Issue # 168

Possible Explosive Talent

April 29, 2011

share with a friend:

Dion Laurent, EarthMan 2, 2010, Sculptural performance work and documentation. Courtesy the artist and Texas Biennial/Big Medium. (detail)

from the editor

More big changes are in store in Austin’s art world and for Texas museum stewardship overall. A statement released yesterday revealed that Blanton Museum director Ned Rifkin will be stepping down from his post as of May 31. Rifkin will remain on the faculty at UT Austin, where he is currently a professor of art and art history and leads a junior seminar on the year 1962 as part of the Plan II program. In The Blanton’s statement, Rifkin said:

“Much as I will miss working with the outstanding staff at The Blanton, I believe my eagerness to teach more and my desire to pursue meaningful research on a variety of topics will better suit me. I wish every possible success to The Blanton as it continues to offer quality programs to transform lives through art.”

Rifkin came to The Blanton in 2009 from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. where he held the position as Undersecretary for Art and oversaw the workings of six museums. Previous to that, he held director positions at the Hirshhorn Museum of Art, the Menil Collection in Houston and the High Museum in Atlanta. He has worked as a curator at the Hirshhorn Museum, New Museum and Corcoran Gallery of Art.

Rifkin will be succeeded by Simone Wicha, The Blanton’s deputy director for external affairs and operations. Wicha joined The Blanton in 2006 as their director of development, where she successfully completed a $83.5 million building campaign and has made tremendous strides in building their annual giving fund and membership numbers.

While The Blanton has made a definitive leadership transition in appointing Wicha as director, they are currently seeking a new Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art and Curator of European Art. This is a significant step. Out of the two modern and contemporary exhibitions on The Blanton’s the 2011-12 season, one is comprised of collection gifts from the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection and another is a traveling exhibition of works by El Anatsui organized by the Museum of African Art. With the announcement that Arthouse will no longer have a permanent on-staff exhibitions curator, we can hope that The Blanton’s new curatorial talent might provide ambitious programming and an interesting counterpoint to Arthouse’s extreme kunsthalle model. (For more on that, see Claire Ruud and Rachel Cook’s excellent call-and-response think piece in Glasstire and Robert Faires’ article from April 22 in the Chronicle.)

In the meantime, major Texas museums throughout the state are scrambling to fill the vacancies of their top seats. On April 18, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston appointed its search committee to replace longtime director Peter Marzio, who passed away last year. The Dallas Museum of Art announced the week prior that longtime director Bonnie Pitman would step down due to health reasons. Olivier Meslay, Senior Curator of European and American Art and the Barbara Thomas Lemmon Curator of European Art, will serve as interim director. Take into account the additional voids left by directors Dana-Friis-Hansen at AMOA and Matthew Drutt at Artpace and you see an entire art ecology that is poised for re-definition.

I’d like to open this up to you for response and thought. What qualities would you like to see in the new directors of these institutions? What changes could be made to create a more sustainable environment for creativity, exchange and arts patronage statewide? And how might extra-institutional spaces, such as galleries, artist-run spaces, publications and the Texas Biennial (whose Austin and Houston venues are covered in this issue), factor into this new constellation? Share your thoughts here and come out in person this weekend to the Hybrid Arts Summit in Austin, where modes of collaboration, criticism and technology will be discussed. More information on its events are available on Facebook or on the Austin Art Alliance page. Click on the Hybrid Arts icon for a full schedule and come participate!

Wendy Vogel is Editor of ...might be good.

interview

Franklin Sirmans

By Wendy Vogel

Ai Weiwei, Untitled (Divine Proportion), 2006. Los Angeles County Museum of Art gift of the 2011 Collectors Committee. Photo credit: Giovanni Tarifeño. Courtesy of Friedman Benda and the artist.

Formerly the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Houston’s Menil Collection, Franklin Sirmans assumed his current position as the Terri and Michael Smooke Department Head and Curator of Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in January 2010. As a follow-up to Sirmans’ talk at Arthouse a few weeks ago, …mbg caught up with him over email to talk about what he’s been up to in LA and his transition from the Third Coast to the West Coast.

…might be good […mbg]: You've been at LACMA now for a little over a year. How has the adjustment been? What have you been working on?

Franklin Sirmans [FS]: Working with the staff of both the Menil and LACMA, and thanks to Michael Govan’s enthusiastic support, we were able to bring Steve Wolfe’s and Vija Celmins’ solo shows here that originated at the Menil. We gave Steve Wolfe’s show a third and final venue on the West Coast, in the state where Steve lives (he’s based in San Francisco), thus completing the tour after the Whitney in New York and the Menil. Also, with Vija Celmins, another homecoming was created here at LACMA. All the work in the show was created here in Los Angeles, where Vija lived in the ‘60s during and after attending UCLA. She has a ton of friends here who got to revisit the work. It was incredibly special to see the artists’ turnout for her opening—a who’s who of LA art stars who made their mark here more than 50 years ago. And the show is still up for another month.

I went straight to work with the Broad Collection as well, organizing a small group primarily of paintings under the rubric of Color and Form as a complement to the traveling exhibition, Blinky Palermo. We were the first venue for that show, last fall. We’ve also made some key acquisitions through purchases and donations: Ai Weiwei, Christian Marclay, Glenn Ligon, Zhang Huan, Paul Pfeiffer, as well as younger artists like Leslie Hewitt, Friedrich Kunath, Rodney McMillian, Mario Ybarra and Alex Olson.

…mbg: How has working for LACMA as an institution differed from the Menil Collection? Both institutions have specialties beyond contemporary art, but LACMA is a true encyclopedic collection. Has that impacted your curatorial practice at all?

FS: They are completely different institutions, beginning with the vast difference in space and the size of the collections. I’m honestly still trying to figure out the differences in my own curatorial practice. At the Menil, I was responsible for Modern and Contemporary. Here, I work with two other great curators in our contemporary department closely (Rita Gonzalez and Christine Y. Kim) but we all overlap and talk with a staff of over thirty LACMA curators and assistants.

…mbg: Do you have any recommendations for emerging artists, artist-run spaces or galleries in LA that our Texas readers should know about?

FS: Hmmm… it’s a big city. That would be a complicated answer. For now, I’ll just mention LAXART, run by Lauri Firstenberg, which a lot of people will already know.

…mbg: Houston is often said to be similar to LA in its sprawl and its vibe. Thoughts on that?

FS: I can’t see that. I only started driving right before I left Houston, so my view and experience of Houston is certainly not typical, but I’d still have to think about that a lot more.

…mbg: What can Texas learn from LA (positive or negative, if anything)?

FS: It’s good to think of yourself as being at the center of the world sometimes.

