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An orchid is dying. Its brown bloom stalk leans over a stacked set of studio monitors resting on the gallery floor. Lionel Richie’s crooning ballad overtakes the quiet buzz of…

  From the sea of summer group shows I trekked through the other night, two artists stood out: Benjamin Terry and Kerry Pacillio, both on view at Cohn Drennan in a…

Last week I wrote about Houston’s dueling art fairs coming up this fall.  Scheduled one month apart, each has a New York area organizer. It got me thinking about Dallas’s…

R.I.P. Cy Twombly (1928-2011) Born in Lexington, Virginia in 1928, Twombly actively distanced himself from the major movements of 20th-century art, both stylistically and geographically. For decades, both critics and…

I had an email correspondence about Dallas with a friend this week — I’ll call him Toojerstraap. You may know him. Dallas, and its particular insufficiencies – art-wise and all-wise,…

Have you ever noticed than when people look at abstract paintings they’re always peeking around the edges? Clearly the painter has left some secret nugget of wisdom on the sides…

Juneteenth could possibly be seen as the most significant event in American history after independence itself—the eradication of American slavery. On June 19, 1865, more than two years after President…

   When we came back down to visit Texas a few years after moving to New England in a giant green Mercury Continental, I have the distinct memory of stepping out of the car and then…

I love Galveston. But, like Houston, it’s an acquired taste. It’s got lovely old buildings in various states of decay interspersed with not-so-lovely and downright crappy structures. It’s gritty, with…

Who would’ve thought I’d ever be shilling for Texas, with a glass half-full at that? But having recently spent some time back in The Bayou City that’s exactly what I’m…

Probably one of the most stirring moments in the art world in the past year was the removal of David Wojnarowicz’s video, “A Fire in My Belly” from the Smithsonian…

‘Tis the season to hand out financial advice. There isn’t a rock in existence under which we could live and not hear about the dismal state of the economy, how…

Lygia Clark’s “Bicho (Máquina)” is one of many artworks listed on the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s online feature, “100 Highlights of the MFAH”. Framed as “the most significant objects…

In 1994 a cave was discovered in Southern France containing paintings dating back about 32,000 years. Christened the Chauvet cave after one of its discoverers, the cave and its paintings…

In honor of Memorial Day, here’s a round-up of some of my favorite war monuments, all politics and other contest-ables aside, and in no particular order. Ara Pacis Augustae, Rome, 13-9 BC Consecrated…

Artists have a hard time organizing. We don’t have a union to bust, don’t have annual conferences, and it’s not all that shocking. Take a bunch of  individualistic, over-worked, buck-the-system…

The other day I heard a montage of sound bites on NPR of the recent uprisings in the Middle East. The momentary inundation of  frantic sounds from Libya, Syria, Egypt and all those…

Sequels are never as good as the original, but since when has that ever stopped anyone? (To read Part I, click here.) Lack of respect, a turgid definition of productivity,…

To address the conditions of curating contemporary art, one must address the temporality it inhabits. This was one of many currents in a recent lecture at The Glassell School of…

Independent curator June Mattingly has put together a show at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary called Starry, Starry Nights: Five Light-Filled Installations with work by five artists — Adela  Andea, Chris Lattanzio,…