Betsy Huete

Why does a world-class art city (not to mention the most diverse city in America) put up with such shitty and saccharine public art?

Here Hewitt asserts an oft-overlooked concurrence: the civil rights era and minimalism.

With such a relatively small selection of works comes the expectation that the show would be exceptionally tight — and it isn’t.

There is an urgency for a show in Houston that centers around the bare honesty present in Thibodeaux's artist statement — that delves into women’s reproductive rights in a way that is comprehensive, authentic, multivalent — that reaches beyond the same self-congratulatory liberal clap-trap that shows up over and over and over again in the arts community.

STEEL SHARPENS STEEL epitomizes soulless art-fair schlock. And there’s already plenty of schlocking that goes on in Houston.

With the seats intended to be filled by the viewers, Martin is creating an opportunity for us to engage with a community of black women that have impacted her life.

In their cumulative, end-of-year exhibitions, Core Fellows at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston are often accused of showing work that is inscrutable and self-indulgently heady — an accusation that is sometimes fair, other times not.

Invoking the sentiment that Capitalism = Bad is not doing full justice to what Valenzuela's videos are doing here, which is to allow room for an individual’s resiliency or the power of community within the constraints that a capitalistic system presents. 

Iva Kinnard's sculpture's pairing with Christina Macal’s paintings is important and mutually beneficial.

The problem with the work (and the Moody Center’s declaration of conceptual rigor) is that it relies too heavily on the amount of research and the time it took to make, rather than its result.

The rapid-fire seriality of this work undercuts the time the viewer would need to conjure and engage in aura.

Is Hatoum's work doing something besides being eerie? The answer is yes.

The rich and cumulative layers of ceramics abundant in this show read like turbulent bodies packaged and disseminated.

It’s dizzying and dense, strangely erotic, and mildly exhausting.

For all the controversy that comes along with using Toby Kamps as juror, the payoff is huge.

Anthony Suber lays bare the vibrancy of a black body and the deeply rich, layered and complex history that it harbors.

I don’t need or expect or even necessarily want the individual works I’m engaging with to want to change the world, or even try.

This show echoes the vacillation between release and restraint inherent in the experience of grief, and the sense of both empathy and detachment as we encounter the grief of others.

Even though this show opened three days before the election, it’s as if it anticipated the outcome—and it quietly poses questions about how to exist in this new dystopian paradigm.

We don’t value what is good—we value (and are more enthralled by) what seems ‘real.’