…mbg: What can LA learn from Texas (if anything)?

FS: Civic pride.

…mbg: What's next for you? Can you give us a sneak preview of your upcoming projects?

FS: We are the West Coast venue for the Glenn Ligon exhibition currently at the Whitney Museum, which, of course, will travel afterward to the Fort Worth Modern. Last year we purchased two works by Ligon, so it is going to be really exciting to see that show travel here and represent some of the incredibly large presence his work has in LA collections. Also, PST (Pacific Standard Time), the Getty initiative to consider art from Los Angeles from 1945 to 1980, begins this fall and that will be huge. Among the many shows and events, I contributed to the catalogue for a show by Kellie Jones at the Hammer called Now Dig This: Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980. Fittingly for our conversation, the essay focuses on Walter Hopps and his curatorial presence here and elsewhere. Rita Gonzalez is working on a show with the Chicano collective Asco that opens this fall also as part of PST. And our modern art department will present a seminal work by Ed Kienholz that was shown at Documenta 5 in Kassel, Germany and has never been presented in this country.

This fall we will also be presenting Ai Weiwei’s Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads, a work that will later go to Houston.

Wendy Vogel is Editor of ...might be good.

reviews

Texas Biennial: Austin
Austin Venues
Through May 14

By Dan Boehl

TJ Hunt, The True Artist Carries the Weight of the World (performance still), 2011, Performance and earth, Dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Texas Biennial/Big Medium. Photo credit: Ricky Yanas.

There is a lot going on in this installment of the Texas Biennial. Perhaps a reflection of the way the Austin art scene has changed in the last two years, the venues are scattered and disparate. Work is displayed in traditional gallery spaces like Women and Their Work and at the newly renovated Visual Arts Center, but there is an undercurrent of utilitarian space that mirrors the real estate bubble. 1319 Rosewood is an empty house. One of the two empty office spaces in the 816 Congress building used to house an arm of the Obama campaign. The checkered venues felt apropos of the diminished presence of gallery spaces in Austin and created an interesting parallel of the economy. I spent the better part of a Saturday riding my bike around and visiting all the Austin sites. If you don’t have time to see everything, I recommend the installations at 816 Congress and 1319 Rosewood: Congress because it is packed full of work; Rosewood because everything in the house is worth seeing.

Here are my favorite things:

Joshua Bienko (1319 Rosewood)

Bienko makes art-historically referenced rap music. His beats are good, the lyrics interesting, in an art insider way. The video images of exploding rockets and 16-bit graphic video game samples are funny and smart. TehChing Hsieh (2009) and Lewitt, Sol (2010) are too insular to really exist on their own as songs, and they are too full of themselves to think as anything more than self-aggrandizing propaganda or teaching pieces, but both showcase a possible explosive talent. TehChing Hsieh digresses into a rap about grocery shopping that is as mundane and enthralling as the digression in “Rapper’s Delight” where the Sugar Hill Gang raps about eating bad food at a friend’s house. And it’s all delivered in a Beastie Boys screech.

Catherine Colangelo (816 Congress)

Colangelo’s boats, all given women’s names, are crafted with a loving aura that arises from the obsessive patterning. Not quite Asian, not quite Western or Americana, these gouache-on-pencil boats float between worlds, ferrying something precious from one place to another.

Clarke Curtis (816 Congress)

Curtis’ intimate collages fill me with the same feeling I got when I was a kid looking at the book Faeries by Brian Froud and Alan Lee. The creatures Curtis depicts, made from what appears to be fashion magazine pictures of haute couture, have personalities all their own, lives that are impossible to fathom. Like the creatures in Faeries, these animals are not quite menacing, but you can tell they don’t care about the viewer. Like looking at a runway model. It is a hard and odd feeling to capture.

Gabriel Dawe (Pump Project)

One of the best works in the Biennial, Dawe’s string sculpture (Plexus No. 5, 2011) visually undulates. The whole structure flattens, then becomes three-dimensional as the viewer passes through the gallery. At one point the thing falls apart, evaporating into a pool of pixilated color. I’ve seen Dawe’s work before on sites such as ffffound and Design Sponge, but the images cannot do Dawe justice.

Nathan Green (816 Congress)

I have always been a fan of Green’s paintings, and now that he has moved fully into sculpture, I see him as a reverse Guston. Where Guston painted the guts of those bulbous heads before he knew the heads even existed, Green is painting the world so it resembles the insides of his paintings. Green is telling us the most earnest joke he can muster: the world is beautiful and silly and cobbled together from utter nonsense. We are basically looking at parts of Green’s brain.

Hillerbrand + Magsamen (Big Medium)

A man and a woman take objects you might find in a garage (lawnmower, cooler, water jug, folding chairs, bike) and pile them in the middle of a darkened room. Light shines from a hole above. There are sounds of percussion and an auctioneer calls. The piling is desperate and deliberate. Soon the man is able to climb the pile and escape through the hole. Then the woman struggles, perched precariously on the junk, as he attempts to pull her up. They escape. But the action of the video is bookended by the image of the man reaching down into the emptied dark space, holding onto a laughing girl who spins in a slow arc.

TJ Hunt (1319 Rosewood)

I missed Hunt’s performance but caught the aftermath. For her performance on April 9th, Hunt carved “the true artist carries the weight of the world” into the backyard of an empty house. She used a hatchet-like spade and punched the words into the turf until she got halfway through the word “carries.” The photos of the performance at 1319 Rosewood show Hunt to be dirty and exhausted. An empty house foundation gazes upon the earth she sculpted. When I was standing in the backyard looking at the installation, a couple of white and pink kids’ three-wheelers looked on from a bare concrete slab. The house next door, a gentrified affair with huge windows, was playing some Bob Marley.

Jessica Mallios (816 Congress)

In 1:1 (2011) a gigantic camera dominates the dance floor as people shuffle dance around it in a wide arc. There is some Spanish language television projected against the bar’s wall, showing infomercials. The men wear cowboy hats and the women’s clothing barely contains them. Mallios’ video is about sex and the desire to be a part of things while standing apart. It is the best thing in the show.

Ricardo Paniagua (816 Congress)

I met Paniagua on the Arthouse rooftop during the Biennial party. He was wearing a long blond wig, a thermal blanket as a cape and a pretty nice suit. The day before, at the Biennial opening, he was wearing something equally ridiculous. I liked meeting him. All I said was, “You did those paintings,” and pointed to the postcard in his hand. He said, “They are skyscrapers.” I said, “That sounds better than office buildings, but what if you are short, like a child, and see that they don’t reach the ground. Do they still look like skyscrapers?” Paniagua did not know and I do not know either. Fresh Gong Go Bong Bong (2010) looks like it stepped right out of our cloud city future. A future bathed in blood.

