Review

The hyper-detail, size, and symbolism of the show's centerpiece are overwhelming. It is simply the most beautiful and impressive piece I’ve seen this year.

As hour after hour of 'S. S. Hangover,' Ragnar Kjartansson’s Fusebox Festival performance, sailed across the placid lagoon at The Contemporary Austin at Laguna Gloria, I couldn’t help musing about the somewhat random yet enduring history of endurance performance art.

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.

'Eternal Now' was a one-night exhibition — or more accurately, an Everything. It was truly immersive, in the way most selfie-driven installations can only dream of being.

The show carries on the lineage of Menchaca’s ancestors; with his wit, imagination, and intimacy with San Antonio, he's making a new "map" that despite its playful surrealism makes perfect sense. 

It’s nice to be drawn in to a work’s tactile visual appeal before you get knocked upside the head with conceptual weight.

The 'intuitive mark' is something that Aram observes between the functionally decorative and the conceptually active spaces between Modernism and the legacy of abstract painting.

“Eat, sleep, dub, repeat,” Marie sang, and the crowd sang back. This is Part Two of a two-part dispatch on this year's Marfa Myths.

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. 

One of the best things about any music festival is seeing a show by someone you know nothing about who blows you away. This is Myths' strength.

Going forward, what if Vignette moved away from the regionalized survey, and curators worked together on a conceptual theme, and artists proposed site-specific projects? We need to go a lot more rogue.

Quarm's paintings speak to cultural excavation and sustained self-discovery.

Sarah Fox’s multi-media works are simultaneously unsettling, tactile and elusive, suggesting a childlike fairytale ambience and dark sexual symbolism.

The whole show functions as a gentle commentary on how the movie version of circa-1870 has always been a formalized Hollywood mediation of a much harsher truth.

San Antonio is where it makes the most sense for some contemporary art content to explore the past and its powerful hold on the present.

Jamal Cyrus and Jamire Williams unpack the possibilities, meanings, and connections of music’s becoming and its contemporary presence.

This may have been the rock-star artist panel of the year in Texas.

For the time being,  this and other shows like it in this space challenge the momentum and entitlement of gentrified sprawl.

Every artist in this show is a master of their material, and the work is cle-e-e-ean, playful, spooky, and serious all at the same time.

When confronted by an artist like Newsum, whose work is filled with deep, personal magic, it seems miraculous that this nice, mild-mannered professor has produced it all.