Austin
Featured show: Mai Snow, Sept. 1–Oct. 5
Mai Snow was busy during their “summah of painting,” as the artist posted to Instagram, resulting in a stream of high-chroma, expressive groupings of appendages, chairs, shapes, patterns, and doodles on gradient grounds, exploring ideas of “the body-less body.” Downtown Austin’s Northern-Southern heads into the fall season with an exhibition that includes these new works—the artist’s first solo show in Texas and at the gallery. Snow, who identifies as transgender nonbinary, immigrated from Polevskoy, Russia, at age 13. Today they live between the rural Texas town of Valentine and Austin, where they are co-creator of the DIY art garage shedshows.
Dallas
Featured show: Jackie Tileston: Just This, June 22–Sept. 28
“Just this.” It’s a phrase that implies an acceptance of what it is, if not with contentment that at least through consciousness. For Jackie Tileston’s exhibition of new paintings and works on paper at Holly Johnson Gallery, Just This comprises “energy maps of unknown realms,” informed by the artist’s practices, techniques, and experiences such as yoga, meditation, trance, and entheogens. Born in the Philippines, and having lived in India, England, France, and the US, Tileston’s intercultural experiences have resulted in her personal visual vocabulary, the meaning and potential of which relates to gallery visitors’ own (perceived) limitations.
1 ⁄6
HOUSTON
Sarah Fisher, Romeo, 2023, oil on canvas, 48 x 36 inches, courtesy of the artist and Rudolph Blume Fine Art
2 ⁄6
DALLAS
Jackie Tileston, Frequencies for a State Change, 2023, oil, acrylic, enamel, marker, glitter, and pigment on linen, 60 x 54 inches, courtesy of the artist and Holly Johnson Gallery
3 ⁄6
AUSTIN
Mai Snow, Piece of Electricity, 2024, oil on canvas, 36 x 36 inches, courtesy of the artist and Northern-Southern
4 ⁄6
SAN ANTONIO
Ansen Seale, Motel at the End of the Rainbow, 2023, photograph, 24 x 24 inches, courtesy of the artist and Dock Space Gallery
5 ⁄6
HOUSTON
Harif Guzman, Water and Oil, 2011, mixed media, 60 x 94 x 2.5 inches, courtesy of the artist and Deborah Colton Gallery
6 ⁄6
MARFA
Tania Lou Smith, Untitled (walking), 2017, HD Video, no sound, 7 min 13 sec, edition of 5 + 1AP, courtesy of the artist.
Houston
Featured show: Connector: a survey, Sept. 14–Oct. 19
Public art administrator, curator, and artist Tommy Gregory highlights a network of creativity with Connector: a survey, an exhibition that brings together 38 artists from 10 different cities throughout the country. Some of the connections among these artists include creating public art at the Houston airport system and Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, and showing in Houston, San Antonio, and Seattle galleries. Visitors to Rudolph Blume Fine Art can expect to see works by Jimmy James Canales, Emily Link, Casey Arguelles Gregory, Rodrigo Valenzuela and others, exemplifying “the kinds of webs of connections that artists make, influencing one another in a visual conversation.”
Featured show: Select Works by Harif Guzman, Aug. 24–Oct. 26
Ten years ago, Deborah Colton Gallery presented Dying to Live, Harif Guzman’s first solo exhibition in Texas, which has in turn inspired Select Works, on view this fall. Born in Venezuela, Guzman has been greatly inspired by his time in New York, using reclaimed materials deeply rooted in secondhand imagery that characterizes contemporary urban existence and exploring ideas of behavior and human transformation, informed by his own trajectory as a shop worker, street-smart skate punk, busboy, valet, and artist. As the gallery explains, “Relevant themes of power, death and money become romanticized as Guzman exposes human addictions within culture extremes . . . which happen in Texas also.”
Marfa
Featured show: Marfa Open Annual Art Festival, Sept. 20–Oct. 13
Marfa Open Annual Art Festival, now in its ninth year and organized by the nonprofit Marfa Open Arts, is a three-week-long event that invites artists to create and exhibit work in the famed West Texas town. The artist-run festival typically features work from a dozen (or more) artists and includes live performances, exhibitions, outdoor film screenings, and installations. Curious festival-goers, check out Marfa Open House, the main building that serves as a year-round exhibition space and event venue, and ask about Open AiR, an artist residency program with private accommodations and access to art materials. The festival is set to run for three weeks at least; check the website and call to confirm before you go.
San Antonio
Featured show: Chiasmus: Illusion imposed, a truth is released, Sept. 14–31
Named Artist of the Year by the San Antonio Art League and Museum in 2020, artist Ansen Seale uses photography to examine the passage of time. He explains, “The structure that photography (and to some extent all art) imposes on our awareness of the world is a tool that allows us to glimpse another reality. Or maybe it’s our own familiar reality, slowed to a frame-by-frame understanding.” Seale’s solo exhibition of photographic collages at Dock Space features works resulting from his custom-made software, offering an unconventional look at Southwest landscape.
–NANCY ZASTUDIL