Abby Rondales (1319 Rosewood)

At one point in the short video (Future Perfect, 2010-11), one of the characters, Abby, an artist in her thirties who has abandoned her career to stay at home and raise her son, says that when she is left alone she has time to… and here she merely sticks out her tongue. It is a moment of total exasperation. Can we be artists and still raise families, have houses, work jobs? Of course.

Barry Stone (Women & Their Work)

An image of Alan Greenspan confessing everything he ever believed turned out to be false. Greenspan’s image sampled and turned into a rainbow. A black cloud floating. A crop from a museum cloistered painting taken and yellowed. Stone’s work is at once playful and challenging, exploring subtle personal mythologies by masking momentous events. These works seem like design posters without slogans, but the slogans are inside somehow, telling us to hang in there.

Dan Boehl is a poet and novelist living in Austin, Texas. His book Kings of the F**king Sea is available from Birds, LLC.

Texas Biennial: Houston
Box 13, Houston
Through May 21

By Wendy Vogel

Laurie Frick, A long walk through cardboard, 2011, Recycled cardboard boxes, cut, glued and wired to PVC mesh, Dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Texas Biennial/Big Medium.

During a Texas Biennial panel discussion on regionalism at the Blanton Museum two weekends ago, Los Angeles Times art critic David Pagel asked with a smirk, “Is art from LA supposed to be all sunshine and rainbows, and art in Texas rusty and…brown?” While many Austin venues playing host to the curated portion of the Biennial resist such narrow conscription, the works on view at artist-run space Box 13, the only Houston location, do share some formal similarities. Sprawling and scrappy, the exhibition encompasses a range of sculptural practices in an earthy palette. The most enjoyable moments don’t arise from a sense of visual cohesion, but rather when individual works confront the space’s unlikely architecture, a former sewing machine factory in the Second Ward.

Visitors are greeted by an installation in Box 13’s sizable window space by Timothy Harding, Don’t Forget to Dot the I in Power (2010). Large charcoal drawings of abstract scribbles adorned with shiny tape are bent architecturally around blinding neon lights in a contemporary mix of Flavin and Arte Povera. While the work’s title and the artist’s website statement suggest some larger critique of individualism and corporate sloganeering, I didn’t read it explicitly in the work. Formally, however, its placement in the barred window space is effective, drawing attention to the space’s quirks and its function without the need for excessive signage.

In contrast to Harding’s theatrical beacon, the works in Box 13’s first floor gallery appear like humble props. This is certainly true for Brad Tucker’s Stretch Fabric (2010). Adjacent to the wrapping wooden staircase and divorced from the context of the sets of Tucker’s “Bad Trucker” performances, the accordion-like structure looks like a forlorn undersized baby gate. Olivia Moore’s Double and Frame (both 2009), an unusually thick stand-in for a headboard and a reupholstered bed frame missing an inlay for the mattress, subtly upset one’s expectations for the two domestic objects but remain puzzlingly free of irony. Cassandra Emswiler’s floor-bound sculpture, one-half of an installation in Houston and Austin, fares better. A grid of cheap linoleum panels with cheesy references to natural motifs such as flowers and marble are rhythmically overlaid with shells, rocks, skulls and other organic materials. Like a contemporary twist on Smithson’s nonsites that critiqued the “neutrality” of the gallery space, Emswiler’s piece gains a funny factor when set upon Box 13’s oh-so-‘70s linoleum floor.

Laurie Frick’s installation beckons viewers up Box 13’s dramatic stairs and onto the second floor. Resembling an overhead city grid created from cut-up pieces of discarded cardboard boxes, A long walk through cardboard is simple, site-specific and very engaging. I became fascinated in trying to decode the found poetry of her brand-name labels. Once on the second floor, my eyes traveled upward to the space’s composite board ceiling and tangle of spotlights, breaking the illusion of the piece in an unexpected yet honest way.

At Box 13, the Texas Biennial installation offers a refreshing and unapologetic look at one of Houston’s weirdest art spaces. For this, it is a success: because if not for celebrating Texas weirdness, in all its manifestations, what is the Biennial for?

Wendy Vogel is Editor of ...might be good.

Carlos Cruz-Diez
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Through July 4

By Benjamin Lima

Carlos Cruz-Diez, Cromosaturación (Chromosaturation), 1965/2004, Three chromo-cubicles (fluorescent light with blue, red, and green filters). The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of the Cruz-Diez Foundation at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2009.464. © 2010 Carlos Cruz-Diez / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Courtesy the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Scholarly and comprehensive, the Carlos Cruz-Diez retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston makes a case for the ambition, consistency and proficiency of its subject’s works. Born in 1923 in Caracas and based in Paris since 1960, Cruz-Diez resembles Josef Albers in his methodical, rigorous approach to the interaction of color. However, Cruz-Diez’ wide-ranging experimentation with ways of undoing an artwork’s status as a static object marks him as a member of the 1960s-era generation that includes the kinetic and Op artists, such as Jesús Rafael Soto, with whom he has been associated. Whereas a traditional understanding of color would have defined it firstly as a static element and secondly as an attribute of some other object, Cruz-Diez’ approach hinges on a definition of color as a dynamic, interactive process with its own independent existence. Color for Cruz-Diez takes the form of event, situation, or what he calls a “living organism in a constant state of transformation.” This emphasis on mutability and interactivity is the basis for the artist’s most soaring claims about the potential of color to liberate viewers from cultural convention and enable fully autonomous, self-generated aesthetic experiences.

The bulk of the works on view extends across the long special exhibition gallery in the Museum of Fine Arts’ Law Building. The space is broken up into ten thematic sections, beginning with Cruz-Diez’ earliest efforts in more traditional styles and tracing the first steps of his breakthrough to fully independent color. By far the largest number of works on view are physichromies, a category of object whose earliest examples date to 1959 and which the artist divides into six series. A physichromie is composed of a series of vertically aligned elements in combination of colors that are calibrated to change appearance according to changes in the ambient light and the viewer’s position. There is a risk of some repetition here, as several of the galleries show works that explore the same fundamental principles. To my taste, the most engaging physichromies are those that used metallic, translucent or reflective materials, considering the optical instabilities that were a hallmark of Op Art. Most powerful are the later environmental and site-specific works, fewer in number but larger in scale. In several cases, the exhibition includes a single piece from a larger series. In these cases, ample documentation of the other works of these types is provided in the 500-page catalog. The foremost example is the amazing Chromosaturation (1965/2004) a pavilion divided into three segments (that is, interior rooms opening onto one another). The interior is white on all sides, and each of the three segments is saturated with a bright light: one red, one green, one blue. Inside, as one’s eyes adjust, the color seeps into all available surfaces. Visitors put on soft booties to avoid scuffing the floor. Two white square plinths, turned diagonally to the floor plan, allow one to compare the effects of the colored light on two different sides of the same plinth: one orange, one green. Standing on the far end, it is possible to track each of the three colors blending into the next. More than any other, this work demonstrated the potential of color as a form of live, active energy.

