IMAGE ABOVE: Laurie Simmons (b. 1949). Woman/Red Couch/Newspaper, 1978. Silver dye-bleach print © Laurie Simmons. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Ralph M. Parsons Fund.
Albany
ac•qui•si•tions: A Selection from the Past Decade
Drawn from the 462 artworks acquired by everyone’s favorite repurposed jail since 2003, the exhibition unveils works by Robert Rauschenberg, Vernon Fisher, Joseph Havel, Jesus Moroles, Xiaoze Xie, James Surls, Helen Altman, Kelly Fearing, Will Henry, and even Francisco Goya. Through Jan. 19, The Old Jail Art Center.
![Waltercio Caldas Convite ao raciocínio [Invitation to Reasoning], 1978 Painted iron and turtle shell 5 7/8 x 17 3/4 x 7 7/8 in. (15 x 45 x 20 cm) Letícia Monte and Lula Buarque de Hollanda Collection.](https://artsandculturetx.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Invitation-to-Reasoning.jpg)
Convite ao raciocínio [Invitation to Reasoning], 1978.
Painted iron and turtle shell.
5 7/8 x 17 3/4 x 7 7/8 in. (15 x 45 x 20 cm)
Letícia Monte and Lula Buarque de Hollanda Collection.
Austin
The Nearest Air: A Survey of Works by Waltercio Caldas
Guest-curated by former Blanton curator Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro and jointly organized with the Fundação Iberê Camargo (Porto Alegre, Brazil), this retrospective aims to make the Brazilian conceptual artist, who defines his practice as sculpting the distance between objects in pursuit of “maximally present work through minimal action,” better known in the United States. The survey gathers sculptures, installations, drawings and artist’s books from the 1960s to the present. Oct. 27-Jan. 12, Blanton Art Museum.
James Turrell: The Color Inside
Fresh on the heels of The Light Inside, his Museum of Fine Arts, Houston survey (in conjunction with a Los Angeles County Museum of Art retrospective and a Guggenheim installation), the light-and-space master unveils The Color Inside, his newest Skyspace, on the rooftop garden of the University of Texas at Austin Student Activity Center. Following a public conversation between Turrell and former Contemporary Arts Museum Houston senior curator Lynn Herbert at noon Oct. 18, the Skyspace opens to the public starting Oct. 19. Admission is free, but reservations will be required the first few weeks. Oct. 19-ongoing, UT Student Activity Center.
The Singing Bone: Stephanie Chambers, Katy Horan & Kathleen Lolley
Three artists bring visual, narrative form to themes of identity, memory, storytelling and history. Horan’s mixed-media collages examine historical female roles and representation. Lolley, who lives in the dark forests of western Pennsylvania, draws on surrealism and folk art to create work that’s “not about humans having a spiritual experience, but the spirits having a human experience.” Perhaps bridging the two, Chambers, who identifies as a genderqueer artist, says her acrylic paintings redirect the cultural tendency to organize people by age, gender, income and other “checked-off boxes” to the unruliness of the natural world: “I live with enough ambiguity projected onto me through assigned labels.” Oct. 18-Nov. 17, grayduck.
Joseph Noderer and Jamie Panzer
Noderer’s dreamlike, ambiguous painted portraits and landscapes balance image- and mark-making. Panzer uses real tree limbs and bark to reconfigures natural structures in his sculptures to blur the distinctions between the natural, synthetic and artificial. Last chance: Through Oct. 19, Tiny Park.
The New Sincerity and Frank Selby: Candles and Games
The New Sincerity features Florian Baudrexel, Colby Bird, Rosy Keyser, Roy McMakin, Julia Rommel, and Fabrice Samyn, artists whose work “assumes tones of both irony and sincerity in the same breath.” Selby presents graphite drawings on Mylar based on collaged photographs and film stills. Through Nov. 2, Lora Reynolds Gallery.
THIRST
Awarded a $50,000 grant from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Women & Their Work invited artist Beili Liu, architects Emily Little and Norma Yancey, and landscape architect Cassie Bergstrom to create a site-specific installation memorializing the more-than 300 million trees that died in the 2011 drought. Through Nov. 30, Ladybird Lake.
Lame Lewd and Depressed: Lane Hagood, Mark Flood and Jeremy DePrez
This Co-Lab Projects-organized show presents new work by the three Houston artists in a warehouse. Last chance: Through Oct. 30, 721 Congress.
Corpus Christi
Paul Strand: The Mexico Portfolio
Photographs of people, religious folk sculpture and landscapes from the modernist’s trips to Mexico in 1932 and 1934, lent by the Paul Strand Archive of the Aperture Foundation in New York. Through Nov. 7, Art Museum of South Texas.
