Betsy Huete

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.’

Given the cultural climate towards women these days, Joey Fauerso’s show could not be more timely. It sits somewhere between a play date and a crime scene.

"It's those little happenings that knit together things in a way where one change will affect all of history in an unfathomable way."

It’s the best Big Show I’ve seen. What happened?