Glasstire counts down the top five art events in Texas.
To see our fall picks of upcoming Texas exhibitions, please go here.
Wangari Mathenge, “The Ascendants XVIII (She Is Here And So Are You),” 2021, oil on canvas, 80 x 80 inches
1. When You See Me: Visibility in Contemporary Art/History
Dallas Museum Art
April 7, 2024 – April 13, 2025
From the Dallas Museum of Art:
“This spring, the Dallas Museum of Art presents When You See Me: Visibility in Contemporary Art/History, a permanent collection exhibition that grapples with the complexities of visibility. Taking its title from Deborah Roberts’s work of the same name, the exhibition showcases numerous recent acquisitions by a diverse, intergenerational group of 50 artists, mostly artists of color, women and queer artists, whose work contends with visibility both socially and formally.
Featuring nearly 60 works in various media, When You See Me broadens and complicates official histories and their corresponding visual strategies to allow for richer representations of those who have been traditionally excluded or erased. Employing a wide range of formal and conceptual devices—from abstraction to figuration, fiction to documentary, and the shades of nuance in between—the featured artists explore invisibility, hypervisibility, the desire to be seen and the right to be private.”
Installation view of Theaster Gates, “Young Lords and Their Traces” at New Museum, 2022. Courtesy Theaster Gates Studio
2. Theaster Gates: The Gift and The Renege
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
May 17 – October 20, 2024
From CAMH:
“Contemporary Arts Museum Houston is excited to announce the upcoming exhibition, Theaster Gates: The Gift and The Renege, featuring a series of large-scale paintings, sculptures, and installations that reckon with histories of labor, material legacies, and the sociopolitical architecture of the built environment. Born out of a multi-layered engagement with historic bricks from Houston’s Freedman’s Town, The Gift and The Renege contends with patterns of promise and retraction related to the fight for land, particularly for racialized and subjugated communities. Houston’s Mother Ward, Freedmen’s Town in Fourth Ward is a community first built by newly freed Black people, who formed a vibrant community anchored by handmade and laid brick streets.”
Carros y Cultura. Photo: William Sarradet
3. Carros y Cultura: Lowriding Legacies in Texas
Bullock Texas State History Museum (Austin)
May 11 – September 2, 2024
From the Bullock Museum:
“Carros y Cultura: Lowriding Legacies in Texas will open at the Bullock Texas State History Museum on Saturday, May 11. The bilingual exhibition highlights the rich culture of Texas lowriding communities through artifacts, interactive experiences, and lowrider cars and bicycles from San Antonio, Austin, Dallas, Houston, Laredo, Pecos and more.
Lowriding started with the Mexican American community in California after World War II as an expression of cultural identity. Drivers began customizing their cars with elaborate artistry and low-to-the-ground frames. The cars soon became tied to the Chicano civil rights movement and cities began passing laws restricting car height. Those laws led to innovative hydraulic systems, allowing cars to be raised and lowered, which became the defining feature of lowrider vehicles.”
Julian Onderdonk, “Dusty Road,” 1915, oil on canvas. Nancy and Ted Paup Early Texas Art Collection
4. For Love of the Land: Painting the Texas Landscape
The Grace Museum (Abilene)
February 17 – September 21, 2024
From the Grace Museum:
“One of the first chroniclers of art in Texas was Abilenian France Battaile Fisk, who wrote in her 1928 publication, A History of Texas Artists and Sculptors, ‘…our painters of Texas landscape, with its ever changing moods and rapidly developing country are rendering a great service, as with canvas and brush they are faithfully picturing the characteristics of our Lone Star State…’
The mythos of Texas is tied directly to the land. An area of vast contrasts covering 268,596 square miles and elevation ranges from 1,000 feet above sea level at the low end near the meeting of the Pecos and Rio Grande Rivers to the highest point in Texas, Guadalupe Peak, reaching up to 8,749 feet. This exhibition is curated as a visual dialogue focusing on the longstanding tradition of art as an expression of the lore, lure and love of the vast and varied Texas landscape.”
Leeanna Chipana, “Woman in Blue Hat,” oil on board, 20 x 16 inches
5. Leeanna Chipana
Contemporary at Blue Star (San Antonio)
July 5 – October 6, 2024
From the Contemporary at Blue Star:
“Leeanna Chipana’s paintings draw from her Quechuan and American identity, local Indigenous-Latinx communities, and media portrayals of Central and South American immigrants. Leeanna creates figurative oil paintings of emboldened and timeless indigenous peoples in both dreamed and potentially real environments. Employing Incan, Aztec, and Mayan iconography with classical European oil painting techniques and approaches, Leeanna’s work challenges the conventions of traditional figure and landscape painting. Subtly blurring the lines between classical and modern forms of representation, her work examines societal assumptions and views of the Indigenous-Latinx body.”