Dallas/Fort Worth
Color! American Photography Transformed
Color photography didn’t get much respect until the Museum of Modern Art gave William Eggleston a show in 1976, but this sweeping survey spans the medium’s history, from daguerrotypes to digital images. Organized by John Rohrbach, the Amon Carter’s senior photography curator, Color! begins with a rare direct-color photography made (and never successfully replicated) by Levi L. Hill and continues to the present with work by Alfred Stieglitz, Richard Avedon, Henry Holmes Smith, Jan Groover, Joel Meyerowitz, Andres Serrano, Laurie Simmons, Gregory Crewdson, Richard Misrach and Alex Prager. Oct. 5-Jan. 5, Amon Carter Museum of American Art.
Jim Hodges: Give More Than You Take
Co-organized by the Dallas Museum of Art with Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center, the American artist’s first comprehensive U.S. survey tracks his development through early installations made of hundreds of drawings on paper napkins and disassembled silk flowers pinned to the wall through the more elaborate installations large mirror mosaics of recent years. Co-curated by the DMA’s Jeffrey Grove and Walker executive director Olga Viso, the 25-year retrospective debuts in Dallas before traveling to the Walker, Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, and the UCLA Hammer Museum. Oct. 6-Jan. 12, Dallas Museum of Art.
The Age of Picasso and Matisse: Modern Masters from the Art Institute of Chicago
Let’s hope it’s not a bad sign for the Kimbell’s new Renzo Piano building that the museum’s second loan show in five years from the Art Institute of Chicago was occasioned by the AIC’s closure of its European modern galleries to fix problems with the Piano-designed wing’s light harvesting and motion sensor systems, among other issues. Still, with landmark paintings such as Matisse’s Bathers by a River (1909-16), this is as top-drawer a selection of European modernism as North Texas is likely to see anytime soon. Oct. 6-Feb. 16, Kimbell Art Museum.
Marshall Harris: Death Do Us Part
The Fort Worth-based winner of the 2013 Hunting Art Prize makes his solo debut with a selection of graphite-on-Mylar drawings, photography, cast-resin sculpture and video work. “Death typically refers to a finality,” Harris says. “But I’m interpreting it instead as a transition.” Oct. 12-Nov. 16, Red Arrow Contemporary.
Black Box: Photographs by Misty Keasler
Formal portraits of the foam armament of taxidermy animals by the Dallas photographer. “The base of the work already exists in the world in fairly prolific, common places (it is easy enough to encounter taxidermy) but we aren’t accustomed to seeing the hairless amoebic forms here,” the artist writes. “They are simultaneously lifelike and at the same time they never look like real things in the world.” Oct. 19-Nov. 16, The Public Trust.
John Hartley
Much as David Levinthal’s War Games series depicts combat through staged photographs of toy soldiers, the Fort Worth-based Hartley draws from his interest in toy collecting and the human figure to create oil paintings that explore militaristic, religious and social themes. Oct. 18-Nov. 30, Artspace111.
MAP 2013
A festival and exhibition of social-practice projects throughout the Dallas-Fort Worth area produced by the nonprofit Make Art With Purpose. Participating artists include Kim Abeles, Azra Akšamija, Rebecca Carter, the Center for Tactical Magic, Joshua Cohen & Adrienne Cohen, and E.G. Crichton. Through Nov. 24, various locations.
Linnea Glatt: Incre-Mental
Glatt sews her contemplative drawings with a needle and thread, using intricate stitches such as French knots. The works’ circular forms are intended to “evoke a sense of place, providing an arena in which to leave her mark and suggesting stability in the face of change.” Last chance: Through Oct. 12, Barry Whistler Gallery.
Kevin Todora
The Dallas-based artist brings together two photographic bodies of work: found photos that Todora physically manipulates by cutting, drilling and painting onto them; and photographs of everyday objects that he places in unusual tableaux. Such interventions are meant to “rebel against what Todora considers intrusive imagery in print media.” Through Dec. 22, Dallas Contemporary.
Moving Pictures
This group show of video art fills both the Fort Worth nonprofit’s.7th Steet and Locke Street locations with work by Frances Bagley, Tim Best, Rebecca Carter, Mark Collop, Colette Copeland, Matthew Cusick, Liz Hickok, Hillerbrand + Magsamen, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Kerry Pacillio, Liz Rodda and Nina Schwanse. Last chance: brand 10 + x art space.
Benjamin Terry: lo-fi
The 2012 winner of the Dallas Museum of Art’s Arch and Anne Giles Kimbrough Award presents wall-mounted painted-wood sculptures with simple but deliberately off-kilter forms. Last chance: Through Oct. 19, RE Gallery.
Shop Constructions and Drawings from the Hill: James Magee
Sculptural reliefs and drawings related to Magee’s magnum opus, a West Texas complex known as the Hill. It consists of “four identical stone buildings, linked by raised causeways to produce a cruciform layout. Three of these buildings house enormous installations by Magee. Last chance: Through Oct. 12 at Kirk Hopper Fine Art.
