• Home
  • popular
  • EVENTS
  • submit-new-event
  • CHARITY GUIDE
  • Children
  • Education
  • Health
  • Veterans
  • Social Services
  • Arts + Culture
  • Animals
  • LGBTQ
  • New Charity
  • TRENDING NEWS
  • News
  • City Life
  • Entertainment
  • Sports
  • Home + Design
  • Travel
  • Real Estate
  • Restaurants + Bars
  • Arts
  • Society
  • Innovation
  • Fashion + Beauty
  • subscribe
  • about
  • series
  • Embracing Your Inner Cowboy
  • Green Living
  • Summer Fun
  • Real Estate Confidential
  • RX In the City
  • State of the Arts
  • Fall For Fashion
  • Cai's Odyssey
  • Comforts of Home
  • Good Eats
  • Holiday Gift Guide 2010
  • Holiday Gift Guide 2
  • Good Eats 2
  • HMNS Pirates
  • The Future of Houston
  • We Heart Hou 2
  • Music Inspires
  • True Grit
  • Hoops City
  • Green Living 2011
  • Cruizin for a Cure
  • Summer Fun 2011
  • Just Beat It
  • Real Estate 2011
  • Shelby on the Seine
  • Rx in the City 2011
  • Entrepreneur Video Series
  • Going Wild Zoo
  • State of the Arts 2011
  • Fall for Fashion 2011
  • Elaine Turner 2011
  • Comforts of Home 2011
  • King Tut
  • Chevy Girls
  • Good Eats 2011
  • Ready to Jingle
  • Houston at 175
  • The Love Month
  • Clifford on The Catwalk Htx
  • Let's Go Rodeo 2012
  • King's Harbor
  • FotoFest 2012
  • City Centre
  • Hidden Houston
  • Green Living 2012
  • Summer Fun 2012
  • Bookmark
  • 1987: The year that changed Houston
  • Best of Everything 2012
  • Real Estate 2012
  • Rx in the City 2012
  • Lost Pines Road Trip Houston
  • London Dreams
  • State of the Arts 2012
  • HTX Fall For Fashion 2012
  • HTX Good Eats 2012
  • HTX Contemporary Arts 2012
  • HCC 2012
  • Dine to Donate
  • Tasting Room
  • HTX Comforts of Home 2012
  • Charming Charlie
  • Asia Society
  • HTX Ready to Jingle 2012
  • HTX Mistletoe on the go
  • HTX Sun and Ski
  • HTX Cars in Lifestyle
  • HTX New Beginnings
  • HTX Wonderful Weddings
  • HTX Clifford on the Catwalk 2013
  • Zadok Sparkle into Spring
  • HTX Let's Go Rodeo 2013
  • HCC Passion for Fashion
  • BCAF 2013
  • HTX Best of 2013
  • HTX City Centre 2013
  • HTX Real Estate 2013
  • HTX France 2013
  • Driving in Style
  • HTX Island Time
  • HTX Super Season 2013
  • HTX Music Scene 2013
  • HTX Clifford on the Catwalk 2013 2
  • HTX Baker Institute
  • HTX Comforts of Home 2013
  • Mothers Day Gift Guide 2021 Houston
  • Staying Ahead of the Game
  • Wrangler Houston
  • First-time Homebuyers Guide Houston 2021
  • Visit Frisco Houston
  • promoted
  • eventdetail
  • Greystar Novel River Oaks
  • Thirdhome Go Houston
  • Dogfish Head Houston
  • LovBe Houston
  • Claire St Amant podcast Houston
  • The Listing Firm Houston
  • South Padre Houston
  • NextGen Real Estate Houston
  • Pioneer Houston
  • Collaborative for Children
  • Decorum
  • Bold Rock Cider
  • Nasher Houston
  • Houston Tastemaker Awards 2021
  • CityNorth
  • Urban Office
  • Villa Cotton
