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    Changing The City

    Arts Town: Mayor Parker touts new 5-year, $85 million cultural arts budget centered around hotel taxes

    Clifford Pugh
    Jan 30, 2014 | 1:02 pm

    Just about every arts leader in Houston gathered with elected officials on the stage of Zilkha Hall at the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts to tout the benefits of the city's burgeoning arts scene at the annual Elected Officials Reception for the Arts, hosted by the Houston Arts Alliance.

     

    Amid banners with the words, "Cultural tourists spend more and stay longer," "Houston has more than 500 cultural, visual and performing arts organizations," and "More Art," Mayor Annise Parker announced the implementation of a five-year cultural arts budget using revenue from the hotel occupancy tax.

     

    "Instead of doing it a year at a time, I wanted to give it five years of funding to get some stability," she said. "It's a time to think about where we want our arts community to be in the future. Is it about investing in more visual arts in the community? Is it about investing in arts education? It is about public facilities or is it about making sure our universities are turning out artists who are writing and performing and dancing here in Houston?"

     

     

      "It's a time to think about where we want our arts community to be in the future." 

     
     

    Houston City Council recently passed the budget which calls for $85 million to be spent on the arts over five years, assuming that hotel occupancy rates remain high in the booming Houston economy. The city receives 7 percent of the hotel occupancy tax with 1.3 percent going to the arts. So for every $100 hotel room, $7 goes to the city and of that amount, $1.35 goes to the arts.

     

    For the most recent fiscal year, arts groups received $14 million from the hotel occupancy tax, said Minnette Boesel, the mayor's assistant for cultural affairs.

     

    An additional unspecified amount of hotel occupancy tax funds (known as HOT funds) will be used to create a long-term plan for the arts in Houston. A committee of arts leaders, with a lot of community input, will spend up to two years creating the blueprint for Houston's cultural future.

     

    "The last one was done 20 years ago and the arts have expanded so much since then," Boesel said. "It's a whole new approach of how we fit in both regionally and globally."

     

    Cities — big and small — across the nation are devising plans to maximize arts funding. In 2012, Chicago published a comprehensive roadmap for the city's cultural and economic growth, identifying 200 proposed arts initiatives and 10 priorities for "the vision of culture in Chicago to be realized."

     

    Closer to home, the city of Sugar Land has created a Culture Arts Strategic Implementation Plan and Guide "to lay out a formal decision making process to assist in the prioritization of funding requests."

     

    At the arts reception, city controller Ron Green noted that more than 146,000 people are employed in the arts in the Houston area, more than the the Texas Medical Center by almost 50 percent. "That's a major economic impact on our community," he said.

     

    "We have been able to build the case for how important the arts are to our overall economy," Parker said.

     

    City Council members David Robinson, Jack Christie, Mike Laster, Dave Martin and Richard Nguyen, along with State Rep. Gene Wu mingled with the large group of arts leaders, including Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Director Gary Tinterow, The MATCH Board president Emily Todd, Texans for the Arts executive director Ann Graham, Contemporary Arts Museum director Bill Arning, new Asia Society of Texas director Bonna Kol, Alley Theatre managing director Dean Gladden and Houston Cinema Arts Society executive director Trish Rigdon.

     

    Also on hand were honorary Consul General of Austria Gerald Seidl, honorary Consul General of Colombia Miguel Rafael Lopez Mendez, Acting Consul General of Indonesia, Prasetyo Budhi and Houston poet laureate Gwendolyn Zepeda, who read a poem she had written for the occasion.

     

    Houston Arts Alliance chairman of the board Marc Melcher, HAA president and CEO Jonathan Glus and board members Philamena Baird, Shannon Buggs, Michael Cordúa, Laurette Cañizares, Cissy Segall Davis, Denise DuBard, John Guess, Jr., Andrew Huang, Suresh Raghavan, M. Kaye DeWalt, Fatima Mawji and Boesel welcomed the crowd.

     

    Other arts leaders included gallerists Barbara Davis and Nicole Longnecker, Houston Chamber Choir executive director Becky Tobin, DiverseWorks executive director Elizabeth Dunbar, Fresh Arts board chairman Harry McMahan, SWAMP executive director Mary Lampe, Houston Ballet executive director James Nelson, Art League executive director Michael Peranteau, River Oaks Chamber Orchestra executive James Rowland, Blaffer Art Museum director Claudia Schmuckli, Houston Metropolitan Dance executive director Michelle Smith, Musiqa executive director Joe Wilson, Houston Center for Contemporary Craft executive director Julie Farr, and Mercury artistic director Antoine Plante.

     

    From the business community there were Yellow Cab president Roman Martinez, whose company sponsored the reception, Bank of America’s David Ruiz and Van Ngo and Boeing’s Dayni Alba.

