Everybody Goes Asian

The Chaney Family Collection has ignited interest in actually selling contemporary Asian art in Houston, the MFAH show this month showcases Robert Chaney's oil money art wealth and his penchant for Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese and Japanese artists. This Houston collector is new to me- I have no idea if he's ever bought a piece by a Houston artist, but he lives out off Memorial Drive. Better than grandstanding for collectors from out of town; it's good to know if a Houston artist moves far away and gets famous they may be collected by this white guy. :)

All the galleries in town make the big push in July for Arthouston (not Artshouston), when they try to sell, sell, sell. This usually means lowest common denominator crap, so when seven or eight of the big names come up with conceptual Asian art to ride the museum wave, its nice to see them selling hype instead of bullshit.

Barbara Davis presents: Weihong, Li Wei and Huang Yan

Deborah Colton comes up with: China Under Construction: Contemporary Art from the Republic

McClain does: ! CHINA NOW !

New Gallery spins: New China

Devin Borden Hiram Butler goes with: Tam Van Tran- Holographic Ensemble

Finesilver spits: Young-Min Kang

Inman shows: dreaming, faraway

a month later CTRL gets in on the party with: To the Left

get your imported art while its hot!

DEBRIS: My Lovely Whore

Oh, July can just go fuck itself, with all the mosquitoes and humidity, thunderstorms and puddles. At least you can cool off at the Menil for free, or hop movies all day down at Edwards Grand Palace Theatre. Best A/C around. Third place goes to the Museum of Fine Arts- free on Thursdays till 9 pm and throwing out some good films for the summer. The weekend of July 14th brings a festival of new Spanish short films to the Dirty South and on the 20th Marcel Camus' Black Orpheus will be here to bring you down. Especially since it's free, art rats need to make sure they make it out on Thursday, July 26th at 7 pm for a.k.a. Nikki S. Lee; a full length feature on the performance and conceptual artist who has ingratiated herself into a myriad of American subcultures with a bit of makeup, a little coercion and a lot of chutzpah. She has posed as a member of various ethnic and social groups including drag queens, punks, swing dancers, senior citizens, Latinos, hip-hop fans, skateboarders, lesbians, yuppies, and Korean schoolgirls. In her new film this social chameleon flips her analysis back on herself, and the artist will be in town to introduce her film.

The Joanna, Houston's newest art gallery, is nestled in the neighborhood behind St. Thomas University, housed in an innocuous garage and home. Their newest show, No Skeleton Armies, Please is a real treat if you can find them over at 4014 Graustark at the corner of Branard. Stop by for new work from young artists Michael Bise, Francis Giampietro, Nick Meriwether, Eric Pearce, Treon Rick and Brian Rod. Most of them are known for their imaginative drawings and organizer Cody Ledvina's biting sense of humor is sure to be on display. Opens Friday June 6th (6-9pm) and continues through the month. Check out thejoannawebsite.com for more information.

Houston’s president and prime minister of street art square off July 13th at Domy Books in Give Up vs YAR. It’s good to see posters for the show pasted up, just daring the cops. Toeing the line between hoodlum and artist, the two have made a career in the street and in the gallery. When their pieces started being stolen from their spots by intrepid art collectors, you couldn’t blame them anymore for going a bit legit. Stop by the show for great new work, and please don’t ask anyone if they’re the artist. For one thing, artists never stand next to their shit in the first place, but these ones will be sure to be out of sight.


pick up the Free Press today!

Mr Pointy!!!

In the MFAH lobby of the new building... Mr. Pointy!

In the photo you can't see the creepy little screaming face coming out of the back of his neck...

from the NY Times: "maybe Mr. Pointy is the soul of the modern mass media itself, a force that dazzles the eyes and minds of people all over the world, lulling them into dreams of sweetness and light, promising illumination while racking up colossal profits, a Pied Piper leading us into digital oblivion."

also...

John the Third makes his museum debut with Kid Koala at the next MFAH party for the Red Hot exhibit!

Happy 4th!!!

Get out and see the fireworks!

We'll be here:

good view, maybe we can get up on the roof...

Heads Up

Would you like a free studio, a thousand bucks for materials and a $500 monthly stipend? Who wouldn't? Hit up the Lawndale Art Center for more info on their studio program and an application. Last year Donna Huanca (currently traveling Europe), Jabari Anderson (up to no good with Otabenga Jones) and Stephanie St. Sanchez (filming anything that moves) got in on the ground floor; be there this year for more visiting artists, studio visits and chances to exhibit than you have right now sitting in your ratty warehouse or spare bedroom!

