Glasstire counts down the top five art events in Texas.
For last week’s picks, please go here.
Poster for “Arm Candy”
1. Arm Candy: Iva Kinnaird & Emily Peacock
San Jacinto College (Houston)
January 29 – March 9, 2024
From San Jacinto College:
“Iva Kinnaird, known for her mix of unconventional paintings and mixed-media sculptures, finds a balance between humor and awkwardness. The work included in Arm Candy explores this unease with a series of sculptures involving dead cockroaches, oversized roach totems, and delicate constructions made from ibuprofen gel caplets. Kinnaird’s paintings confront the viewer with both familiar archetypes and unsettling banality.
Emily Peacock, a Houston-based artist and Assistant Professor of Art at Sam Houston State University, collaborates with her family to create art that explores and celebrates their bond. Her work delves into familial history, relationships, domesticity, the Texas landscape, and personal loss. Peacock, also a stand-up comedian, employs humor and self-deprecation as coping mechanisms, emphasizing the tension between emotional vulnerability and extroversion.”
Mike Calway-Fagen, “Tool Use for Passion Project”
2. Mike Calway-Fagen: Tool Use for Passion Project
Co-Opt Research + Projects (Lubbock)
March 8 – May 12, 2024
Opening reception March 8, 5 – 8 p.m.
From CO-OPt Research + Projects:
“CO-OPt Research + Projects presents works by Indianapolis-based artist, writer, and curator Mike Calway-Fagen, with a reception on Friday, March 8, 2024: Tool Use for Passion Project.
‘Passion Projects’ are less serious, diminished in the eyes of the professional class by their lack of capital production and contribution to the GDP. Passion is sensual, even animalistic, not of the mind but of the body. Historically, it and words like it, were, and still are, used to identify less human, savage, or animalistic attributes, those that could be assigned to whatever race, class, sexual preference the hegemony needed to devalue to maintain their perceived supremacy/primacy.”
A work by Angela Guerra Walley at Artpace San Antonio
3. Death Rights
Communion (San Antonio)
February 24 – March 23, 2024
From Communion:
“Death Rights presents creators engaging with death, loss, remembrance, and the afterlife, from political, spiritual, and radical perspectives. Death Rights brings together a breadth of artists to radically reshape and reclaim our relationship to death.
Exhibiting artists explore end-of-life rituals, alternatives, and communal processes of grieving and laying to rest; our relationship to the past and buried histories and ancestors; and the politics of who is allowed to be remembered. They demand new ways of grieving and celebrating those lost, and create ways of relating to death when danger looms close to their communities. The show includes works by Gabriel Chalfin-Piney, Adriana Corral, Evan Paul English, Angela Guerra Walley, Joe Harjo, Angel Lartigue, Iliria Osum, Kameron Neal and Shayok Misha Chowdhury, Heather Renée Russ, Andy Sahlstrom, and Ingrid Tremblay.”
Valerie Arber, “A Massive Bag of Dreams,” 2023, acrylic and gouache over mono print on paper, 28 x 22 inches
4. Valerie Arber: A Massive Bag of Dreams
Do Right Hall (Marfa)
March 1 – 24, 2024
From The Do Right Hall:
“An exhibition of recent work on paper and panel by Valerie Arber.”
Tyler Casey, “COCK FIGHT,” 2023, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 36 inches.
5. Tyler Casey: Bang, Bang: A Show About Texas
Artspace 111 (Fort Worth)
February 8 – March 16, 2024
From Artspace 111:
“Artspace111 is proud to present Tyler Casey’s latest solo exhibition Bang, Bang: A Show About Texas. Part self-referential memory, part fever dream of Texan vibrato, artist Tyler Casey simultaneously pays homage to the tender cliches of the west. Casey is influenced by the formality of classical painting but subverts the seriousness of the form through loosely rendered figures, text, and color abstraction.
Through his own painterly style, he creates an entirely new conversation around the tropes of the west. Rodeos, cowboys, oil tycoons, Whataburger – Casey leaves no stone unturned in his exploration of his colorful and cheeky interpretations of Texas. He paints through the lens of nostalgia and biography, spending summers with his grandmother in west Texas, the smell of oil rigs, muted, sun-bleached colors and the vastness of the landscape. Casey presents how the idea of Texas is visually perceived through an outsider’s perspective of the Lone Star state.”