The final gallery of architectural projects and public interventions was of special intellectual interest. There are scale models and video footage of monumental projects: a hydroelectric power plant, a bank tower, a ship. These relatively small displays underscore the most basic lesson of color in quantity: that “one square centimeter of any blue is not as blue as a square meter of the same blue,” in the words of Henri Matisse, as cited by Yve-Alain Bois. They also raised the question of ideology, perhaps particularly relevant in the contemporary Venezuelan context given the political chasm between the government of Hugo Chávez and his opponents. In any case, the range of works proved the breadth and versatility of Cruz-Diez’ approach. Most of the public works were sited in Europe and Latin America; we can hope there will be more opportunities in the future to see them in the United States.

Benjamin Lima is assistant professor of art history at the University of Texas at Arlington.

project space

Austin-based artist Sean Ripple has been interested in the encryption and translation of information between the real and digital worlds. For this issue’s Artist’s Space, he created an original artwork based on his series of Encrypted Correspondences. To see more work by Sean Ripple, check out his installation Between Jobs, on view at Austin Museum of Art at Laguna Gloria until May 11.

Talking Through the Archive

I’ve recently been working on a project where I create ciphers so that I can send encrypted correspondences to various friends and acquaintances. The ciphers all use different informational contexts as source material to communicate in a scrambled fashion. The first cipher I created uses the Scarborough-Phillips Library at St. Edward’s University and has set the tone for subsequent ciphers. For that project, I selected 26 books from the library to correspond to 26 letters of the English alphabet. With my ciphers, the idea is the books, pop songs and soft copy books available on Google books will become the lexicon from which you pull words to communicate something silly or serious, in your own voice or not.

For Artist’s Space, inspired by a recent conversation I had with some friends about how teens don’t email any longer and how Facebook has jumped the shark for younger markets, I extended my encrypted correspondence project and created a cipher using ...might be good’s archive to riff on the notion of an invisible culture that uses text and cryptograms as their the primary means of communication—a new underground culture that employs data glut to get at something personal and private.

The corresponding photos are inspired by a recent business idea a friend of mine mentioned where individuals could pay to have their kid’s whereabouts documented: a social tracking service.

The first image in the slideshow is of text messages sent during the week of April 18th containing encrypted messages. To see the ...might be good cipher, click here.

I encourage you to post screenshot images of texts that have been encrypted using the ...mbg cipher to ...mbg’s Facebook wall.

Sean Ripple is an artist based in Austin, Texas.

...mbg recommends

Fusebox Festival
Through May 1

By Lee Webster

If you were one of the thousand people at Seaholm Power Plant in Austin on the opening night of Fusebox Festival 2011, you could feel it in the air. Amid the soar of the vaulted ceilings and the sound of a 100-string orchestra, there was a palpable sense that the little performing arts festival that could had arrived. Fusebox has grown into a meticulously curated two weeks of avant-garde and experimental performing arts events. It both puts Austin on the map as a destination for boundary-blurring art and brings the best new multimedia works to the stages of Austin.

Take a look at the smattering of offerings left on the last weekend of the festival, then get out there and take a chance on a new experience of art beyond the gallery walls.

The Bench
Ant Hampton & Glen Neath
Through May 1

The Bench facilitates the meeting of two strangers who become the audience and performers alike. Both wear headphones instructing them what to do and say, and the drama unfolds from there. Author Glen Neath and Ant Hampton, one half of the creative team Rotozaza who brought us the extremely well-received Etiquette in 2008, are masters of facilitating startlingly intimate, exhilarating, yet carefully controlled encounters that awaken the voyeur and performer in us all.

Biography of Physical Sensation
April 27 – April 30

Rubber Repertory, Biography of Physical Sensation.

This is the story of a life conveyed through all the pain, pleasure, awkwardness and oddness of disambiguated smells, sounds, sights and touches. Rubber Repertory distilled the life of one woman down to its essentials through hours of exhaustive research and interviews. Her biography is recreated nightly by a group of technicians who stage and execute each action upon individual audience members one by one. You might be fed milk and cookies one moment or hefted over a shoulder and carried around the room the next. No person’s experience will be the same, though all will leave with the slightly tingly sensation of being more alive to a world of perception beyond our thinking brains.

I’ve Never Been So Happy
Rude Mechs
April 28 - April 30

The Rude Mechs are back with the culminating presentation of a show that explodes the myth of the Wild West in a delightfully fun cultural mash-up of theater, pop culture and melodrama. The Rudes put Grand Ole Opry tunes and the bizarre myth and machismo of El Topo together in a blender, and what comes out is a big ol’ hee-haw that begs the audience to join in with a carnival of interactive art experiences and a rousing sing-a-long.

Low Lives 3
Jorge Rojas
April 29 - April 30

Low Lives presents live performance works transmitted via the Internet to over 20 locations internationally. It’s an exciting prospect for Austin to see and take part in an international dialogue on contemporary performance. The webcast from Austin will be part of Katelena Hernandez’s Comfort Sessions, a private and public performance project in which the artist serenades an audience of one or more with a set of lullabies. Hernandez promises to lull the audience to sleep in the folds of her flowing fleece dress as she sings for “crying babies, for insomniacs, the sick, the dying, for the lonely, for perverts, for the frightened, for those who need something but don’t know what,” and now, for an international audience.

Get Mad at Sin!
Andrew Dinwiddie
April 29 - April 30

Get Mad at Sin! is one performer’s quest to bring to life a sermon of the late, great Evangelical preacher Jimmy Swaggart. Faithful to a tee to an original recording of Swaggart in 1971, Dinwiddie promises to recreate the man himself with the same vim and vigor Swaggart used to bring thousands unto the Lord in his prime.

Lee Webster is an artist living and working in Austin, Texas.

Announcements: exhibitions

Austin Openings

Kara Braciale
SOFA Gallery
Opening Reception: May 1, 5-7pm

In The Repeat, Boston artist Kara Braciale presents a series of gouaches that mimic the weft and the weave of Ikat styled tapestries. Through the careful marking out of patterns and the repeating gesture of filling-in lines with color, Braciale combines the act of weaving with the act of mark making. And it is possible to approach these paintings the way one might approach a tapestry; that is, to see the “threading,” process and information, while also experiencing the pattern as a work created through the accumulation of time.

