Now is the moment to get as much art as possible into your system in anticipation of the leaner summer months ahead. The first of these recommendations has already closed, but we couldn't let it slip by without mention.

Silvana Lacarra
Birdhouse Gallery
Closed May 30, 2010

Silvana Lacarra’s show Surface closed last weekend at Birdhouse Gallery, and the artist returns to Buenos Aires today, with a promise to be back next year. The small show contained a few treasures—in particular Lacarra’s three autorretratos (self-portraits) and a couple of landscape “paintings” made of cut wood. The autorretratos, photographs of the artist wearing a slim, photoshopped dress that appears to be made of wood, harken back to a work from the same year also titled Autorretrato (2007), a table with the same diamond shaped holes through its surface. In the new photographs, the holes appear to be directly through Lacarra’s body, prompting reflections about the body’s surface, solidity, appearance and actuality.

Jenny Hart
Domy Books
Through June 10, 2010

Jenny Hart’s current show, Study Hall, is consonant with a faux-tween aesthetic that’s popular at Domy. Hart’s series of high-school portraits, replete with 80s blow-outs, aviators and an Iron Maiden T-shirt, are more glamorous than the characters in Esther Pearl Watson’s Unlovable, but the portraits, framed with embroidery designs in colored pencil, retain a related adolescent awkwardness and suggest the fraught infatuations of a teenager.

Jill Magid and Mary Walling Blackburn
Blanton Museum of Art
May 8 & 15, 2010

Jill Magid and Mary Walling Blackburn will be in Austin this weekend and next, respectively. Well, kind of. This Saturday, Austin-based performer Stephen Low will perform Jill Magid giving a lecture, fittingly, about people who take on new identities for various reasons. Next Saturday, Austin-based writers Katie Anania and Claire Ruud (yes, that's me) will, in a related move, substitute teach for Mary Walling Blackburn’s Anhoek School. These events are in conjunction with Anna Craycroft’s WorkSpace exhibition, Subject of Learning/Object of Study, which has already brought some excellent programming to the Blanton. (Last weekend’s Cave and Mountain Tour: The Blanton Edition with artist Keith Wilson was a highlight.) Here’s to more to come!

Claire Ruud is Associate Director of Fluent~Collaborative.