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    line up for this

    2 new must-see Houston art shows draw up immersive, powerful experiences

    Joel Luks
    Nov 3, 2021 | 10:19 am

    It was artist Paul Klee who said that a “drawing is simply a line going for a walk.” In his mischievous statement, he evokes both the simplicity of the practice and the possibilities of where it can take both the artist and the viewer.

    The process and the destination are of note, something that’s also central to The Menil Drawing Institute as it explores and studies modern and contemporary drawings to challenge conventions, definitions and assumptions of the medium's role in art and its opportunities and limitations—or lack thereof.

    For many, drawing is subservient to painting, a stepping stone providing the fundamentals that make other mediums possible. Like the major and minor scales in classical music. Like the squat that makes a plié possible.

    Two new exhibitions at the Menil Drawing Institute assemble works in which drawing holds its own as a medium with full expressive powers.

    “Draw Like a Machine: Pop Art, 1952-1975”
    It’s not hard to imagine that Andy Warhol wanted to “be a machine” and “machine-like” in how he made his art, a claim he made in a 1963 interview with Gene Swenson, New York editor of London-based magazine Art and Artists. Warhol’s rationale? Because “you do the same thing every time. You do it over and over again.”

    It’s this sentiment that gave focus to the exhibition Draw Like a Machine: Pop Art, 1952-1975, curated by Menil Drawing Institute assistant curator Kelly Montana. Thirty-some works trace the inclusion of mass production, pop culture, advertising and commercialism in fine art. The show also include pieces by Al Hense, Lee Lozano, Leon Polk Smith and Marjorie Strider.

    Montana explains that this artistic movement lessens the evidence of the hand in favor of mechanical production and reproduction processes in which the effects of machinery are part of the aesthetic. In Warhol’s Standing Man, circa 1952, there’s evidence of ink blotting that’s not meant as an accident. Rather, Warhol experiments with the outcome of the rendering mechanism as it becomes central to the accidental shading that ensues. The same focus is true in Cryssa’s The Stock Market, 1962, in which a newspaper typeset block of stock market data is repeated imperfectly to assemble a subtle, meditative pattern. The resultant gradients and variations come not from the artist’s hand directly onto the paper, but rather from objects meant to be used in commercial applications.

    What comes to mind about this machine-versus-man tussle is the extension of the thematic thread to today’s digital mediums. Think of Facebook’s manmade algorithm that incites unpredictable engagement and outcomes outside the grasp of software developers. Or the rise of synthetic intelligence, in which data is used to render simulations that can be indistinguishable from reality.

    This comparison is fitting when considering works of Roy Lichtenstein, who once posited that pop art “doesn't look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself.” His Steak of 1963 evokes mechanical printing. In fact, the artist produced this piece by placing a perforated screen onto the paper and applying graphite and crayon.

    “Spatial Awareness: Drawings from the Permanent Collection”
    Try to follow along the orthogonal lines in Barry Le Va’s Drawing Interruptions Blocked Structures #4 and you’ll find yourself in a conundrum of perspectives that bewilders analytical minds. While the structure clearly portrays a physical space with a nod to industrialism, line groupings assemble illusions of space amid space—amid space. The eye doesn’t know where to go. Or are these lines depicting motion?

    It’s hard to tell, but the exercise in trying to decide what’s what is a game with no beginning and no end. Yet somehow it’s still fun.

    The 1981 work that welcomes visitors into the exhibition Spatial Awareness, curated by the Menil Drawing Institute’s first pre-doctoral fellow, Saskia Verlaan, introduces a rich dialogue that scores drawing’s role in transforming a two-dimensional medium into a three-dimensional experience. The collection of 30 works—including art by Sam Gilliam, Dorothea Rockburne, Trisha Brown, Richard Tuttle and Liliana Porter—is in the spirit of the institute’s raison d'être.

    That’s fitting when considering that Le Va was primarily a sculptor and installation artist whose creative process often began with diagrams. He started with sketchbooks and moved into extremely large drawings that rivaled the scale of his installations. Upon his death in January, his tribute piece in New York Times compared them to scripts or musical scores.