Naomi Shlinke
Gensler Architecture and Design and D Berman Gallery
Opening Reception: May 6, 5-7pm

Naomi Shlinke's images of “formation in progress” are equally legible from micro to macro levels. The relative passage of time is measured as some elements are abraded and washed down, while others are left whole and untouched. The beautiful liquidity of ink allows me to use the brush like a seismograph and my hand like a shovel. Momentary and unique in the way that process-based art can be, the resulting imagery is at once strange and familiar, hallucinatory and real. Space is limited for this show; please click here to learn how to reserve your ticket.

Sabra Booth, Margaret Craig, Daniel Kaplan, and Leigh Anne Lester
grayDUCK Gallery
Opening Reception: May 6, 7-9pm

Natural forms, genetic modification, flickering conversation and molecular structures are all explored in this organic show. Rock, Paper, Carbon features mixed media on paper from Sabra Booth, mixed media sculptures from Margaret Craig, paper mache sculptures from Daniel Kaplan and carbon drawings by Leigh Anne Lester.

Walker Pickering
B. Hollyman Gallery
Opening Reception: May 7, 6-8pm

Nearly West is a series Pickering has been working on for close to three years. Inspired by the open road and the temporary relocation it provides, these square-format photographs offer a thoughtful documentation of American places and things. With his smart use of color, Pickering captures rural roads, urban and natural landscapes, and traces of the people who live there in a way that transcends the banality of these everyday markers. The images are distinct in mood, each with a balancing peacefulness.

Austin on View

Apparent Weight: 2011 MFA Studio Art Exhibition
Vaulted and Arcade Galleries of the Visual Arts Center on UT Campus
Through May 14

Apparent weight is a term from physics that indicates an objects relative, perceived weight within a closed system. In an accelerating, ascending elevator, an individual senses a greater downward force than usual; in that moment, that person’s apparent weight has increased. Conversely, underwater, or in free fall, that same person perceives weightlessness. An object’s apparent weight is both quantifiable but shifting, concrete but infinitely variable. A vantage point outside of the system is required to take an accurate measurement of apparent weight. This is because apparent weight is relative to its context; in relationship to artistic production, it would encompass factors like cultural values, art historical frameworks and personal histories. The artists in this exhibition ask the viewer to consider the work’s apparent weight—that is, a weight that is both obviously present and not yet proven.

2011 MFA Design Exhibition
East Gallery of Visual Arts Center on UT Campus
Through May 14

This year’s MFA Design class developed practice-based research out of a curricular framework organized around the theme of mapping. As a design process, mapping encompasses the framing, digging, arraying, and presenting of information, and is a useful way for designers to stake out territory and negotiate space and complex problems. Mapping does not necessarily define the projects represented here, but it serves as an underlying process, reminding us that design is an activity inextricably tied to pragmatic, real-world problems, where solutions emerge by carefully surveying the situation and the materials at hand.

Jeff Stanley
Center Space Gallery of the Visual Arts Center on UT Campus
Through May 14

For the second 2011 Fade In series, the VAC presents a video reel especially created by M.F.A. candidate Jeff Stanley. Stanley will be presenting his work, Re_FX, and this edition of Fade In will only be on view from the window facing Trinity Street. Join us for the unveiling of this video exhibit outside the VAC, along Trinity Street, following the Opening Exhibition for 2011 Student Art and Design Exhibitions.

New Art in Austin: 15 to Watch
Austin Museum of Art
Through May 22

New Art in Austin: 15 to Watch is the fourth exhibition in a triennial showcase that spotlights emerging artists from Central Texas whose work stretches the boundaries of contemporary art. Accompanied by a full-color scholarly catalogue, the exhibition will bring cutting edge work in a variety of media to a broad audience.

Recovering Beauty: The 1990s in Buenos Aires
The Blanton Museum of Art
Through May 22

Organized by The Blanton, Recovering Beauty: The 1990s in Buenos Aires will be the first comprehensive presentation of art produced during the 1990s in Buenos Aires, a time of pivotal transformation in Argentina. The exhibition will focus on the work of artists identified as the “arte light” group, which rose to prominence during this decade.

The Sultans Played Creole
Champion
Through May 28

Champion is pleased to announce The Sultans Played Creole, a group exhibition organized by James Cope and featuring Kadar Brock, Branton Ellerbee, Nick Mathis, Cody Poole, Caris Reid, Amy Revier, and Marjorie Schwarz. The title references the Dire Straits song “Sultans of Swing”, which was released on their debut album in 1978 and deals with shifts and breakdowns of cultural borders, particularly the divide between North and South in the U.S.

Jack Strange
Arthouse
Through July 3

British artist Jack Strange makes conceptual works in a wide variety of media including sculpture, photography, video, works on paper, and performance. Characterized by a cheeky wit, his work is visually engaging and frequently causes the viewer to do a double take. Strange finds beauty in the mundane and humorously celebrates the banal by appropriating everyday items and subjecting them to simple manipulation.

Javier Tellez
Arthouse
Through July 31

Letter on the Blind, For the Use of Those Who See is an emotionally stirring film by Venezuelan-born, New York-based Javier Téllez whose work weaves fiction and documentary in an elegant investigation of marginalized populations (such as the disabled and mentally ill). Téllez's film, which premiered at the 2008 Whitney Biennial, is based on the ancient Indian parable, "The Blind Men and the Elephant."

Ely Kim
Arthouse
Through August 28

Ely Kim likes to dance. In Boombox, Kim dances in hallways, bathrooms, artists’ studios, living rooms, classrooms, garages, and many other locations. With musical selections ranging from ABBA to The Smiths, Status Quo to Le Tigre, and Busta Rhymes to Whitney Houston, Kim dances his way through 100 familiar pop songs, in 100 locations, shot in 100 days, and edited to under 10 minutes.

About Face: Portraiture as Subject
The Blanton Museum of Art
Through September 4

About Face features 35 portraits in diverse mediums from antiquity to today. Drawn mostly from The Blanton’s notable collection, along with several choice loaned objects, the exhibition includes works by artists known for their probing investigations of the genre, such as Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt van Rijn, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, John Singer Sargent, Diego Rivera, Sir Jacob Epstein, Antonio Berni, Alice Neel, Chuck Close, Robert Henri, Andy Warhol, Yasumasa Morimura, Charles Umlauf, Oscar Muñoz, and Kehinde Wiley.

Austin Closings

Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler
Lora Reynolds Gallery
Through May 7

Cinema, the subtleties of its components and its history form the core of Hubbard/Birchler’s artistic work. This exhibition will feature new photographs as well as the Texas premiere of Hubbard/Birchler’s most recent video installation titled Méliès. Set in the Chihuahua Desert of West Texas near the border town of Sierra Blanca, this video explores the cinematic residue of a specific location named Movie Mountain.

