July brings an eclectic range of art openings, from paintings of Houston’s hip-hop history to the art of geometry through the ages, to a photographic ode to Berlin.

Along with it being a great month to discover new photography and video art, July offers a chance to see exciting work at the Menil that ponders lives greatest mysteries. Plus, Asia Society unveils a pivotal, must-see new exhibit.

The 40th Center Annual at Houston Center for Photography (now through August 20)

Menil Collection Courtesy Photo

Nari Ward, Say Can You See featured in "Longing, Grief, and Spirituality: Art Since 1980" at the Menil Collection.

Formerly known as the “Juried Membership Exhibition,” this yearly members’ exhibition seeks to illuminate current themes, technologies, and practices in photography. Associate photography curator at the MFAH, Lisa Volpe jurors this year’s exhibition with an eye on works that take ordinary moments of life and turning them into powerful art.

“Unfettered by the banality of everyday pictures, the works on exhibit challenge histories, question social structures, probe memories, and remake reality. The broad array of approaches and styles of the work submitted is a testament to the talent of these artists and a tribute to HCP’s vital role in supporting an abundant art community,” describes Volpe.

“El Franco Lee II: Mid-Career Survey” at Houston Museum of African American Culture (now through September 2)

This the first solo museum exhibition of the Houston-based artist bring us into Lee’s painting style, which he describes as "Urban Mannerist Pop Art."

This collection — 30 works created over the past 16 years of the artist’s professional career — showcase Lee’s ability to balance the bizarre into vibrant narratives that reflect pieces of real Houston history. The paintings depict figures such as the boxer Jack Johnson, as well as other Black icons such as Michael Jackson, Jordan, Tupac, and JR Richards.

A highlight of the exhibition will be work chronicling Houston hip-hop lore, specifically Lee’s depictions of the late Houston rapper DJ Screw and his Screwed Up Click (SUC).

"Art Has Many Facets” at Menil Collection (now through September 10)

Taking its inspiration from "Art Has Many Facets," an exhibition curated by John and Dominique de Menil’s good friend Jermayne MacAgy at Houston’s University of St. Thomas in 1963, this 21st-century version also explores artists’ fascination with faceted geometric forms.

Staging a conversation between artworks from different times and places, all of which incorporate slanted planes or cube-like forms, the exhibition includes the art of ancient dice to cut crystals to Cubist canvases to African masks.

The objects arrayed on pedestals and shelves were included in MacAgy’s original display, while newly selected paintings are related to works by the same artists that she selected.

“Berlin: A Jewish Ode to the Metropolis” at Holocaust Museum Houston (now through September 10)

Featuring 27 photographs from noted artist Jason Langer, the exhibition is the result Langer’s remarkable artistic mission and a five-year reconciliation of the impressions of the Holocaust that were seeded in Langer as a 10-year-old living on a kibbutz in Israel.

Langer was able to undo the fearful impressions about Germany implanted in his mind as a child. He was able to see that Berlin is a city of dichotomies and that there are symbols of division and reunification everywhere. Langer lends a poetic sensibility to both classic views of Berlin as well as smaller, hidden places which often tell specific, individual stories.

“A Mysterious Cord” at Sawyer Yards (now through October 14)

This selection of works by the tenant artists of Spring Street Studios seeks to explore the ties the bind us.

For these artists, a mysterious chord gives art the potential to connect the viewer to the artist and to something deeper within themselves. Artists of all different mediums and painting styles connect the viewer with a more profound truth and understanding of the world as they know it.

The artist’s vulnerability, on full display, exposes the viewer to their own emotions and feelings as they view the art.

“Longing, Grief, and Spirituality: Art Since 1980” at Menil Collection (now through Summer 2024)

The Menil dives into the well of the human condition with this new exhibition of contemporary art from some of the greats of the last half century.

Featuring works created over the past 40 years, many of which are owned by the Menil, the museum’s newest display presents artists’ response to the precariousness of life through the expression of grief, spirituality, and longing.

Artworks include Kara Walker’s powerful, 40-foot-long silhouette work, Freedom Fighters for the Society of Forgotten Knowledge, Northern Domestic Scene, 2005; Andy Warhol’s expansive late painting, The Last Supper, 1985; Mel Chin’s monumental sculpture Our Strange Flower of Democracy, 2005, on special loan from the artist; and a major recent acquisition by Nari Ward, Say Can You See, 2021.

The display highlights myriad of artistic approaches to political issues of the past decades.

“Jordan Strafer: Trilogy” at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (July 28-November 26)

CAMH is calling this first solo museum exhibition of the New York-based video artists both perversely pleasurable and pleasurably perverse.

In her narrative videos, Strafer draws from both autobiography and a range of cultural sources to create what the artist refers to as “Mad Libs-like” collages of visual and textual references that include public speeches, psychoanalytic theory, film history, and literature.

The works weave a myriad of contemporary references from televised testimonies of Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford to the Wizard of Oz and her own personal stories. With both dolls and human actors depicting Strafer’s stories, the films emerge as a series of familial psychodramas turned horror films in which no one survives unscathed.

“Strafer’s films are an urgent reminder that artworks need not only offer a reparative version of the world, but can and should hold up a mirror to our basest and baddest of behaviors,” says Rebecca Matalon, CAMH senior curator.

“Artists on Site Series 4” at Asia Society (July 26-August 27)

This pivotal new exhibit at Asia Society was originally created in 2020 as an initiative to transform the Asia Society galleries into studio and project spaces for Houston-based artists.

Now, this fourth series gives space to this year’s selected artists Tatiana Escallón, Farima Fooladi, Naomi Kuo, and Alexis Pye to create while giving Houston art lovers a unique window on not just their work, but their artistic practice.

Columbian-born abstract artist Tatiana Escallón began her creative career as a designer and illustrator, but now painting has became her main language.

Artisti and UH professor Farima Fooladi’s paintings depict spaces using memory, compressing architecture and landscape from her upbringing in post-revolutionary Iran with those surrounding her as an adult after emigrating to the United States.

Houston-based Taiwanese American artist Naomi Kuo utilizes drawing, collage, textile-making, and various collaborative modes to make connections between social systems, material culture and individual experiences—particularly in peripheral spaces.

Alexis Pye explores the tradition of painting as a way to express the Black body outside of its social constructs, to evoke playfulness, wonder, and blackness, as well as the joys amidst adversity