Glasstire counts down the top five art events in Texas.
For last week’s picks, please go here.
Mónica de Miranda, “Path to the Stars,” 2022, HD Video, 34 minutes, 41 seconds. Courtesy of the artist and Sabrina Amrani Gallery
1. Mónica de Miranda: Path to the Stars
Blanton Museum of Art (Austin)
September 7, 2024 – March 9, 2025
From the Blanton Museum of Art:
“Interdisciplinary artist Mónica de Miranda’s Path to the Stars (2022) explores the legacy of anti-colonial resistance in Angola. The video follows a female protagonist from dawn to dusk as she journeys down the Kwanza River. Eventually, she reaches the river’s mouth, where it empties into the Atlantic Ocean and where the Portuguese invaded Angola in the late 16th century. During her journey, the woman confronts her own ‘shadow self’ through shifting moments in time. Past, present, and future bleed together through various scenes and characters connected to the river. The poetic journey is situated in a space of imagination and liberation that is at once real and utopian.”
“Miguel Angel Ríos: Merged with Vastness,” installation at Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino. Photo: Anthony Rathbun
2. Miguel Angel Ríos: Merged with Vastness
Sicardi Ayers Bacino (Houston)
January 18 – March 8, 2025
From Sicardi Ayers Bacino:
“About the paintings of Merged with Vastness, Camargo wrote, ‘Landscape is the central theme in Miguel Angel Rios’ most recent work, where pilgrimage becomes a metaphor to explore the space in which figure and environment dissolve into each other, creating tensions between the material and the spiritual, the visible and the imperceptible.’ Although their style may appear as an amalgam of Georgia O’Keeffe’s and Fauve landscapes, more than the result of an aesthetic stylistic decision, Ríos’ paintings are the translation of a mystic experience.
Ríos has responded depicting vibrant landscapes, himself, and a handful of living organisms (dogs, cacti, soil, sky) that stand separately yet together in the same horizon of being. Their intense colors are the hues of enhanced or altered perception. Camargo sums it up thus, ‘In the current production, the figure is blurred in the environment, giving way to the immensity of the landscape, which now represents the journey of the wanderer without a destination but with a purpose of pursuing light.’”
Mary Ramsden, “io,” 2024, oil on canvas, 102 3/8 x 82 5/8 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Pilar Corrias, London. Photo: George Baggaley
3. A Room Hung With Thoughts: British Painting Now
Green Family Art Foundation (Dallas)
February 15 – May 11, 2025
From Green Family Art Foundation:
“Placed into dialogue in the Green Family Art Foundation’s exhibition spaces, the forty works (or “thoughts”) in the show come together to provide visitors with an insight into British painting today — many of its key established and emerging voices, its multiple positions and vectors, and its vibrant, often unruly, and perennially questing energy. Here, figuration meets abstraction, the everyday meets the fantastical, and themes, concepts, and atmospheres play off and enrich each other in a unique cross section of contemporary painting practice.”
A work from “Edward Lane McCartney: Restoration”
4. Edward Lane McCartney: Restoration
Beeville Art Museum
January 13 – April 26, 2025
From the Beeville Art Museum:
“In Restoration, McCartney reflects on his twenty-five years as an artist, marked by discovery, resilience, and the transformative power of materials. From the wood of demolished houses to discarded cardboard and collected buttons, each piece holds a story, a history that resonates with the act of creation. Repetition and optical properties serve as central themes throughout his work. Complex layering of materials builds visual complexity and embodies the restoration of the discarded into something meaningful. ‘Each layer of a collage or assemblage reflects a meditative process, where I engage with the textures, colors, and forms of the materials at hand,’ commented McCartney. ‘It echoes the broader human experience of finding beauty in what is overlooked or forgotten.’”
Rodney Smith, “Callista in Top Hat Blurred, Snedens Landing, New York,” 2008
5. Rodney Smith: Enchanted World
Baker Schorr Fine Art (Midland)
February 22 – April 19, 2025
From Baker Schorr Fine Art:
“At once elegant and witty, the sophisticated compositions and stylish characters in the extraordinary pictures of fashion photographer Rodney Smith (1947-2016) exist in a timeless world of his imagination. Born in New York City, Smith began as a photo essayist, turned to portrait photography, and found his niche and greatest success in fashion photography. Inspired by W. Eugene Smith, taught by Walker Evans, and devoted to the techniques of Ansel Adams, Smith was driven by the dual ideals of technical mastery and pure beauty.
Over his 45-year career, Smith developed a unique photographic vision, one that is beautiful, ordered and inhabited by well-dressed ladies and gentlemen. He banishes the chaos of modern life for another that is grounded in a romantic view of the past. For Smith, photography was a tool for spiritual exploration and self-understanding.”
