Sizzling days means it’s time to head indoors for some cool new summer art. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston presents some blockbuster touring exhibitions, while the Blaffer maps out new contemporary art and Lawndale goes big with local and regional artists. The new Post art space launches us into the stars. Meanwhile galleries and museums across the city celebrate the art of printing.

“What is a Ward?” at Sabine Street Studios (now through July 14)
The resident artists of Sabine Street at Sawyer Yards, which is located in Houston’s First Ward, were asked this exhibition title question, along with questions about how home and location inspire and influence their art. The works in the exhibition wrestle with these questions along with ideas of neighborhood identity, especially when the neighborhood is made up of people with a diversity of backgrounds.

“Dual Perspectives: Artist and Audience” at Spring Street Studios (now through August 10)
This summer show of artworks from across the entire Sawyer Yards campus explores the dynamics of perspectives between artist and audience. Drawing inspiration from Ansel Adams' idea, "There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer,” the exhibition emphasizes the role of the viewer as an active participant in the art experience. Look for a spectrum of mediums, from traditional paintings and sculptures to contemporary digital works in the show with many pieces accompanied by the artist’s commentary on their creative process, intentions, or the emotional resonance they intended to convey.

“The Big Show” at Lawndale (now through August 17)
Lawndale’s annual juried summer show of local/regional artists turns 40 this year. While the Big Show doesn’t usually have a set theme, this year’s juror Dr. Laura Augusta, an award winning Texas curator and writer, stated that some of the 140 works do engage in “unexpected conversations” across the exhibition, including ones of environmental anxieties, loss and remembrance, and “whimsy and colorful playtime.” But no matter what trends and themes crop up each year, the Big Show always brings us a reminder of the breadth and wealth of Houston artistic creativity.

“As you visit The Big Show, I hope you intuit the depths of Houston’s rich secrets, the shadowy corners of its abundant strip malls, the muddy trails left behind in its cycles of flood and fever, the ways in which its peoples wander intrepidly through the city’s bustle and sprawl,” Augusta states.

“Cian Dayrit: Liberties Were Taken” at Blaffer Museum (now through August 18)
This first solo museum exhibition in the United States of works by the acclaimed Manila-based artist will showcase Dayrit’s use of written text, graphs, and symbols to create cartographic artwork. In this unique form of artistic map making, Dayrit investigates notions of power and identity represented and reproduced in monuments, museums, and maps. The Blaffer describes the exhibition as bringing together site-specific installations, embroidered textiles, and elaborate paintings created over a decade of participatory actions and solidarity work in the Philippines and around the world. The artist positions land as a site of struggle through archival references, protest imagery, and grassroots counter-mapping.

“The Toy Canvas: Artists at Play” at Pearl Fincher Museum of Fine Arts (now through August 31)
Just in time for summer play comes this exhibition of toys as art and artful toys from the Northwest Houston museum. The exhibition features toys as contemporary art, toys in photography, LEGO brick builds, inflatables by FriendsWithYou, toys as sculpture, Madame Alexander dolls, and more. These engaging artworks invite visitors of all ages to reimagine how we play and the toys that ignite memories of our childhood. The exhibition explores the theme of play, with inventive works that address the childhood imagination in all of us.

“Raqib Shaw: Ballads of East and West” at Museum of Fine Arts (now through September 2)
Internationally acclaimed India-born, London-based artist Raqib Shaw unites Eastern and Western artistic tradition to create intrigue and monumental paintings depicting mythical settings. This traveling exhibition offers significant works from 2009 to 2023, including some paintings that took Shaw up to seven years to complete. Inserting himself into the fantastical worlds of his paints, Shaw considers them to be a type of visual diary and in comments about his work has described the paintings as both a way of dealing with our world and a way to escape into another world of his own making.

“Raqib Shaw’s universe is revealed through the memory of childhood experience in the extraordinarily beautiful Valley of Kashmir, the tragic history of modern Kashmir, and his knowledge and appreciation of the history of art both Western and the Eastern,” MFAH director Gary Tinterow said in a statement.

“PrintHouston 2024” across Houston (now through the summer)
Galleries and museums across Houston will present exhibitions and programming throughout the summer for the ninth PrintHouston. This biennial art event celebrates original prints, the artists who create them, and the people who collect them. Houston-area galleries, museums, institutions, and alternative spaces are scheduled to showcase the diversity of printmaking art forms with exhibitions, artist talks, workshops, and more. Many galleries across the region will host special print exhibitions for local and nationally renowned artists while organizations such as Burning Bones Press will offer workshops and demonstrations. Look also for several lectures and talks on the art of printing presented by the Museum of Fine Arts and the Menil Collection.

“Solar Dust" at POST Houston's Art Club (now through October)
The inaugural immersive installation presented in the Post’s new high tech art space, Art Club, is this intersection of music, visual arts and technology. Created by Quiet Ensemble, an artistic collective specializing in large-scale light and sound installations and interactive works, “Solar Dust” takes viewers into the star strewn heavens as brilliant stars float in the air, suspended within a three-dimensional cloud-like structure that hovers above, emanating a glow reminiscent of light dust. Quiet Ensemble describe the experience as watching the interplay of vibrant colors and fluid movements as they create an otherworldly tableau, where light and sound intertwine in harmony.

“Thomas Demand: The Stutter of History” at Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (June 30–September 15)
The MFAH will be the only U.S museum presenting this landmark retrospective of the internationally celebrated artist who merges sculpture and photography together. Demand’s hyperrealistic photos seemingly depict the intricate minutia of historically important spaces and places like the Fukushima plant following the March 2011 nuclear disaster; a recount room in Florida during the 2000 American presidential election, or Bill Gates’s dorm room at Harvard. However, these photos actually document Demand’s paper and cardboard model sculptures of these places. After photographing the sculptures, Demand destroys them so only the photos remain.

“I am delighted that the Museum has been given the singular opportunity to show the extraordinary and challenging photographs that result from Demand's unsettling explorations of how photography both reveals and deceives, prompting visitors to question their perceptions and fundamental truths,” MFAH director Gary Tinterow said.

Courtesy of Raqib Shaw and White Cube

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston presents "Raqib Shaw: Ballads of East and West."