The Witliff Collections at Texas State University – a hidden gem located on the seventh floor of the Alkek Library – has been collecting the work of Manuel Álvarez Bravo, a leading Mexican modernist photographer, for more than 20 years.
Villagers gather scrap metal atop a crashed spacecraft in Northern Russia’s Altai Territory, while thousands of white butterflies swarm all around them. In a related image, five cows lay dead in a field.
Houston artist Michael Crowder’s Retro-spectacle transports viewers from 2013 to 1913. Crowder transforms Wade Wilson Art into a velvet-lined cabinet of curiosities, facilitating a perspective into the past that calls into question what contemporary art can be.
Over the years a few things happen when you write about local art— the most basic being that you become familiar with local work (and occasionally with the artists who make it).