Barbara Purcell

Mao's site-specific installation at Co-Lab brings together an affinity for steel, ceramics, and leather, with a refined sense of melding materiality into a multivalent metaphor — in this case, the symbolic, dualistic nature of the serpent.

"When talking about the hero’s journey, someone might think in epic proportions, but the truth is we have seen things in everyday life that are hidden from our consciousness that are heroic."

Installations by Letitia Huckaby, Sandy Skoglund, Jennifer Steinkamp, Martine Gutierrez, and Yayoi Kusama offer a cross-generational female perspective spanning 60 years. 

"I’m not interested in a straightforward depiction, or a direct transfer from my brain onto a surface. I distrust the image and I distrust myself." 

Embarking as a motivated flaneur is the point.

Brackens participates in this cultural moment by “having bodies in repose or resting — doing anything but dying."

The live-streamed performance conveyed a rawness that not only reflects the artist's personal experiences, but the kind of year this has been.

“It’s this weird duality. Art spaces are falling away, but at the same time, we’re creating more access points.”

Even at the end of options, there are still options. 

Texas Hill Country may be known for its German cultural heritage, but what about the Italian guy with his own art museum in Marble Falls?

Nigerian artist Olaniyi Rasheed Akindiya would like to clarify that he lives in Pflugerville, Texas — not Pflugerville, Germany.

Austin-based photographer Leonid Furmansky got to know Galveston on his BMX bike — riding, sometimes trespassing, along old buildings and empty streets to document what he describes as its strange beauty.

Purcell spoke with mother and daughter on why they’ve chosen to open a second space, the differences between the two cities’ art worlds, and the surprising ways in which they overlap.

Big Medium rounded up more than 800 artists for this year’s EAST, Austin’s annual art-pocalypse, which stretches out across the city’s storied East Side for two very full weekends.

By examining what is so often overlooked, the artist exposes what is often most deeply embedded — historically, culturally, even geologically.