    Adjacent to Le Va’s puzzle is the 2017 work Untitled by Houston artist and Project Row Houses founder Rick Lowe. Here, a bird’s eye view of Houston’s Third Ward in which the Project Row Houses buildings stand out and serve as a geometrical, schematic foundation for the outline of a game of dominos, one of Lowe’s favorite pastimes. Verlaan explains that the layering of physical space and communal space expands how we might consider its definition in terms of the activation within it. In this case, it’s implied.

    But in Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Two People (Due Persone), 1963-64, space isn’t implied, it’s delightfully dynamic. Two figures looking into a mirrored background place the visitor in the center of the work, also bringing the tangible surroundings into conversation with the piece. A reverse 20the century trompe-l'œil in which the two-dimensional work becomes three-dimensional? However you view it or play with it, it's a reminder not to take art too seriously.

    Or that you’re a work of art, too.

    ---

    “Draw Like a Machine: Pop Art, 1952-1975” and“Spatial Awareness: Drawings from the Permanent Collection”are on view at the Menil Drawing Institute through March 13, 2022. Admission is free.

    In Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Two People, the visitor partakes in the completing the work, also bringing the tangible surroundings into conversation with the piece.

    Menil Drawing Institute_mirror work
      
    Photo by Joel Luks
    In Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Two People, the visitor partakes in the completing the work, also bringing the tangible surroundings into conversation with the piece.
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    A Roman Holiday (Season)

    All roads lead to Houston museum's blockbuster exhibit of Imperial Rome

    Tarra Gaines
    Jun 11, 2025 | 3:15 pm
    ​The Museum of Fine Arts Houston presents "Art and Life in Imperial Rome: Trajan and His Times"
    Photo courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
    The Museum of Fine Arts Houston presents "Art and Life in Imperial Rome: Trajan and His Times" ("Statue of Trajan" Minturno, Italy, 2nd century, marble, National Archaeological Museum, Naples)

    Houston's holiday season will have a distinctly Roman feeling this year, as the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston is bringing the glory of the Gladiator era to Texas. On November 2, 2025 through January 25, 2026 the MFAH presents the monumental new exhibition “Art and Life in Imperial Rome: Trajan and His Times.”

    Featuring 160 objects of antiquity, including marble sculptures, frescoes, mosaics, delicate glass vessels, and exquisite bronze artifacts, the exhibition will transport visitors back in time to the Roman Empire during a flowering of art and architecture. The MFAH partnered with the Saint Louis Art Museum to organize the exhibition, which will showcase many pieces that have never been on view in the U.S.

    While Emperor Trajan might not be the most famous — or in some cases, most infamous — of the Roman emperors, he ruled between 98 and 117 C.E. during the empire’s height and was the second of the so-called “Five Good Emperors” of the Nerva-Antonine dynasty. He was also the first emperor born outside of present-day Italy, in what is now Andalusia, Spain. During his reign, he granted citizenship and rights to some peoples from conquered lands. The exhibition will explore how this time period expanded what it meant to be a Roman and how art reflected Rome’s power and promoted the empire’s values and ideals.

    \u200bThe Museum of Fine Arts Houston presents "Art and Life in Imperial Rome: Trajan and His Times"
      

    Photo courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

    The Museum of Fine Arts Houston presents "Art and Life in Imperial Rome: Trajan and His Times" ("Statue of Trajan" Minturno, Italy, 2nd century, marble, National Archaeological Museum, Naples)

    From statues of prominent men and women of the era, including Trajan, to vivid frescoes and furnishing from the villas of Pompeii, the objects in the exhibition will tell fascinating cultural and political stories of life in imperial Rome. To add context to the artworks and objects of antiquity, the MFAH will recreate a section of Trajan’s Column, which was a towering pillar with a spiraling narrative frieze, one of the few monumental sculptures to have survived the fall of Rome.

    “Art and Life in Imperial Rome: Trajan and His Times” brings such a wealth of objects to Houston thanks to unprecedented loans from the renowned antiquities collections of Italian museums including Museo Nazionale Romano, the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, the Parco Archeologico di Ostia, and the Musei Vaticani. It would would likely take months of travel across Italy to see this much art.

    “This is truly a rare opportunity for U.S. audiences to experience spectacular objects from this glorious era of the Roman Empire,” said Gary Tinterow, director and Margaret Alkek Williams chair of the MFAH, in a statement. “We are enormously grateful to our colleagues in Rome, Naples, and Vatican City for lending these treasures to us and broadening the appreciation of Italy’s cultural heritage.”

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