![Waltercio Caldas Convite ao raciocínio [Invitation to Reasoning], 1978 Painted iron and turtle shell 5 7/8 x 17 3/4 x 7 7/8 in. (15 x 45 x 20 cm) Letícia Monte and Lula Buarque de Hollanda Collection.](https://artsandculturetx.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/14_ULYSSES.jpg)
Attie makes mixed-media collages by building up and tearing away layers of vintage paintings, fabric scraps and printed material.The Eden of the show’s title has been invaded and ravaged by all kinds of human interventions, both violent and “civilized,” yet the underlying idyllic imagery stubbornly comes through. Last chance: Through Oct. 26, Read Contemporary.
Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads: Gold
Smaller, gold-plated versions of Ai Weiwei’s globetrotting bronze Zodiac Heads have made their way to a city that’s thriving in our new Gilded Age. Through March 23, Crow Collection of Asian Art.
Lilian Garcia-Roig: Sight-Specific
Plein air yet performative paintings of dense forest landscapes from Northern Florida and Georgia as well as the Cascades Mountains in Washington State. Last chance: Oct. 26, The McKinney Avenue Contemporary.
El Paso
Navigating Art Languages: The James M. Shelton, Jr. Collection
A hit-parade of modern and postmodern masters from one of El Paso’s most important private collections, featuring Alexander Calder, Jean Dubuffet, Hans Hoffman, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Cy Twombly, Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Donald Judd, Sol Le Witt and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Through Feb. 2, El Paso Museum of Art.
Houston
SPRAWL
Co-curated by former Houston Center for Contemporary Craft curatorial fellow Susie J. Silbert and former HCCC curator Anna Walker, SPRAWL explores the urban landscape with works by 16 artists presented in three thematic sections loosely based on the three phases of urban growth. Oct. 4-Jan. 19, Houston Center for Contemporary Craft.
American Adversaries: West and Copley in a Transatlantic World
Organized by Emily Ballew Neff— Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s curator of American painting and sculpture — this exhibition centers around the colonial-era rivals’ most famous paintings: Benjamin West’s The Death of General Wolfe and John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark, which have not been shown together in more than 60 years. The show also includes works by George Romney, Gilbert Stuart and John Trumbull. Oct. 6-Jan. 20, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Nice. Luc Tuymans
Three years after the Belgian artist’s first U.S. retrospective stopped in Dallas, he mounts a Raid the Icebox-style that presents a (mostly) career-spanning selection of his portraits with portraits, masks, funerary objects and more from the Menil Collection’s ancient, African, Native American and modern-and-contemporary collections. At his insistence, the museum, which never produces banners, placed one in the Menil’s south entrance, supposedly as a form of institutional critique. Does Tuymans deserve the concession? Is he a particularly interesting interpreter of the Menil’s holdings? Go and decide for yourself. Through Jan. 5, The Menil Collection.
Round 39: Looking Back, Moving Forward
Project Row Houses celebrates its 20th anniversary with its own Raid the Icebox-style artistic intervention; in this case, artists will raid PRH archives and use their findings to inspire their site-specific installations. Round 39 includes Houston based artists Jamal Cyrus in collaboration with Ray Carrington Jr., Troy Gooden, Lovie Olivia; and New York based artists Valerie Piraino and Jessica Vaughn. Oct. 5-March 2, Project Row Houses.
Texas Contemporary
In the art fair’s third iteration, Texas galleries Anya Tish Gallery, Art Palace, Avis Frank, Barbara Davis Gallery, David Shelton Gallery, Devin Borden Gallery, Inman Gallery, McClain Gallery, Moody Gallery, Rice University Art Gallery, Sicardi Gallery, Texas Gallery and Zoya Tommy Contemporary (Houston); DUTTON and Lora Reynolds Gallery (Austin); and William Campbell Contemporary Art (Fort Worth) will be joined by about 60 mostly U.S.-based galleries. The opening-night party will benefit the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston’s free admission policy and community programming, and an auction of works by Alejandro Cartagena, Joe Mancuso, Beth Secor and Michael Velliquette will benefit Houston Center for Photography, Project Row Houses, Workshop Houston, and The Contemporary Austin. George R. Brown Convention Center.
Margaret Meehan: we were them
“Small sculptural objects fashioned out of vintage women’s clothing from the 1950’s, silk bondage rope, branches and feathers” comingle with found photos of a mysterious woman. I am so there. Noah Simblist contributes an essay on the Dallas-based artist’s source material and “the seemingly disparate connections between the violent mechanisms of hegemonic power and the gathering of resistance against them.” Oct. 4-26, David Shelton Gallery.