San Antonio on View

New Image Sculpture
McNay Art Museum
Through May 8

Organized by the McNay’s Chief Curator and Curator of Art after 1945, New Image Sculpture assembles works by emerging and mid-career artists who freely appropriate from art history, ethnographic artifacts, fashion, folk art, hobby crafts, popular culture, and the world of do-it-yourself. Included is Austin collected, Okay Mountain.

Jung Hee Mun
Sala Diaz
Through May 15

Mun is on a “quest to identify the constant processes within and about the self, and the mind’s struggle to rationalize and understand how to be a self.”

New Works 11:1
Artpace
Through May 22

E.V. Day's deconstructive style puts all clothing at risk, from women's undergarments to wedding gowns. Devon Dikeou seeks to "reiterate or re-enrich Conceptual models in their physical reality, often reinterpreting these models through an autobiographical twist." Kelly Richardson's computer-generated videos and photographic works serve to obscure the limits between fantasy and reality. Curated by Heather Pesant

San Antonio Closings

Joshua Bienko
Artpace
Through May 1

Joshua Bienko exposes the fetishistic nature of sports, music, and fashion through stylistically diverse drawings, paintings, photography, and video works. His diverse practice often references popular cultural icons such as contemporary artists, poster pinup girls, rap songs, and sports logos. Through this unique juxtaposition of imagery and object, he emphasizes the relationship between fame and desire with art stars and the fashion industry.

Gabriel Vormstein
Artpace
Through May 1

Gabriel Vormstein is interested in exploring the relationship between figuration and abstraction. Inspired by the work of Egon Schiele, he reexamines the romantic, emotionally charged gestures found in early Modernist painting. By redrawing figures found in art history, Vormstein captures the body as an abstract shape that can be filled with new choices of color and medium, such as the ground of newspapers, and more particularly, the mechanical text of the financial pages.

Michael Jay Smith
McNay Art Museum
Through May 1

To create Symmetry in Rhythm, Michael Jay Smith recorded the group Urban-15 at Luminaria, San Antonio’s arts night of March 13, 2010. By first shooting the elaborate performance, moving the camera to the beat of the music, and then modifying the footage digitally, Smith transformed color, light, and movement into a kaleidoscopic dream. Slight changes in the original footage, often result in dramatically different images. Smith’s work is inspired by the beauty of symmetry, referencing mandalas and stained glass rose windows found in cathedrals.

Houston Openings

Brad Troemel
The Joanna
Opening Reception: May 21 7-10pm

Brad Troemel's exhibit, PA, is a survey of surplus recognition or what he believes to be the most hateful comments of his detractors on the internet. To disrupt the false binary of positive or negative attention, Troemel proves their equality and offers a model of repossessed agency for those who are the subject of similar resentment. Through image appropriation, he reclaims the surplus of unfavorable judgments he had thus far publicly ignored. Think of these images’ relation to capitalism’s logic of valued scarcity. If the only thing more difficult than becoming a beloved Web 2.0 artist is to become reviled artist, there is no internet art as valuable as the objects Troemel exhibits here.

Houston on View

Kristin Musgnug
Inman Gallery
Through May 15

Kristin Musgnug's Unnatural Histories features oil paintings of flora. From the artists: "My paintings spring from an interest in the complex interactions between people and nature, including how our concept of nature shapes our actions towards the land."

Linda Post
Art Palace
Through May 14

Linda Post explores how perception and individual position can be examined in experiential video installations, sound works, media sculpture and photography. Wherever presents a group of discreet works that extend her exploration of the site-specific to the idea of the ideal exhibition space as a neutral non-site. The white cube is addressed as nowhere or wherever. A choreography of the everyday emerges as simple everyday actions are performed and systematized.

Jamal Cyrus
Bryan Miller Gallery
Through May 14

Rather than being an exhibition of discrete, contained works, DKONKR is more like an elaborately prepared puzzle with clues to the artist's intent spanning eras and epochs. From Egypt's first dynasty to early American slave culture and on to the civil rights era and modern Egypt, Cyrus masterfully finesses the societal and spiritual implications of materials, techniques and images. Placed in relation to one another, these elements suggest intriguing trans-dimensional and supra-historical narratives and connections.

Mary Temple
Rice Gallery
Through May 25

Mary Temple paints directly on walls and floors creating installations that not only trick the eye, but also trigger memory by freezing a fleeting moment of passing time. Upon encountering a Mary Temple light installation, it is common for viewers to stick out a hand in an attempt to block the light they perceive as falling on the wall before them. Yet after a few moments of hand waving, they realize that the shards and patches of light they see are, in fact, painted on the wall. This moment of confusion is what Mary Temple calls the “not-knowing,” that moment when memory collides with experience causing the viewer to question what is real. Temple has refined her trompe l’oeil painting technique to convince the eye, mind, and body that somehow light has been captured, and so it has, in hundreds of thousands of tiny brushstrokes

Kim Anno
Skydive
Through May 28

Kim Anno states about her recent work, “Climate change and the rising level of the oceans, and the issue of water in itself has become a central focus in my work. I am performing hydrodynamic experiments in labs, tanks, creeks, rivers, oceans, and various other bodies of water.” Anno includes video footage from a recent trip to Galveston in the exhibition.

Carmen Flores
Lawndale Art Center
Through June 4

Carmen Flores' drawings explore the proliferation of violence in the culture and its impact on the human psyche. The imagery in Flores' work is drawn from personal safety tutorials, police reports and press accounts of violence drawn in graphite and chalk.

Leigh Merril
Lawndale Art Center
Through June 4

Leigh Merrill's work is driven by an interest in regionalism and the cultural signifiers of particular places. She has photographed the places where she has lived, motivated by curiosity about the architecture that surrounds us and how it reflects larger ideas of beauty, class, romanticism and perfection.

Marc Bell and Jim Woodring
Lawndale Art Center
Through June 4

Some artists record the world, some interpret it, and some distort it. A few, like Jim Woodring and Marc Bell, create their own worlds. They represent a certain strain in modern comics-a world of fantasy influenced by childrens books, pre-war newspaper comic strips and illustration, and contemporary art.

Hillerbrand+Magsamen, Daniel McFarlane, & Anthony Thompson Shumate
Lawndale Art Center
Through June 4

This exhibition features residents for the fifth year of the Lawndale Artist Studio Program, Hillerbrand+Magsamen (Stephan Hillerbrand and Mary Magsamen), Daniel McFarlane and Anthony Thompson Shumate. The exhibit includes abstract paintings, video art, and installations.