    Jason Fuller, from left, Elizabeth Dunbar and Gene Wu at the Houston Arts Alliance Reception for the Arts.

    Jason Fuller, from left, Elizabeth Dunbar and Gene Wu
      
    Courtesy photo
    Jason Fuller, from left, Elizabeth Dunbar and Gene Wu at the Houston Arts Alliance Reception for the Arts.
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    news/arts

    Best July Art

    Where to see art in Houston now: 9 fun new exhibits opening in July

    Tarra Gaines
    Jul 9, 2025 | 4:30 pm
    ​Artechouse presents "Blooming Worlds"
    Photo courtesy of Artechouse
    Artechouse presents "Blooming Worlds"

    Art blooms in our world class museums but also on our city streets this July. From exhibitions featuring traditional paintings and sculptures to high tech immersive and interactive shows, we’re weaving art into the best of summertime fun and dreaming up beautiful new artistic creations all over Houston.

    “Town Meeting 1978-2028” at Art League Houston (now through July 20)
    Pioneering Houston-based interdisciplinary artists Nick Vaughan and Jake Margolin continue their decades-long project to create new and sometimes monumental artworks in response to little-known pre-Stonewall queer histories. For this latest exhibition, the duo explore a more recent and influential piece of Houston history, “Town Meeting I,” the pivotal convening of 4,000 LGBTQIA+ Houstonians at the Astro Arena in 1978. For this show at Art League, they’ve used their “wind drawing” technique of stenciling unfixed charcoal powder on paper and blowing it away, leaving a ghost-image. Using archival images of “Town Meeting I” as the bases of their stenciling, the finished “wind drawings” highlight the ephemerality, beauty, and loss of queer histories. In addition to these new works, Vaughan and Margolin hope to inspire, facilitate, and develop programming in 2028 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of “Town Meeting 1.”

    “Fragmentos de un sueño que yo también soñé (Fragments of a Dream I Also Dreamed)" at Art League Houston (now through July 20)
    “Every house is a body, and every individual body is a house full of memories and hopes,” says award-winning Venezuela born, Chicago-based artist, Jeffly Gabriela Molina, of her artistic focus. Molina’s fragmented, layered, and figural compositions explore that idea of home and memories. Delving into memories and stories, these figurative compositions, depicting people and relationships, fluctuate between stories of the present, past, and future. Taken together, the works in “Fragmentos de un sueño” aim to visually capture the feelings of vulnerability, nostalgia, and hope embedded in the experience of many immigrants. Art League notes that Molina’s pieces emphasize optimism over hardship, specifically addressing the longing for a home that no longer exists while striving to create a new one.

    “Every Fiber of Their Bodies” at Art League Houston (now through July 20)
    Working with natural fibers such as linen, paper collage, and hand-spun paper yarn made from calligraphy paper and book pages, textile artist Lin Qiqing weaves stories ofhuman relationships, gender, immigration, and language. As the title hints, the labor-intensive weaving process brings thematic depth to the images of bodies depicted in the pieces. The woven pieces also make connections to the natural world, as when Lin crumples then smooths handmade mulberry paper to resemble human skin, or when she uses handwoven fiber to mimic the body’s movement. Lin process includes research and experimenting with natural materials to explore themes of the internal human struggle for existence and our interactions with the world around us.

    “Annual Juried Exhibition” at Archway Gallery (now through July 31)
    For the 17th year, the artist owned Archway Gallery celebrates Houston artists with its juried exhibition of area artists who are not members of the space. This year’s exhibition is juried by Project Row Houses founder and MacArthur "genius" fellow, Rick Lowe. The acclaimed artist and social activist has selected work from over 35 area artists representing a diversity of medium and styles. Sales from the exhibition will go to Houston’s Brave Little Company, the theater company for Houston’s kids and their gown ups.

    “Foyer Installation: René Magritte” at Menil Collection (now through August 3)
    After a critically acclaimed trip to Australia, some of our favorite Belgian-born Houstonians are back home. Yes, the Magritte paintings have returned to the Menil Collection after taking a star turn in a monumental Magritte retrospective at Sydney’s Art Gallery of New South Wales. Now the Menil is celebrating their return with a special installation in the main building foyer. The Menil Collection owns the largest collection of work by René Magritte outside the artist’s native Belgium, and this display focuses on a core group of paintings from the 1950s and ’60s that truly represent Magritte’s status as a master creator of impossible painted worlds and an icon of the Surrealist movement. The paintings were purchased within a couple years of their making by the museum’s founders, John and Dominique de Menil. They represent and important part of 20th century art history, as the de Menils became Magritte’s biggest champions in the United States, helping to shape the artist’s reception and reputation in the postwar American art world. Stop by to welcome them home and slip into their enigmatic wonder.