  • Luck Springs Houston
  • EightyTwo
  • Rectanglo.com
  • Silver Eagle Karbach
  • Mirador Group
  • Nirmanz
  • Bandera Houston
  • Milan Laser
  • Lafayette Travel
  • Highland Park Village Houston
  • Proximo Spirits
  • Douglas Elliman Harris Benson
  • Original ChopShop
  • Bordeaux Houston
  • Strike Marketing
  • Rice Village Gift Guide 2021
  • Downtown District
  • Broadstone Memorial Park
  • Gift Guide
  • Music Lane
  • Blue Circle Foods
  • Houston Tastemaker Awards 2022
  • True Rest
  • Lone Star Sports
  • Silver Eagle Hard Soda
  • Modelo recipes
  • Modelo Fighting Spirit
  • Athletic Brewing
  • Rodeo Houston
  • Silver Eagle Bud Light Next
  • Waco CVB
  • EnerGenie
  • HLSR Wine Committee
  • All Hands
  • El Paso
  • Avenida Houston
  • Visit Lubbock Houston
  • JW Marriott San Antonio
  • Silver Eagle Tupps
  • Space Center Houston
  • Central Market Houston
  • Boulevard Realty
  • Travel Texas Houston
  • Alliantgroup
  • Golf Live
  • DC Partners
  • Under the Influencer
  • Blossom Hotel
  • San Marcos Houston
  • Photo Essay: Holiday Gift Guide 2009
  • We Heart Hou
  • Walker House
  • HTX Good Eats 2013
  • HTX Ready to Jingle 2013
  • HTX Culture Motive
  • HTX Auto Awards
  • HTX Ski Magic
  • HTX Wonderful Weddings 2014
  • HTX Texas Traveler
  • HTX Cifford on the Catwalk 2014
  • HTX United Way 2014
  • HTX Up to Speed
  • HTX Rodeo 2014
  • HTX City Centre 2014
  • HTX Dos Equis
  • HTX Tastemakers 2014
  • HTX Reliant
  • HTX Houston Symphony
  • HTX Trailblazers
  • HTX_RealEstateConfidential_2014
  • HTX_IW_Marks_FashionSeries
  • HTX_Green_Street
  • Dating 101
  • HTX_Clifford_on_the_Catwalk_2014
  • FIVE CultureMap 5th Birthday Bash
  • HTX Clifford on the Catwalk 2014 TEST
  • HTX Texans
  • Bergner and Johnson
  • HTX Good Eats 2014
  • United Way 2014-15_Single Promoted Articles
  • Holiday Pop Up Shop Houston
  • Where to Eat Houston
  • Copious Row Single Promoted Articles
  • HTX Ready to Jingle 2014
  • htx woodford reserve manhattans
  • Zadok Swiss Watches
  • HTX Wonderful Weddings 2015
  • HTX Charity Challenge 2015
  • United Way Helpline Promoted Article
  • Boulevard Realty
  • Fusion Academy Promoted Article
  • Clifford on the Catwalk Fall 2015
  • United Way Book Power Promoted Article
  • Jameson HTX
  • Primavera 2015
  • Promenade Place
  • Hotel Galvez
  • Tremont House
  • HTX Tastemakers 2015
  • HTX Digital Graffiti/Alys Beach
  • MD Anderson Breast Cancer Promoted Article
  • HTX RealEstateConfidential 2015
  • HTX Vargos on the Lake
  • Omni Hotel HTX
  • Undies for Everyone
  • Reliant Bright Ideas Houston
  • 2015 Houston Stylemaker
  • HTX Renewable You
  • Urban Flats Builder
  • Urban Flats Builder
  • HTX New York Fashion Week spring 2016
  • Kyrie Massage
  • Red Bull Flying Bach
  • Hotze Health and Wellness
  • ReadFest 2015
  • Alzheimer's Promoted Article
  • Formula 1 Giveaway
  • Professional Skin Treatments by NuMe Express

