Best July Art

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

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.

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Photo courtesy of Artechouse

Artechouse presents "Blooming Worlds."

museums openings visual-art

Best August Art

9 must-see art openings at Houston museums and galleries for August

DiverseWorks presents Jesus Benavente: "NuestroWorld"

Jesus Benavente, A Life A Home and A Horse Named Triste, 2021. Photo courtesy of the artist.

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As the summer sizzles on, Houstonians have the opportunity to contemplate some cool new art around the city. As some art institutions get ready for big fall blockbusters, this month's list highlights some intriguing gallery exhibitions and smaller shows that have popped up this month.

Along with showcases of ancient and contemporary textile work at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and Ismaili Center, art gets wild, teal, and tattooed over at Sawyer Yards. Plus, a new mural in Southwest Houston builds international bridges, and DiverseWorks invites art lovers to a new kind of amusement park.

"Between Flame, Stone, and Tide” at Mitochondria Gallery (now through August 29)
Though using very different practices and mediums, artists Alex Peter Idoko, Chika Idu, and Ejiro Fenegal create work that explores how elemental forces shape narratives of memory, identity, belonging, and environmental responsibility. Idoko uses a blowtorch on canvas and paper, exploring themes of destruction and renewal. Fenegal sculpts in marble, using the classic medium to preserve individual stories while affirming collective identity. Idu’s textured oil paintings depict children in aquatic landscapes to depict the relationship between vulnerable communities and threatened environments. When taken together, the exhibition helps viewers reflect on the enduring relationship between material, place, and the environments that sustain us.

"Beyond Skin Deep: Tattoo Artist Showcase” at Sawyer Yards (now through September 12)
Painter, tattoo artist, and exhibition curator Julian Solis wants to defy distinctions between fine art and folk art, making the case for body art as fine art. Solis has organized the exhibition around local tattoo artists’ works in a variety of media. These pieces done in oil, graphite, ink, and more prove their rightful placement on gallery walls, yet they also reveal the unique visions of the artists who usually create on a canvas of human bodies. Visitors to the exhibition will discover traditional flash paintings alongside portraits in oils, with both displaying the relationship tattooers have between their personal art practices and art made for clients

"Transformative Teal” at Sabine Street Studios (now through October 10)
Instead of organizing this group show around a theme or genre, this exhibition asks Sabine artists working in a variety of mediums — including painting, sculpture, photography, and digital media — to contemplate the color teal and its constant metamorphosis between blues and greens. The artists find meaning in the color in a myriad of ways, from intimate narratives of identity and healing to expansive meditations on nature and society. The organizers note that the works showcased reveal how the concept of transformation is at once an external phenomenon and an internal journey.

“WILD” at Sabine Street Studios (now through September 12)
For its biennial exhibitions the WiVLA (Women in Visual and Literary Arts) organization selects a theme and members form collaborative partnerships of two or three artists from different disciplines to create visual and written works in conversation with each other. This year’s “Wild” theme inspires the artists to create work untamed and unconfined. Whether literally or abstractly these artists will decide what wildness means to them, opening their art up to risk, intensity, and freedom.

Persia to Paisley: Global Luxury and the Kashmir Shawl at Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (now through November 29)
This special installation within the MFAH’s eminent Hossein Afshar Art of the Islamic Worlds Galleries examines how one piece of clothing, the Kashmir shawl, changed and shaped cultures of its time. Handwoven from pashm, the under hair of Himalayan goats, Kashmir shawls represented the height of luxury for hundreds of years across, Asia, Africa, and Europe. These shawls also became the ultimate piece of wearable art, as it took months of coordinated labor among expert designers, dyers, and weavers to create one piece.

The show will feature extraordinary Kashmir shawls and textiles from the early 17th century to today, including a later 19th century European Long Shawl, signed by Antony Berrus, director and designer of one of the most successful textile ateliers in Paris, an early 17th century Waist Sash from Mughal India, and depictions of Kashmir fashion in classic paintings.

“Painted Bridges” located at 9750 Bellaire Blvd. (ongoing)
Led by Houston’s own street art–and beyond–superstar GONZO247, six emerging Taiwanese artists and designers offer the city a seat at an international art table with this new mural in the Southwest Management District. The six artists are the inaugural cohort of Meridian Fellows from EpNex, an organization based in Taiwan with a network across the U.S. and Asia-Pacific, which has a mission to design programs that connect people across cultures.

With GONZO247 acting as mentor, the artists designed and painted a permanent public mural inspired by the theme of “The Space Between.” The final vision honors Houston’s connection with its oldest official sister city, Taipei, while also telling the story of a "shared feast,” with one empty seat at the center. The space left open holds a dual meaning: one of honoring those who have passed from our lives, while also reminding the viewer that "There is always a seat for you.” The astronaut at the table represents Taipei-born Houston astronaut Dr. Kjell Lindgren.

Jesus Benavente: "NeustroWorld" presented by DiverseWorks at 5601 B Navigation Blvd. (August 13-September 13)
For this DiverseWorks-commissioned project, Brooklyn-based, Texas-born artist Jesus Benavente uses humor to explore how cities such as Houston constructs its identity. Playing with images and ideas from Houston’s past, and our mythologizing of that past, Benavente eschews the traditional gallery show by creating a fictional visitors center for “NeustroWorld.” The title is a Spanglish phrase meaning "The World Is Ours,” and, of course, a spin on AstroWorld.

This “NeustroWorld” will merge concepts of visitors center, gift shops, and amusement parks into an immersive art space containing large scale banners, Tejano music paired with a custom neon video sculpture inspired by Selena’s rodeo performances, and a 13-foot blimp roaming through the gallery. Visitors can also pick up a free NuestroWorld Amusement Guide and purchase limited-edition merchandise, including custom screen-printed t-shirts, mugs, and stickers. That Amusement Guide will also serve as a kind of art map inviting “NeustroWorld” goers to explore other parts of the city, asking viewers to think about them in new ways, perhaps even as adventure rides in the amusement park we call Houston.

“Imagined Ancestors” at the MFAH Glassell School of Art (August 15-October 4)
This exhibition highlights the work of Patrick Palmer, dean of the Glassell School. With both paintings and sculptures, Palmer depicts the generations of people who shaped his life in both profound and small ways. The pieces are inspired by “the impossible idea” that the art can portray a single moment. Palmer investigates quiet moments to better understand how the past and present are forever connected.

“Article” at Ismaili Center (August 15-January 10)
The Ismaili Center continues to champion local artists with this solo show from textile-based works by Houston artist Gabriel Martinez. Using garments collected from the streets of the city as his medium, Martinez’s pieces ask viewers to think about how material circulates and the different values people place upon everyday objects. The title work of the exhibition is a 30-foot wall-sized composition sewn entirely by hand without assistants or machinery.

While visiting the Center, be sure to take time to find and marvel at the new commissioned and site-specific installation “No. 1573 Reflectors” by acclaimed Bangladeshi-British artist Rana Begum that the Center has just added to its permanent collection. Installed in the east atrium, the 20 feet high pink-and-white reflective piece explores the nature of the infinite.

Jesus Benavente, A Life A Home and A Horse Named Triste, 2021. Photo courtesy of the artist.

DiverseWorks presents Jesus Benavente: "NeustroWorld"

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