Window into Houston
Blaffer Art Museum
Through June 22

Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston will debut a new exhibition series, Window into Houston, at 110 Milam Street in downtown Houston. This exhibit is dedicated to showcasing the work of Houston artists in a unique and highly public setting that allows for focused two-part installation in the windows of a historic building.

Houston Closings

Chad Hopper and Amanda Jones
Domy Books
Through May 5

In acrobatic acts of blind alchemy they mix wood whispers and plastic gossip. Animals take over abandoned office buildings, leading us to explore the mysteries lurking between pictures and words.

Miguel Angel Rojas
Sciardi Gallery
Through May 14

At the Edge of Scarcity pays homage to impoverished communities in Colombia, where residents live on the edge, often turning to drugs in the pursuit of an otherwise impossible future. This show includes text-based works on paper, one incorporating dollar bills and coca leaves that includes stylized lists of famous consumers (Sid Vicious) and dealers (La Perra, Machoviejo). Another highlights the incessant desire for “more, more, more.” Perhaps the most moving work in the exhibition is “Mirando la Flor” (Watching the Flower; 1997-2007), a decade-long project that includes a harrowing and intimate video showing a man wired on drugs and dying, who Rojas equates with the Dying Gaul, a masterpiece of Roman antiquity.

Dallas Openings

Gun and Knife Show
Central Trak
Opening Reception: April 30, 6-8pm

Co-curated by Heyd Fontenot and Julie Webb, this exhibit encompasses 40 different artists who have worked in the subject of guns and knives. This not only shows and investigates the public accessibility of gun and knives, but makes this exhibit accessible to all of the public through these subjects. The existence of guns and knives is psychologically provocative. Weapons were not a part of the natural world; humans desired them and brought them into being. Their specifically intended use is to destroy the biological material and tissues of which we are composed.

Campbell Bosworth
Webb Gallery
Opening Reception: May 1

Campbell Bosworth uses his skills of woodworking and his formal training in painting to create narratives of life on the border of Texas. In this show there are two (Gun Bars) which demonstrate a melding and shows an incredible narrative through their over the top work. The highly carved and guild revolver bar spins to hold 6 tequila bottles is covered in carved detail of the subject and their larger than life expolits. This is only one of the incredible pieces in this show-- from carved tequila bottles, drug lord portraits, huge carved Narco Bling, rocket launcher, and a trigger finger-- all work together to tell the story of the cartel’s accumulation of status and power

The Illustrations for Our Afflicted Powers
Free Museum of Dallas
Opening Reception: April 29, 5-7pm

The artists participating in this project include Matt Cusick, Tuba Öztekin Köymen, Michelle Mackey, Anna Membrino, Savannah Niles, Ahn-Thuy Nguyen, Laray Polk, Tiana Wages and Sally Warren. Their artworks are inspired by passages selected from either of two publications: Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, or Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. These publications present powerful critiques of US society and foreign policy in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001. Through imaginative and often oblique responses to these books, these Texas artists demonstrate the many ways in which image and text interact above and beyond a conventional understanding of illustration.

Dallas on View

Jay Shinn
Marty Walker Gallery
Through May 7

In his new exhibition, Centerfolds, Jay Shinn deftly manipulates space, light, shadow, and shape with sharp minimalist work that actively alters viewer's perceptions by continuously shifting between two-and-three-dimensional planes. His arrangements imply movement and balance as they evoke pathways, thresholds, and mandala-like plans while also inviting the viewer to understand each form by approaching it from different positions.

Brian Fridge
Dunn and Brown Contemporary
Through May 14

For this exhibition Fridge presents a site-specific video projection in the project gallery. This video, Sequence 36.1, is part of a new catalog of silent, black and white videos. The photographic prints in the exhibitions are stills taken from the videos

Noah Barker
Free Museum of Dallas
Through May 27

End Mart is the nonproductive marker place. We all know how hard it is sometimes to let go of purpose, of function, of thought, unless of course the release itself is prepackages and preconceived. End Mart offers consumers the means by which to achieve complete, pure, unproduction without the hassle and with a complimentary bag upon purchase. For the more tentative buyer, weary of unencumbered freedom, introductory products are also available.

XXI: Conflicts in a New Century
Oak Cliff Cultural Center
Through June 3

Co-curated by Charles Dee Mitchell and Cynthia Mulcahy, this exhibit examines conflicts in the first decade of the 21st century including wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Congo, and Ivory Coast through photographs by many of the most notable artists, documentary photographers and photojournalists working today.

Juergen Teller
Dallas Contemporary
Through August 21

The photographs in Man with Banana, a large-scale exhibition, will survey Juergen Teller’s oeuvre and include many new and unseen works from the last year. Blurring the distinction between his commercial and non-commercial work, Teller takes a story-telling approach to this exhibition by combining images of family and friends interwoven with known and at times abstract metaphors.

Jim Lambie
Goss Michael Foundation
Through September 3

Jim Lambie has discussed the relationship between the tape works and the solid objects they incorporate in terms of a jazz ensemble, comparing the tape to the “baseline played by the drums and bass” and the pieces placed on top to the “guitar and vocals.

Announcements: events

Austin Events

Low Lives 3
Co-Lab
April 29, 7-10pm and April 30, 2-5pm

Hybrid Arts Summit 2011
Art Alliance Austin
April 30, 9:30am-5pm

Hybrid Arts Summit 2011 is the culmination of a month-long series of happenings and the convergence of AMOA's New Art in Austin: 15 to Watch, Art Week Austin, the Fusebox Festival and the Texas Biennial. Featuring a dynamic mix of keynote speakers and in-depth panels, the symposium offers a compelling platform of ideas and vigorous discussion around cross-disciplinary creative practice, specifically as it relates to community building through collaboration, art criticism, and technology in practice.

Five x Seven Art SPLURGE
Arthouse
May 12, 7:30-10:00pm
Admission: $150

Five x Seven is an annual art sale and exhibition benefiting Arthouse exhibitions and educational programs. Hundreds of emerging and recognized contemporary artists with strong ties to Arthouse or Texas create unique works of art on identical 5 x 7-inch boards. Five x Seven artwork may be purchased for $150 each(or $100 for Arthouse Members. With over 1,000 works to choose from, this is a fantastic way to build or add to your art collection. All pieces are displayed anonymously - only when you purchase a work of art will you discover who created it.

Five x Seven: ART SOCIAL
Arthouse
May 13, 8-11pm
Admission: $30 for general admission, $125 for 5-pack of individual tickets

Night two of the annual Five x Seven exhibition will continue the sale of original works with an Art SOCIAL. Music by The Black and White Years, food by Frank and Pie Fixes Everything, and drinks by Trumer Pils will be on hand. Admission is free to all participating artists.

