Glasstire counts down the top five art events in Texas.
For last week’s picks, please go here.
Amoako Boafo, “Reflection I (detail),” 2018, oil on paper, 51 1/8 x 43 3/8 inches. Courtesy Private Collection and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.
1. Amaoko Boafo: Soul of Black Folks
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
May 27 – October 2, 2022
From the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston:
“Amoako Boafo: Soul of Black Folks is the debut museum solo exhibition for Ghanaian artist Amoako Boafo. Working primarily in portraiture, Boafo is known for his vibrant use of color and improvisational tactile finger painting technique on his subject’s skin. His work actively centers Black subjectivity, Black joy, the Black gaze, and radical care. This is co-organized with the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco. Its presentation in Houston will include new and recent works created between 2016–2022, including a site-specific wall painting made for CAMH.”
Lynda Benglis, “Elephant Foot First Foot Forward,” 2018, white tombasil bronze, 48 x 64 x 61 1/4 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Cheim & Read, New York.
2. Lynda Benglis
Nasher Sculpture Center
May 21 – September 18, 2022
From the Nasher Sculpture Center:
“Throughout her five-decades-long career, Lynda Benglis has created sculptures in a wide range of materials that explore the physicality of form and its effects on the viewer. For her exhibition at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Benglis highlights three bodies of work in media as diverse as traditional bronze and decorative glitter.
In the Garden, Benglis makes use of the water features by installing recently-created monumental fountains. Beginning in the 1960s with her poured latex paintings, for which the artist dripped and poured pigmented latex directly onto the floor, Benglis has been concerned with reconciling states of liquidity and solidity. By the early 1980s, with her first fountain developments, Benglis incorporated actual movement and flow into her work (as opposed to the static image or illusion of it). The added element of water over the surfaces of her sculptures further underscores the impression of gestural and spontaneous processes inherent in her latex and polyurethane pours of the 1960s and 1970s and gives the appearance of an object in continual transformation.”
“Home Bound” by Lisa Horlander.
3. Inbetween Studios Grand Opening
Inbetween Studios (Tyler)
May 28 – July 1, 2022
From the organizers:
“Inbetween Studios is a shared artist space and micro gallery in Downtown Tyler run by artists Lisa Horlander and Jessica Sanders. The Micro Gallery will feature the series Home Bound, paintings of East Texas trees by Lisa Horlander. The series portrays the feral woods that grow in Horlander’s neighborhood despite the ever-growing urban growth that threatens their survival. The series opens up a conversation about urban growth and the diminishing Piney Woods, portraying trees that are broken but still thriving trapped in house and full moon shaped canvases. During the pandemic the series took on a new focus, finding similarities between these trees’ survival and our own.”
From “Migration,” works by Margaret Meehan and Jade Walker.
4. Migration: Jade Walker and Margaret Meehan
Arts Fort Worth
April 1 – May 28, 2022
From the organizers:
“In both Margaret Meehan and Jade Walker’s work, there are notes of vulnerability and commentary of how we live our lives and relate to one another. For the exhibition Migration, they created work to help mitigate the distance of their current locations. One in Austin, TX and the other in Richmond, VA. Over the course of months through mailed correspondence the exhibition proposal ideas evolved, overlapped and resolved themselves. Each artist finding a way to migrate between studios and across the miles that separated them. It is impossible to imagine making artwork that does not have the residue of the current moment. In the end the distance and the marked lack of community inspired this collaboration, but it also created a space that brought them together to create their own flock.”
Dawoud Bey, “A Girl with a Knife Nosepin, Brooklyn, NY,” 1990 (printed in 2019), inkjet, collection of the artist, courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery,NY; Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago; and Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco.
5. Dawoud Bey: An American Project
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
March 6 – May 30, 2022
Read Liz Kim’s review of the exhibition.
From the MFAH:
“Photographer Dawoud Bey portrays communities and histories that have been underrepresented or even unseen. From portraits in Harlem to nocturnal landscapes, classic street photography to large-scale studio portraits, his images combine an ethical imperative with an unparalleled mastery of his medium.
Dawoud Bey: An American Project spans the breadth of Bey’s career through nearly 90 works, from the 1970s to the present. Photographs in this retrospective of the influential photographer range from his earliest street portraits in Harlem (1975–78) to his most recent historical explorations: the Underground Railroad (2017) and Louisiana plantations (2020).”