    “Blooming Wonders” at Artechouse (now through September)
    The latest immersive exhibition from the Houston venue that brings art, science, and technology home together, Artechouse, lets the flowers blossom. The exhibition contains several dynamic installations, including “Timeless Butterflies,” a 270 degrees projection space that puts visitors in the middle of a butterfly cloud. Audiences journey with a flock of butterflies into an immense garden of flowers. Another immersive piece, “Infinite Blooms” takes audiences on a journey through an endless digital forest of cherry blossoms. The installation, “Akousmaflore et Lux” creates a very different type of garden where plants transform into musical instruments. “Clay Pillar” by Interactive Items / Vadim Mirgorodskii invites visitors to sculpt new forms using clay and a little help from an AI program. Note that “Blooming Wonders” runs simultaneously with the rock ‘n’ roll exhibition, “Amplified” with “Wonders” open during the daytime.

    “Weci | Koninut” at Avenida Houston (now through September 1)
    Houston is a place for big dreams, and this wondrous outdoor exhibition near George R. Brown Convention Center gives us the space to do so. Created by First Nations artists Julie-Christina Picher and Dave Jenniss, this interactive installation weaves together visual arts, Indigenous storytelling and sensory technologies in the form of six immense sculptural dreamcatchers. Each of these dreamcatchers are unique and represent one of the six seasons from the Atikamekw culture, an Indigenous people in Canada. Activated by people passing by, the dreamcatchers come to life with lights, sounds, and story, making the whole installation truly interactive. “Weci | Koninut” creators say that they want the installation to offer a total immersion experience for visitors, to create a moment where nature and dreams converge. Each piece offers a place for the public to slow down, sit, reflect, and yes, dream.

    New Murals in the East End and Midtown (ongoing)
    We could spend days viewing all the new murals painted across town, just in the last few years. But in honor of summer outdoor art viewing, we thought we’d spotlight two noteworthy new additions to our city-wide gallery of murals. As part of his major exhibition last spring at the CAMH, Vincent Valdez worked with San Antonio muralist Rubio and local students to create “Memoria, Memory.” Dedicated to his mother Theresa Santana Valdez (1947–2020), the vivid mural on historic Navigation Boulevard features her favorite bird and flower. Over in Midtown, check out “Stellar Illumination,” the latest installation in the city’s Big Walls Big Dreams mural series. Created by Robin Munro, also known as Dread, the seven stories high “Illumination” depicts a celestial scene of an astronaut gazing at Earth from space.

    “The Weight of Place” at Anya Tish Gallery (July 11-August 23)
    This group exhibition will explore themes of memory and the emotional, psychological, and physical landscapes memories can evoke. The will showcase three contemporary Texas-based female artists: Megan Harrison, Marisol Valencia, and Lillian Warren. While these artists work in different mediums–including large-scale paintings, mixed media works, and elegant porcelain sculptures–they are inspired by personal reflection and nature to create artworks that reflect on the ways we hold onto the past through sensory experience.

    “In Residence: 18th Edition” at Houston Center for Contemporary Craft (July 12-June 27, 2026)
    This annual exhibition celebrating the Center’s Artist Residency Program reaches it’s big 18th anniversary. Over the many years, the residency program has supported so many emerging, mid-career, and established artists working in all craft media. The program gives them a space for creative exploration, exchange, and collaboration with other artists, arts professionals, and the public. Now arts and craft lovers will get a chance to see the culmination of that work with this exhibition featuring pieces in fiber, clay, copper, and found objects by 2024-2025 resident artists Prerata Bradley, Stephanie Bursese, Atisha Fordyce, Nela Garzón, Gbenga Komolafe, Gabo Martinez, Preetika Rajgariah, Macon Reed, Jamie Sterling Pitt, Adam Whitney, and Dongyi Wu.

    “My Texas” at Our Texas Cultural Center (July 27-August 22)
    Award winning, Russian-born photographer, Anatoliy Kosterev, chronicles his personal exploration of Texas with photographs he took around the Lone Star State. The photos offer extraordinary views of Texas, from our dynamic cities to dramatic and sometimes lonesome landscapes. Kosterev’s photographic style blends science and technology with an artistic eye. He puts those two perspectives into practice when documenting all facets of life in Texas. Using HDR, drone imaging, macro photography, and traditional camera methods, he captures a diversity of subjects from quiet human moments to vast landscapes to delicate close-ups of insects and flowers.

    \u200bArtechouse presents "Blooming Worlds"
      

    Photo courtesy of Artechouse

    Artechouse presents "Blooming Worlds."

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