Houston Events

Low Lives 3
Diverseworks
April 29, 7-10pm and April 30, 2-5pm

Now entering its third year, Low Lives is an international exhibition of live performance-based works transmitted via the internet and projected in real time at multiple venues throughout the U.S. and around the world. Low Lives examines works that critically investigate, challenge, and extend the potential of performance practice presented live through online broadcasting networks. These networks provide a new alternative and efficient medium for presenting, viewing, and archiving performances. Low Lives is not simply about the presentation of performative gestures at a particular place and time but also about the transmission of these moments and what gets lost, conveyed, blurred, and reconfigured when utilizing this medium. Low Lives embraces works with a lo-fi aesthetic such as low pixel image and sound quality, contributing to a raw, DIY and sometimes voyeuristic quality in the transmission and reception of the work

The Future is Now: A Skydive Fundraiser
Skydive
May 7, 6-9pm
Admission: #20

Bringing 20 performance artists together in one space celebrating many versions of the future; this will be a night to remember at the home of Skydive. Projected on the front of the house will be a newly edited version of the original 1920's film Metropolis. As you stroll throughout the house, robots will serve you drinks and hor d'oeuvres, and join us in the "common room" for an amazing silent auction featuring work by emerging and established local and non-local artists.  Your participation will directly support artists visiting and making shows in Houston!

Dallas Events

Wish! Art Auction
Dallas Contemporary
May 12, 7-10pm and May 14, 7-11pm

Tickets are running out for Wish!, Dallas Contemporary's annual art action and premier venue for discovering new artists. Get tickets while they're available.

Shoot Your Mouth Off Panel
University of Texas at Dallas
May 21, 4-6

Margaret Meehan, Noah Simblist, and Julie Webb among others will speak on this panel in honor of CentralTrak's current Gun and Knife exhibit.

Announcements: opportunities

Call for Entries

Gift of Gift of 2011
Gift of Gift of
Deadline: May 27

Each year Gift of Gift of organizes an event in which photographs are exhibited for consideration for collective purchase, to be offered as a donation to a major collecting institution. If you are an emerging photographer and do not yet have work in a major museum collection, this is your chance! Submit your work for the chance to become part of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston's permanent collection. Last year Gift of Gift of was able to purchase 70% of the works exhibited.

Funkhaus Art Prize 2011
Funkhaus Berlin
Deadline: May 20

Funkhaus Nalepastrasse is proud to announce a new art prize for sculpture taking place in Berlin in June 2011. The prize in the sum of 4,000 Euros will be given to one artist. For more information on how to apply, click here.

2012: Transgressions and Extremes
New Art Center
Deadline: September 1

2012: Transgressions and Extremes is conceived as a multimedia exhibition of contemporary artists exploring various aspects of the popular mythology related to the cultural and existential significance of the year 2012. The exhibition will be accompanied by an extensive promotional and marketing campaign in print and online media. Up to 15 artists will be selected for participation in the exhibition. All participating artists and All applicants will be listed on our website with their personal web links. For more information, please click here.

The Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program

The Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program supports writers whose work addresses contemporary visual art through grants issued directly to individual authors. The first program of its kind, it was founded in recognition of both the financially precarious situation of arts writers and their indispensable contribution to a vital artistic culture. The Arts Writers Grant Program issues awards for articles, blogs, books, new and alternative media, and short-form writing. It aims to support the broad spectrum of writing on contemporary visual art, from general-audience criticism to academic scholarship. For more information, please click here.

Call for Papers

Art&Education's Papers Prize: No Rules–Negotiating Art and Deregulation
Art&Education
Deadline: May 25

In support of young scholars conducting innovative research in contemporary art, Art&Education is pleased to announce a Call for Papers for its inaugural Papers Prize, which includes a research sum of $2,000 and the opportunity to present a paper at a conference, organized by Artforum and e-flux co-sponsored by Society of Contemporary Art Historians, on the subject of the deregulation in art practice and history. For more information, click here.

Call for Artists

Lawndale Art Studio Program
Lawndale Artist Studio Program
Deadline: May 16

The Lawndale Artist Studio Program is part of Lawndale’s ongoing commitment to support the creation of contemporary art by Gulf Coast area artists.

Call for Arts Writers

Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program
The Creative Capital
Deadline: June 8

Call for Residencies

Many Mini
Skydive
Deadline: June 10

Many Mini Residency is a one-week residency program operated in a one-room residency that is open to applicants from all disciplines (art and non-art alike) and encourages participants to customize their residency experience. There is no minimum time-limit for a stay at the residency but the maximum stay allows use of the space for half a day. Participants provide documentation and a short statement about their time spent in the residency to serve as both a record and a resource displayed online as the final component of the project.

Grant Opportunities

Artpace Travel Grant
Artpace
Deadline: April 29

Awarded to area artists each spring, this grant fosters the growth and vision of an artist's career and encourages dialogue between local and international art communities. Grants support creative growth, including research or project-specific travel to visit an exhibition, collection, institution, or geographic location. To apply, click here and download the application.

Job Opportunities

Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art
The Blanton Museum of Art
Deadline: May 3

The Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art will work in concert with The Blanton curators in Latin American and European art to research, develop, present, manage and evaluate exhibition projects of varying scales using works in the permanent collection as well as loaned objects and new commissions. The Curator will oversee an outstanding permanent collection of approximately 7,000 works of art, including prints and drawings, paintings, sculpture, installation, photo- and media-based works. He or she will research and interpret works in the collection and make recommendations for acquisitions to further develop museum holdings in this area. The Curator will recruit and manage loan exhibitions of modern and contemporary art and will work with colleagues in the field to develop co-produced exhibition projects and/or exhibition tours. The Curator will work collaboratively with curators, educators, and designers in the creation of program content. She or he will work with the museum's development and marketing staff, the Director, and Deputy Director's office to expand audiences and support for the collection and for all museum programs. For more details on how to apply, click here.

Curator of European Art
The Blanton Museum of Art
Deadline: May 3

The Curator of European Art will work in concert with The Blanton's curators in Latin American and Modern and Contemporary art to research, develop, present, manage and evaluate exhibition projects of varying scales using works in the permanent collection as well as loaned objects. The Curator will oversee an outstanding permanent collection of approximately 8,100 works of art, primarily prints, drawings and paintings. He or she will research and interpret works in the collection for various museum publication formats and make recommendations for acquisitions to further develop museum holdings in this area. The Curator will recruit and manage loan exhibitions of European art and will work with colleagues in the field to develop co-produced exhibition projects and/or exhibition tours. The Curator will work collaboratively with curators, educators, and designers in the creation of program content. She or he will work with the museum's development and marketing staff, the Director, and Deputy Director?s office to expand audiences and support for the collection and for all museum programs. For more details on how to apply, click here.