    best april art

    9 vivid and eye-catching April events and openings no Houston art fan should miss

    Tarra Gaines
    Apr 13, 2023 | 1:16 pm

    Time to get revved up, Houston: we’ve got a zooming month of art ahead.

    From nature-inspired wilderness sculptures to a pioneering graphic novel, to museum basketball to photography taken with youthful eyes, April brings art in a multitude of unique and innovative forms.

    Fasten those seat belts and hit the road for art everywhere — including the streets themselves, as the world’s greatest Art Car Parade rolls into town once more.

    “CAMH Court” at Contemporary Arts Museum (now through April 27)

    Houston-based artist Trenton Doyle Hancock makes basketball into (even more) visual art with this interactive installation presented by a slam-dunk of a partnership between CAMH and adidas Basketball.

    Billed as the first-ever playable basketball court in an art museum, CAMH COURT conforms to the signature dimensions of CAMH’s Brown Foundation Gallery through canting a regulation-size court into a parallelogram. Emerging from Hancock’s hyper-imagination, the court is an immersive and uniquely spirited environment where players might dunk from the three-point line or lose themselves in the embrace of Hancock’s striped Bringback characters, which swarm from baseline to baseline.

    In addition to the custom court, Hancock has designed the backboards and basketballs, extending the cast of characters that populate his fantastical world into new dimensions.

    “Ada Trillo & the Sirkhane: Darkroom” at Houston Center for Photography (now through June 4)

    These two, parallel solo exhibitions put at the forefront the migration and immigration experience of family and children in geographic distant border countries: United States-Mexico-Central America and the Middle East.

    First-generation, Mexican-American photographer Trillo shares a series of photographs that make visible the migrant caravans traveling through Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico since 2020.

    Self-taught Syrian-born photograph Serbest Salih and founder of Sirkhane Darkroom, non-profit mobile darkroom and photo lab dedicated to underprivileged children from Syria, Turkey, and Iraq, exhibits some of Darkroom students’ analog photographs.

    "Ripple Effect” at Retrospect Coffee Bar (April 14)

    Gray Foy, Dimensions , c.1945 \u2013 46. Pencil on paper, 21 1/2 x 27 3/4 in. (54.6 x\n70.5 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Steve Martin, 2005. \u00a9\nEstate of Gray Foy. Photo: John Wronn
      
    John Wronn; Courtesy of the Menil Collection
    Gray Foy, Dimensions , c.1945 – 46. Pencil on paper, 21 1/2 x 27 3/4 in. (54.6 x 70.5 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Steve Martin, 2005. © Estate of Gray Foy. Photo: John Wronn

    This collective exhibition organized by local artist Anna Hazel will benefit the Buffalo Bayou Partnership. Works inspired by Buffalo Bayou from over 25 artists will be on display for one night only, and a percentage of sales from every piece sold will support BBP and their mission to create and steward welcoming parks, trails, and unique spaces along the city’s most significant natural waterway.

    Art Car Parade Weekend at various locations throughout Houston (April 13-16)

    As we note in our breakdown of events, the weekend keeps it artfully weird with the Main Street Drag April 13, designed to bring the parade to those people who might not be able to attend the parade, with artists bringing their Art Car Art Cars to schools, hospitals, nursing homes, developmental facilities and other locations.

    Friday brings the ultimate art party, the Legendary Art Car Ball at the Orange Show World Headquarters. Appropriately, Marilyn Oshman, Founder of the Orange Show Center for Visionary Art, will be this year’s grand marshal.

    On Saturday the 36th Annual Houston Art Car Parade brings us our full day of rolling folk art with every kind of animal, vegetable, mineral and political statement made artfully manifest in car form.

    Finally, cheer on your favorites at the Awards Ceremony on Sunday back at the Orange Show.