All proposals are due Wednesday July 11, 2007 at 4:00PM. $15 to apply (which sucks) but it's cheaper than rent!

Mr. Pointy

It was pretty sweet to run into Takashi Murakami's Tongari-kun (Mr. Pointy) in the lobby of the MFAH's new building last week. In town ahead of the Red Hot exhibit of Asian art collected by one rich motherfucker, this sculpture- and it's placement in the lobby with a backdrop of Greek, Roman and Egyptian figures- should be one of the best in the exhibit. Hopefully it won't move for the full show in a couple of weeks! Not as big as the 28 foot tall outdoor installation in Rockafeller Park in 2004, this fuzzy guy is still a great piece.

What happened in Wichita Falls?

Rejecting Ulterior Motifs: How Contemporary Art Wore Out Its Welcome in North Texas

Texas has traditions, held close to the heart. When the fluid culture of our global village arrives on the doorstep of traditional mavens, don’t expect it to be accepted with open arms. After the exhibition Cherry Picked: 2007 Survey of Texas Art and Artists opened in April at the Wichita Falls Museum of Art, a subsequent contemporary show, Ulterior Motifs #12, was removed from the schedule. It was followed by a scathing email from Wayne Gilbert, Motifs organizer and owner of G Gallery in Houston, alleging a $1 million budget revocation by board members appalled at contemporary art being shown in Wichita Falls. When asked to approve the show, board members voted against it 14 to 1. Neither charge has been proven, but the board definitely “did something” about the Ulterior Motifs exhibit.

The WFMA is not used to scrutiny or attention outside of their insulated community of 100,000. Even within Texas they did not look to others for inspiration until recently, and the tight-knit sensibilities of the city were put to the test last month when this bumbling art world overreaction became the latest bullet in a growing list of strange scandals in North Texas.

At the crux of the WFMA’s encounter with the outside world was an invitation extended to curators Rachel Cook (Editor-in-Chief of Glasstire) and Leona Scull-Hons to design the museum’s 40^th anniversary exhibit, Cherry Picked. Seemingly as innocuous as the recent Take Me to the River exhibition of contemporary painting and video presented in 2006, Cherry Picked was a bit more ambitious than the museum expected. The exhibit opened to a cautious audience unwilling to embrace video, installation or conceptual artwork and set off a split between patrons of the museum. Experienced in the local scenes of Austin and San Antonio as well as both frequent travelers, the curators each chose ten artists that expressed their views of Texas art. Cook limited her search to artists over 30 whom she believes have made a strong contribution to their locale and Texas at large. Scull-Hons geared her choices toward emerging artists she compares to “cherry blossoms”. Her curatorial inclinations led her to performance and other non-traditional materials as well as paintings and sculptures.

Selected from a burgeoning pool of talent within the state, artists from Dallas and Austin set the tone for the exhibit along with strong representation from San Antonio, Houston, and West Texas balancing the overall vision. They steadied their approach, avoiding replicating the Texas Biennial and its heavily conceptual art and hipster craft bent; as well as steering clear of the WFMA’s mainstay, stereotypical Texas imagery and paintings of cowboys. Taking into account the cultural atmosphere in Wichita Falls, they avoided depictions of sex or violence, circumventing any religious or moral castigation. Most conservative in the show were the paintings of Marco Villegas, minimal abstractions in earthy colors that evoke the Texas prairie with simple, soothing layers of geometric squares. The sculptures of William Canning and Lizzy Wetzel stick close to the herd, drawing straight lines to “Texas” representational imagery through innovative conceptual processes. Canning inflates whimsical inner tubes in steel, while Wetzel adorns cow skulls with shamanistic mystery. Also working in sculpture, Sharon Engelstein’s minimal shapes mute their references to traces of human figures and faces. Austin’s Okay Mountain contributed two artists to the exhibit; the humble drawings of Dan Fabian and Justin Goldwater mimic and ridicule today’s hip comic figuration and tease lilting references out of their subjects. A kissing cousin of these hipster drawings, crafty reworking of fabric and found materials is found in Bunnyphonic’s performance work as well as the psychologically charged needlepoint and stuffed animals of Celia Eberle.

