MOON MOTH BED (2023), is not your typical nature documentary. Austin-based artist Virginia L. Montgomery created this video for EYE MOON COCOON, her fall 2023 exhibition at Austin’s Women & Their Work, who invited her to create a large immersive installation that referenced Texas and the Texas ecosystem.
When did you first learn that art had power? For groundbreaking Chicana artist, activist, scholar, and educator Amalia Mesa-Bains, the revelation came to her as a child.
Do you remember Princess Diana’s fatal car crash in 1997? How about the Fukushima nuclear accident of 2011? Florida’s 2000 presidential election recount, with its hanging chads?
Raqib Shaw: Ballads of East and West, on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston June 9 through Sept. 2, features works like the one described above, each painting ornately blending Eastern and Western influences, depicting hope and despair.
Life, love, and death. Each of these states of being is intrinsically tied to a process of transformation, molecular to ethereal, scientific to spiritual.
San Antonio-based artist Megan Harrison knows about change. “I spend a lot of time outdoors, in nature. I’m drawn to the natural world because it’s more complicated than I can really understand,” she tells me during our recent conversation about her work. “It’s always unfolding and changing.”