    “Eye on Houston: High School Documentary Photography” at Museum of Fine Arts (April 19-Spring 2024)

    Each spring, we get a peek at tomorrow’s artists today with this annual exhibition of student photography from area high schools that celebrates Houston’s diverse neighborhoods from the perspective of these budding artists who live here.

    In this 28th year, the exhibition features images by students representing eight high schools: Bellaire, Carnegie Vanguard, DeBakey, Eastwood Academy, Furr, Westbury, Westside, and Jack Yates.

    The students documented daily life in their respective communities, capturing moments that reflect their sense of self, their future, and their imminent transition into adulthood.

    “Hyperreal: Gray Foy” at Menil Drawing Institute (April 21-September 3)

    Enter the surrealistic and sometimes magical world of Gray Foy’s imaginative artwork in this first solo museum exhibition of the midcentury American, Dallas-born artist.

    Spanning the artist’s career from the 1940s to the 1970s, the exhibition traces Foy’s early Surrealism influences, which he described as “hyper-realism,” to his later inspiration in nature’s transitional and transformative states, culminating in works were he explored botanical and ecological subjects.

    The exhibition also celebrates two recent gifts of nearly 80 drawings to the Menil, a selection of which will be on display.

    “Gray Foy’s unusual talent caught the eye of some of the savviest drawings connoisseurs of the mid-20th century, but because Foy stopped working mid-career, he is not well remembered today. This exhibition is selected from recent gifts to the Menil Collection, now an important repository of Foy’s drawings,” describes Menil director, Rebecca Rabinow.

    “Si Lewen: The Parade” at Menil Drawing Institute (April 21-September 3)

    In a first for the U.S., the MDI brings together all 55 original drawings that the ground-breaking Polish-born American artist created for graphic novel, The Parade, about the never-ending cycle of war.

    The Parade speaks to cycles of war, the seductive glory and pomp, followed by soldier enlistment, community deprivation, devastating destruction, death, and heartbreak.

    Of the monumental work, MDI assistant curator Kelly Montana describes, “Si Lewen: The Parade evokes the destruction and despair surrounding World War II in Europe as authoritarian violence built and lives were lost. Inspired by the traditions of visual narrative by artists like Frans Masereel, Lewen created a deeply affecting set of works that carry a message as potent today as it was in the 1950s when the book was published.”

    “A Gift from the Bower” at Locke Surls Center for Art and Nature (April 22-23)

    Yes, we have to get outside the Loop — multiple loops — for this art in nature exhibition at Splendora Gardens in Cleveland, Texas. But with a partnership between DiverseWorks and the Locke Surls Center for Art and Nature (LSCAN), we expect it worth the drive.

    Originally conceived by artists James Surls and Charmaine Locke, this outdoor, multidisciplinary art exhibition lies within natural galleries formed by small clearings in the woods of Southeast Texas.

    The project is co-curated by Jack Massing and Xandra Eden to include newly commissioned works by fourteen artists and artist teams. The flora and fauna of the grounds of LSCAN take a central role in a number of the artists’ works, while others focus on community, the environment, and our relationships to nature and land.

    Look for art from renowned and up and coming artists including Leticia R. Bajuyo, Susan Budge and George Tobolowsky, John Calaway, Carlos Canul and Rachel Gardner, Lina Dib, Alton DuLaney, Ronald L. Jones, Sharon Kopriva, Charmaine Locke, Jack Massing, Sherry Owens and Art Shirer, Patrick Renner, Kaneem Smith, and James Surls.

    “Evita Tezeno: Out of Many” at Houston Museum of African American Culture (April 27-June 17)

    This new exhibition by the Texas-born collage artist showcases her technique that combines painting and collage.