Gaia
Gaia, a Maryland Institute College of Art-educated street artist and member of the Baltimore collective Wall Hunters, fills Rice Gallery with his responses to Houston’s urban landscape, which he toured with local luminaries from architectural historian Stephen Fox to Project Row Houses director Linda Shearer. Through Dec. 8, Rice University Art Gallery.
Francesca Fuchs, (Re)Collection: Paintings of Framed Paintings, Drawings, Prints and Photos
Beautifully painted in washed-out tones and quivering brushstrokes, the series has developed into a powerful meditation on how the art painters live with becomes part of them. The installation, which fills a long wall with pictures hung three or four high, seals the triumph of one of the best painting shows in Houston this year. Last chance: Through Oct. 12, Texas Gallery.
Rachel Hecker: Group Show
Art League Houston’s 2013 Texas Artist of the Year describes her celebratory exhibition as “largely a collection of anomalies” given her tendency to “make things that have nothing to do with what I am doing” alongside ongoing investigations. Through Nov. 15, Art League Houston.
Moving/Still: Recent Photography from Texas Artists
Gallerist and guest curator Kerry Inman emphasizes conceptually-oriented work in the fifth iteration of FotoFest and Houston Center for Photography’s Talent in Texas series. Some of the most intriguing work includes Paho Mann’s Reinhabited Circle Ks series; Keliy Anderson-Staley’s Off the Grid study of Maine families living without plumbing, electricity or phones; Miguel Amat’s darkly picturesque Dams and Loans series; and Jesse Morgan Barnett’s curiously sublime photos of accident-scarred highway guardrails. The show is split between the two venues through Nov. 3; starting Nov. 8, the works at HCP move to FotoFest. Through Dec. 7, FotoFest and Houston Center for Photography, fotofest.org and hcponline.org.
Gavin Perry: End of the Line
The Miami-based artist returns with his large, colorful, intricately layered resin paintings. Last chance: Through Oct. 18, Barbara Davis Gallery.
Michael Bise: Love in the Kingdom of the Sick
Referencing and empathizing with Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, Bise’s large graphite drawings reflect on the experience of his recent heart transplant accompanying entanglement in the medical system and the politics of illness. Last chance: Through Oct. 12, Moody Gallery.
San Antonio
Lethal Beauty: Samurai Weapons and Armor
Curated by Andreas Marks of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, this exhibition surveys the technical and aesthetic refinement of samurai art and artifacts, presenting 70 works by master craftsmen spanning the 13th to 20th centuries. Through Jan. 5, San Antonio Museum of Art.
Localized Histories
Organized by Fairfax Dorn and drawn from the collection of the Linda Pace Foundation, Localized Histories brings together work by Leonardo Drew, Tony Feher, Isa Genzken, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Thomas Hirschhorn, Christian Marclay and Linda Pace to explore “the relationships between the static, found objects and their temporal nature to create something which extends beyond painting and sculpture.” Through Dec 29, Artpace.
Megan Harrison: Atramentite
Guest curator Anjali Gupta presents work by San Antonio artist Megan Harrison, who “has installed a number of vaulting forms in the gallery — each like a five sided crystal, some diminutive, others towering. The black and white inks that swirl on the surfaces create self-similar, fluid patterns reflecting the structure of molecular bonds and the slow evolution of crystals, which form over millions of years.”. Last chance: Through Oct. 13, Sala Diaz.
Katie Pell: Charming Are Your Unformed Wishes
Inspired both by traditional bracelets and cargo cults – religious groups who believe material wealth can be obtained through ritual worship, the San Antonio artist presents a monumental charm bracelet sculpted out of reclaimed wood and related drawings. Another room includes a selection of Pell’s “comparison collages” in which two images are presented with handwritten text. Through Nov. 2, Unit B.
Baroque on the Border: Rigoberto A Gonzalez and La Linea: Alice Leora Briggs
Born in Mexico, the Harlingen-based Gonzalez presents large-scale paintings depicting the hardships of life on the U.S.-Mexico border and the brutality associated with drug cartels and illegal immigration. The Lubbock-based Briggs’s woodcuts, sgraffito drawings and installation work respond to her visits to Juarez, Mexico asylums, rehabilitation centers, cartel death houses, and the city morgue. Through Nov. 10, Russell Hill Rogers Gallery, Southwest School of Art-Navarro Campus.
Lauren Browning: Texas Contemporary Artist Series
Curator Arturo Infante Almeida presents stone carvings by Browning, a sculptor whose training as a geologist informs her practice. Through Dec. 31, Institute of Texan Cultures.
Tyler
Deco Japan: Shaping Art & Culture, 1920–1945
Drawn from the Levensen Collection, this traveling show emphasizes “the contradictions of Japan as the Jazz Age collided with military expansionism overseas.” Last chance: Through Oct. 20, Tyler Museum of Art.
— DEVON BRITT-DARBY
Email visual-arts submissions by Oct. 14 to devon@artsandculturetx.com.
