation with artist Shahzia Sikander on February 29 at 10 a.m. CST as part of the gallery’s ongoing TalkAbout series.
Treespell is inspired by the Greek goddess Artemis and the myth of Actaeon the hunter. In the myth, Actaeon surreptitiously watched Artemis bathing, a violation for which she transformed him into a stag and shot him through with arrows. Artemis’s swift and vengeful rejection of Actaeon’s gaze resonated with Chapin’s complex relationship with viewing and viewership as a visual artist. Exhausted by constantly observing her work and being observed through her work in turn, the artist aims to turn her attention to the very question of viewership itself.”
