Best June Art

Where to see art in Houston now: 9 intriguing new exhibits opening in June

Houston welcomes lots of fun new art shows this month, including Lawndale’s annual “Big Show.” The Asia Society invites people on a scavenger hunt, and Sawyer Yards welcomes art selfies. After a lull during campus renovations, the place for innovative and provocative art at the University of Houston, the Blaffer Art Museum, opens three new exhibitions. Meanwhile, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston travels into a beautiful, luxurious past and into a mind-bending AI future as it celebrates some new acquisitions.

“The Big Show” at Lawndale Art Center (now through August 2)
One of Houston's favorite annual shows opens this month, as Lawndale once more puts local artists in the spotlight. As is tradition, this group exhibition features new work by artists practicing within a 100-mile radius of Lawndale. This year’s expert juror is Dr. Phillip A. Townsend, curator of art at the University of Texas’ Art Galleries at Black Studies (AGBS). Townsend has selected 88 works by 77 artists from nearly a thousand entries.

Naming this 2025 Big Show “Between Lines and Faces,” Townsend chose art that "explores the intersection of three seemingly disparate elements: text, portraiture, and the mundane. When woven together, these themes reveal profound insights into the human condition and the society we inhabit.

“Be the Art: The Silos Selfie Experience” at Sawyer Yards (now through August 9)
Here’s one with art created for all the Instagram/TikTok influencers out there. The artists at the Silos have been prompted to display large-scale, nearly immersive works, as an invitation for people to photograph them alone or to take selfies with them. Whether created as a painting, drawing, print, sculpture, or mixed media, these works are camera ready and willing to share screen time with a visitor's face. Each artwork also features a statement from the artist, providing some insights into the inspirations behind their choices in media, color, composition, and narrative.

“a way to mend” at Blaffer Art Museum (now through September 27)
Art heals at this new group exhibition showcasing 19 Gulf Coast artists whose work explores recovery, health, and restoration in mental, physical, or spiritual forms. These pieces also find a balance between landscapes and abstraction images. Our region is also a commonality in the work, as the Blaffer preview description of the exhibition notes that these artists find the Gulf Coast as a place of “resilience, transformation, and repair.” Along with visual artworks, the exhibition also features companion essays and poems by five authors who composed written work especially for the exhibition.

“¡Cuidado!” at Blaffer Art Museum (now through September 27)
This video installation and sculpture exhibition from multidisciplinary artists X Arriaga Cuellar and Adán Vallecillo also contemplate life and death but with a sharp focus on healthcare workers, especially those from Latin America who came to the U.S. to act as caregivers for the elderly. “¡Cuidado!” combines a video installation of performance work, centering on migrant caregivers from Honduras, with audio and sculptural pieces that represent different modalities of care. Scheduled live performances will also engage with these sculptures. According to the artists, the exhibition serves as a tribute to the Honduran immigrants, including Vallecillo’s sister, Mabel, who have dedicated their lives to this dignified and essential caregiving.

“Saif Azzuz: Keet Hegehlpa’ (the water is rising)” at Blaffer Art Museum (now through December 20)
In his first museum exhibition, award-winning California artist Saif Azzuz brings together installations, paintings, and assemblage pieces that examine themes of privatization of land, water, and natural resources. Some of these works will juxtapose 19th century artifacts – like old Allen Brothers advertisements to sell land around Buffalo Bayou — with historical references to indigenous western Gulf Coast cultures such as the Karankawa and Akokisa peoples. The show will include additional artwork from Azzuz’s family members, including Lulu Thrower, Elizabeth Azzuz, Viola Azzuz, Moya Azzuz, and Colleen Colegrove, all embracing ecological messages.

“Diamonds That Fall from the Treetop” at SANMAN Studios (June 14-July 26)
Houston-born multidisciplinary artist and curator Robert Leroy Hodge is most known for his award-winning, layered collage work. But with this mini-retrospective of selected works straight from his studio, art lovers will get to experience never-before-seen paintings, sculptures, and even musical compositions by Hodge.

“Diamonds” marks the first collaboration between the artist and SANMAN and High Hope Studios, and it's intended to demonstrate a shared commitment to creative excellence, cultural memory, and community-building. With this significant collaboration in mind, SANMAN will also offer free programing around the exhibition rooted in Black joy, sound culture, and community connection.

“From India to the World: Textiles from the Parpia Collections" at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (June 22–September 14)
The exhibition will give visitors their first look at 67 of the 187 pieces the MFAH acquired from the Banoo and Jeevak Parpia Collection, considered one of the most significant holdings of Indian textiles in private hands outside of India. “From India to the World” will give museum visitors insight into the rich history of these silk, muslin, embroideries and vivid tie-dyes created and woven in India. The exhibition also explores the distinctions between textiles made for the Indian market and fabric exported all over the world.

“The Parpia textile collection is a pivotal addition to our collections,” said MFAH director Gary Tinterow. “Showcasing both trade and domestic textiles from India, it represents over 40 years of dedicated collecting by Banoo and Jeevak Parpia, who have assembled one of the foremost private collections of this material globally. The Parpias’ focus on singular works exemplifying traditional forms and techniques offers a comprehensive view of Indian textile history. With this acquisition, the MFAH collection now ranks among the top public Indian textile collections outside of India.”

“Memory Palace” at Asia Society (June 25-October 12)
Find the joy in discovery with this new exhibition of contemporary sculpture from Japanese artist Umico Niwa, whose work has been presented and celebrated in museums and galleries around the world. Resembling flower creatures or nymphs, the delicate Daphnes figures seem to be at play and invite visitors to imagine their own stories for the creations.

The Asia Society notes that “Memory Palace” draws on Japanese traditions of animism and ancestral reverence but resists easy categorization. Spread across the Asia Society space, the Daphnes call us to an art adventure, as we wander into this “Memory Palace” game of hide and seek.

“Anicka Yi: Karmic Debt” at Museum of Fine Arts (June 29–September 7)
Science, technology, and creativity meet in this exhibition at the MFAH. For the latest in the museum's series of immersive summer shows, Anicka Yi, a Seoul-born, New York-based art innovator, stretches the boundaries of art, science, and maybe even mortality in her work, taking visitors beyond time and space with two mind-expanding installations.

The first section will consist of five of Yi’s large scale, animatronic “Radiolaria” sculptures that resemble giant living cells. The sculptures will be installed so they seem to float within the gallery, as if it were inside a liquid environment. The second installation, the 16-minute video “Each Branch Of Coral Holds Up the Light Of the Moon” is the first work created by Yi using Emptiness, a software system/project created in collaboration with her studio and a team of engineers. Essentially, Emptiness is an AI algorithm trained on Yi’s work that might be capable of producing new Yi-style visionary video pieces even beyond her lifespan.

“Anicka Yi shows us that it is possible to use AI systems to express our most human concerns, as she invites viewers to consider our place in ever-evolving cycles of creation and change,” said MFAH director Gary Tinterow.

$\u200bThe Museum of Fine Arts Houston presents \u201cAnicka Yi: Karmic Debt\u201d$

Photo by Sun Shi

The Museum of Fine Arts Houston presents “Anicka Yi: Karmic Debt” (Anicka Yi / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of theartist and Gladstone Gallery).

visual-art museums openings

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"

visual-art museums galleries openings