Brandon Zech and Gabriel Martinez discuss their anticipated fall exhibitions in Texas, including a major survey of an important Texas artist in Houston, a homecoming for a Dallas-born artist at the Nasher Sculpture Center, an exhibition in San Antonio highlighting an influential Chicana artist, and more.
Vincent Valdez, “So Long, Mary Ann,” 2019, oil on canvas. Image and work courtesy of the Collection of Mike Healy and Tim Walsh, Santa Barbara, CA.
Vincent Valdez: Just a Dream…
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
November 15, 2024 – March 23, 2025
From CAMH:
“Vincent Valdez: Just a Dream… is the artist’s first major museum survey and spans over two decades of his work, from early career drawings to current allegorical portraits. This exhibition cements Valdez as one of the most important American painters working today—imaging his country and its people, politics, pride, and foibles.
Working across painting, video, drawing, sculpture, lithography, and multimedia installation, Valdez deftly addresses the failings and triumphs of contemporary American society with a reverential focus on collective memory and overlooked political histories.”
Amalia Mesa-Bains, “What the River Gave to Me,” 2002, mixed media installation including hand-carved and painted sculptural landscape, LED lighting, crushed glass, hand-blown and engraved glass rocks, candles, 48 x 48 x 168 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco. Photo: John Janca
Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory
San Antonio Museum of Art
September 20, 2024 – January 12, 2025
From SAMA:
“This fall, SAMA will host the first retrospective exhibition of the influential Chicana artist and cultural critic Amalia Mesa-Bains, who pioneered the genre of altar-installation. Presenting work from the entirety of her career for the first time, Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory features over 40 works in a wide range of media and celebrates Mesa-Bains’s important contributions to the field of contemporary art.
For over 45 years, Mesa-Bains has innovated sacred forms such as altares (home altars), ofrendas (offerings to the dead), descansos (roadside resting places), and capillas (home yard shrines) to recover cultural memory and position Chicana art into the broader field of contemporary American art.”
Hugh Hayden, “America,” 2018, Mesquite (Prosopis glandulosa) on plywood, 43 1/8 x 80 7/8 x 80 7/8 inches. © Hugh Hayden. Image courtesy of Lisson Gallery
Hugh Hayden: Homecoming
Nasher Sculpture Center (Dallas)
September 14, 2024 – January 5, 2025
From the Nasher Sculpture Center:
“Working in the tradition of wood carving and carpentry, New York-based artist Hugh Hayden builds sculptures and installations that explore the idea of the ‘American Dream.’ Church pews, a dinner table and chairs, or a football helmet—signifiers of faith, family, and athletics—become surreal and somewhat sinister subjects in the hands of Hayden, who frequently carves thorns and branches into surfaces of things that would normally come into contact with the human body, implying potential harm, or at least discomfort, should they be engaged with.
For his exhibition at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Hayden will mine memories from his childhood in Dallas, nodding to homelife, school, and play from youth to adolescence. As a key component of Homecoming, Hayden will create a rendition of a children’s playground covered in thorns carved from the base material.”
Kimowan Metchewais, “Cold Lake Fishing,” undated, paper, ink, adhesive tape, graphite, acrylic paint, 18 x 29.7 inches. Courtesy National Museum of the American Indian Archives Center, Smithsonian Institution
Native America: In Translation
Blanton Art Museum (Austin)
August 4 – January 5, 2025
From the Blanton Museum of Art:
“Native America: In Translation, curated by artist Wendy Red Star, assembles the wide-ranging work of nine Indigenous artists who pose challenging questions about identity and heritage, land rights, and histories of colonialism. The exhibition is organized by Aperture, New York, and is made possible, in part, with generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts.”
Julie Speed, “Amen,” 2022, gouache and collage, 15.25 x 18.25 inches
Julie Speed: The Suburbs of Eden
Ballroom Marfa
September 20, 2024 – February 2, 2025
From Ballroom Marfa:
“Ballroom Marfa is pleased to announce the upcoming Fall 2024 exhibition from Julie Speed, The Suburbs of Eden opening Friday, September 20, 2024. The exhibition brings together paintings, collages, and gouaches from Julie Speed created over multiple decades.
Speed, whose work is often compared to that of the Surrealists, Dada, and Renaissance painters, has an artistic style that struggles to fit neatly into any art historical period. The work is both outside of reality and tied to it. An astute draftsperson, Speed depicts strong, often non-gendered figures inhabiting dream-like spaces, offering comfort in the shared nature of our inner thoughts. Speed confronts universally shared experiences and stories, clothing her figures in humanity itself. Torsos and limbs are transformed into scenes of war, politics, architecture, and nature.”
Tacita Dean, “Beauty,” 2006, gouache on black and white fiber-based photograph mounted on paper, 141 x 147 inches. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Purchase through a gift of Raoul Kennedy in memory of Patricia A. Kennedy. © Tacita Dean
Tacita Dean: Blind Folly
The Menil Collection (Houston)
October 11, 2024 – April 19, 2025
From the Menil Collection:
“Tacita Dean: Blind Folly is the first major museum survey in the United States of work by the British European visual artist Tacita Dean (b. 1965). The exhibition, organized in close collaboration with Dean, spotlights her career-defining approach to creating art through unmediated and chance-based drawing processes across a variety of mediums, from film to printmaking.
The show’s title reflects Dean’s desire to let the behavior of her mediums dictate the results of her work. For the artist, the playful British phrase connoting foolishness, ‘blind folly,’ represents her trust in the role chance and fate play in the creative act. She has said that her process is about ‘how to find by not looking.’”
1 comment
Happy to see that top shows are back with video content!