Texas Studio: Regina Agu
Regina Agu sits, poker straight, on the lumpy coffee shop couch where we meet to discuss her current projects.
casey gregory
Empathy as an Ultimatum at Project Row Houses
My recent visit to Project Row Houses’s 46th round of exhibitions, Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter at Project Row Houses, on view March 25 through June 4, introduced me to a new way to consider empathy: As an ultimatum.
Music and Printmaking Merge in Son Jarocho Style: Alec Dempster at MECA
In the front hallway of the 6th Ward’s MECA building, you can scan a QR code and hear the creaky strains of an old violin from the Veracruz region of Mexico. Another digital scan of a jumbled-looking square produces a complex tapestry of rapidly overlapping strings known as El Siquisiri. The style of music is known as Son Jarocho, and it is a blend of “musical and dance tradition from the Sotavento, the southern regions of Mexico’s Veracruz state.”
A Remarkable Career: The Single-Minded Clarity of Floyd Newsum
“It’s always been my dream to be a full-time artist.” I spoke to Floyd Newsum in his studio in the basement of the UHD campus, a short train-ride from Planter and Stems, as he prepared for a show of new paintings at the Nicole Longnecker Gallery, Jan. 14-Feb. 18, 2017.
Pushing Painting: Blake Rayne at Blaffer
Blake Rayne’s Cabin of the Accused, on view at Blaffer Art Museum through March 18, 2017, is a survey of works that “rearticulate specific elements, organizational attitudes, and pictorial procedures” in the artist’s oeuvre.
Show Up: Shayne Murphy
“Do you know the stereotype that any male who’s approaching his mid-30s becomes really interested in World War I or World War II?,” Shayne Murphy laughs sheepishly, including himself in this group.
Projecting Poetry: Pablo Gimenez-Zapiola’s Eastext
When Pablo Gimenez-Zapiola arrived in the United States from Argentina in 2002, he had with him three hundred dollars and a bicycle.
Painting As She Goes: Marcelyn McNeil’s New Works at Conduit Gallery
“I’m not a sarcastic painter,” Marcelyn McNeil tells me near the end of our conversation in her east Houston live/work space. She has just finished explaining the title of her upcoming solo effort at Dallas’ Conduit Gallery. Love and Theft, on view Sept. 10-Oct. 15, is a nod to her commitment to the old-school practice of painting and an acknowledgment of the constant appropriation and regeneration of formal abstraction in today’s teeming art world.
Push, Pull, Play: Kirsten Reynolds’s Site Specific Constructions at Blue Star Contemporary
When we watch the walls of a house go up, we are aware of an implicit narrative in the skeletal studs, a uniformity that allows us to imagine a cozy life being lived inside their orderly framework.
Comfortable Heat Wave: Owen Drysdale at Barbara Davis Gallery
The floating mirages of Owen Drysdale’s Hot Summer Deadly Day are lovely, but bloodless.
Hilary Lloyd at Blaffer Art Museum
“Casual elegance” is a phrase too often bandied about by women’s clothiers and wine marketers, who would have you believe that it is something that can be purchased or assumed as a posture. For something to be “casually elegant” its level of refinement must be so high that it has become habitual, and only appears casual.
Randy Twaddle at Moody Gallery
Randy Twaddle’s work has long managed to tightrope that yawning maw between conceptually acerbic and commercially viable.