    Tezeno’s tapestry-like works are carefully constructed from a variety of materials she brings together to depict everyday scenes from Black Life in America. Turning the phrase “Out of Many, One” and its Latin form E Pluribus Unum, which articulates the ideals of America’s Founding Fathers, the exhibition “Out of Many” aspire to those ideals, representing, with fondness, the days in the lives of everyday Black Americans.

    news/arts
    popular

    a very fine house

    Pioneering Houston Latino folkart gallery will close next year

    Tarra Gaines
    Jun 5, 2025 | 9:30 am
    ​Macario and Chrissie Ramirez.
    Photo by Agapito Sanchez
    Macario and Chrissie Ramirez.

    It’s the end of a cultural era as Chrissie Ramirez, owner of the Heights gallery and cultural space Casa Ramirez Folkart Gallery, announced that after 40 years she will close the 3,000-plus-square-foot space on W. 19th St. at the end of the current lease period in March 2026.

    \u200bMacario and Chrissie Ramirez.
      

    Photo by Agapito Sanchez

    Macario and Chrissie Ramirez.

    Filled with traditional art, especially paintings and sculptures, the space also showcased textiles, home accessories, religious objects, clothing, literature, and antiques. But it was the husband-and-wife owners, Macario and Chrissie Ramirez, who turned this Casa into a real home for the local Latino community, as well as a cultural landmark in Houston’s art landscape. Macario Ramirez founded Casa Ramirez in 1985 to honor his father, a folk artist and part-time jeweler who had his own business in San Antonio selling Mexican crafts. Over 40 years, Macario and Chrissie's longtime support for Latino artists along with the gallery's culturally rich programming and educational outreach helped to popularize Mexican and Latin American folk art and traditions.

    Chrissie Ramirez continued her husband’s mission after his death in 2020, keeping the gallery and his life’s work going. After five years running the business, she wants to travel and lead a less scheduled live. Houstonians won’t have to say goodbye just yet, as Ramirez says they will stay stay open and continue their annual holiday celebrations and programming.

    “Casa Ramirez will continue to operate as a retail establishment and offer the colorful mix of folk art, crafts, work by local artists and focus on the vibrant culture and traditions of Mexico, Latin American and the Southwest that we are so well known for and held in our hearts for so long,” Ramirez said in a statement.

    Throughout her remarks, Ramirez recalled her husband’s pioneering cultural and civil rights work in the community and his continuing legacy in Houston.

    Prominent Texas author, analyst, radio host, and Nuestra Palabra founder Tony Diaz spoke about the cultural reach Case Ramirez had over the years. Diaz especially credits Macario Ramirez and the gallery for helping to make Dia de los Muertos such an important Texas holiday and for helping to spread understanding of its celebrations in the U.S.

    “Today Day of the Dead is socially acceptable —it’s a movie by Disney. That was not always the case,” Diaz said. “There was a moment in our history when people would see the sugar skulls that are now beloved and they would think that it had something to do with ‘other things.’ You could come to Casa Ramirez, and the street would be full with our gente who knew that it was something beautiful to preserve. And before the rest of the nation caught on, Casa Ramirez was the home for that dear celebration of ours. ”

    Though she might be retiring, Ramirez says she will keep the name Casa Ramirez for future projects and activities in other locations. She also plans to continue her cultural work, with a focus on organizing “the collection of writings, documents, and artifacts” that are part of the Casa Ramirez and her family’s history with a goal to “archive them for their educational and historical value.”

    Ramirez emphasized that Casa Ramirez will remain open until March. She will spend this time “clearing, closing, and cleaning out” the gallery, but has plans for holiday and closeout sales before shuttering the space for good. It will still host traditional annual gatherings and programs for the rest of the year, including Hispanic Heritage Month in September, the Day of the Death holiday celebrations in October/November, and Christmas and New Years programming with special guests and music events in the works. Thankfully, that means Houstonians still have plenty of time to visit and share their own memories of this extraordinary Casa.

    casa ramirez folkart galleryclosingsthe-heightsvisual-art
    news/arts
    popular
    CULTUREMAP EMAILS ARE AWESOME
    Get Houston intel delivered daily.
    Loading...