The polarized reaction to the show may seem peculiar, but video artists Jenny Schlief, Robert Boland, and Cauleen Smith brought something to Cherry Picked that illustrates a radically new aestheticism. Smith’s I want to see my skirt invests the narrative of a young Malian girl into a fractured group of videos that explore the expressive qualities of film with varied textures and connotations. Questioning the world in naïve and quirky experiments, Boland’s films are absurd shorts if they are approached without an open mind to his spiritual connotations, as the artist attempts to levitate on shrubbery and wrestle in yogurt. Houston artist Jenny Schlief may have had a scandalous impact even though her masturbatory To the Lady is not included here; Mature Milk, where the artist drinks massive amounts of strawberry milk and pukes on camera, and Shower Party and Girl Star, of Schlief jumping on a hotel bed in her underwear, were enough to push the envelope in Wichita Falls. Other included installations by Chris Sauter and Helen Altman rework domesticity with evocative juxtapositions. Sauter has piled sleeping bags in a corner, hinting at inhabitants by sculpting outstretched arms. The sculpture takes on strong connotations with molded plastic cups scattered across the floor; you can almost hear the snoring. Altman has presented a simple installation here at the WFMA, an open refrigerator with a thawing turkey inside. The surprised gut reactions by viewers are a testament to the artist’s ability to use everyday items with startling effect. Mimi Kato’s designer fantasies are computer-aided photography and video work drawing from Japanese culture but reinterpreted through her life in San Antonio. Photographs of Muslim teenagers in Houston by Soody Sharifi attempt to bridge the gap between cultures by relating everyday American scenarios; hopefully they and others are recognizable here as familial Texan scenes instead of foreign oddities.

Reaction to the exhibit was split between generations but also along cognitive lines. Some patrons “didn’t understand,” but students, young professionals and children latched onto the multimedia experience of the show. The “over 60” crowd, which WFMA Director Cohn Drennan describes as having “a limited palette,” (if you’ll pardon the pun) did not appreciate the forward looking examples of why Texas art is valid in today’s world art market. On the other hand, younger, media-savvy visitors wandered the extensive gallery, marveling at each turn.

In Wichita Falls, as in many places, traditional thoughts on fine art compete with an expanding definition of art today. The board of the WFMA is filled with long-standing members who were pivotal in introducing a museum to the city back in 1967, and they have been patronizing the establishment for nearly a half century. The Wichita Falls Museum of Science, History and Art opened its doors with an exhibit of Western paintings and bronzes by Frederick Remington and Charles Russell provided by Fort Worth oilman Sid Richardson. For over thirty years the museum persisted as a touchstone institution for the city elite, and a satellite of Midwestern State University.

The small town ennui was recently broken with the hiring of Cohn Drennan from Washington DC’s Department of State’s Art in Embassies program. When Drennan arrived at the WFMA he examined the collections, jettisoning science and history from the museum’s objectives based on meager holdings. With a renewed focus on art, the new director mounted several projects: a corporate exhibit of wine-centered paintings titled Pressing Matters: the Sterling Vineyards Collection, Take Me to the River, 160 paintings by sixteen Texas women artists in the ambitious Timeless, and a survey of the museum’s holdings. Within two years of his tenure at the WFMA the director felt comfortable in his position as an arbiter of taste for the community, but the spring exhibit of 2007 proved too much for his audience to handle.

A “collective gasp” swept through those who had established the museum, and when the announcement of another contemporary exhibit following Cherry Picked found itself in front of the board, they did not hesitate to axe it. Tepid excuses about impending renovation funding, repetition within the series of the Ulterior Motifs last shown in Arlington and Dallas (#10 and #11) and the organizers’ late delivery of images do nothing to blunt the reality of the exhibit being crushed after the board saw its contents. Ulterior Motifs #12 drew from a similar vein as Cherry Picked—artists who have established themselves in their respective Texas communities—but the show is rather more conservative and prestigious than the exhibit that did go on show. The WFMA has missed an opportunity to exhibit works by international stars Robert Rauschenberg, The Art Guys and Mel Chin along with nationally recognized artists Trenton Doyle Hancock, Al Souza, James Surls and David McGee. Additionally, Wayne Gilbert, with his airing of grievances, may have missed his chance to influence Wichita Falls at a later date and to have a positive impact on the development of Midwestern State University, students, the community and families.

In the long run, the spring of 2007 should be regarded as a pivotal time for the WFMA, emerging recently from obscurity to join adventurous art spaces in out of the way places like the Beeville Art Museum and the Old Jail Art Center in Albany, Texas; embracing contemporary art as a matter of civic pride and potential tourism dollars. By pushing the envelope with their 40^th anniversary exhibit, the museum has a chance to begin a dialogue within the community on the nature of art. Already visitors and membership are up. A younger generation is discovering the museum for the first time, and their commitment to a new way of thinking will dictate the direction in which the institution will have to go.

via artshouston