Think back to your first visit to an art museum as a child. Before entering, it’s likely that the first words out of the mouth of your chaperone were, “Don’t touch anything.”
Two years ago, the Blanton Museum of Art received a gift of more than 350 prints from collector Dr. Gilberto Cárdenas, who holds one of the largest private collections of Latinx art.
San Antonio’s McNay Art Museum operated for decades with a major gap in its holdings. “When you think of all 20th-century art, the U.S. made two huge contributions to the canon,” says Lyle W. Williams, the McNay’s curator of prints and drawings.
A visit to the cavernous EaDO warehouse at 908 Live Oak Street in Houston, the physical home of the groundbreaking non-profit design house Magpies & Peacocks (M&P), leaves a mélange of aesthetic impressions that reflects the environmental sustainability mission of the organization, yet defies definition.
Every once in a while, an artist steals our attention and shakes, shocks, or stuns us into awareness. Colombian artist Beatriz González also graciously opens our minds in the process, exposing the world to us in ways we may not have considered.
The phrase “art studio tour” doesn’t typically bring to mind mass crowds of visitors, city-wide organizational partnerships, or heated discussions about escalating real estate prices.
“I’ve tried to make an intentional shift in the work in the past few years,” Marcelyn McNeil tells me, recently. When we talk, her exhibition of new paintings, Slow Eddy, is about to open at Conduit Gallery (Oct. 19-Nov. 23).
An orchestral score for a ballet wouldn’t ordinarily pop up in an art museum’s storage room. But the one in San Antonio’s McNay Art Museum, a score of Erik Satie’s surrealist Parade, was no ordinary example.