Best March Art

FotoFest, Bayou City Fest, and 9 more can't-miss Houston art happenings for March

March puts a spring in our step as we head out for several art walks both inside and outdoors. We’ve got lots of art festivals, spring shows, and here-and-gone special art events on our must-see list. From new outdoor sculptures in the Heights to a new art pop-up installation series at City Place to FotoFest at Sawyer Yards to one of Houston’s favorite art parties downtown, art is blossoming everywhere this month.

“Anthony Almendárez: Hello, My Name Is ____” from DiverseWorks (now through March 16)

Taking over the exhibition space at MATCH, this multi-channel video and sound installation draws upon survey questions related to employment and labor policies in the United States. As an artist and composer working with sound, video, photo and live performances, Almendárez’s work explores different modes of storytelling. Like much of his work, “Hello” confronts audiences with the nature of identity and how we construct it. This piece also explores the parallels and contradictions between predominantly accepted notions of work vs. artistic labor.

“hallowed be thy name” at Art League Houston (now through April 20)

This new exhibition of textiles, sculpture, and mixed media installation by Chicago-based artist Krista Chalkle takes the images and motifs from Gothic cathedrals and reimagines them as exaltations of queerness. The exhibition features work that emulates stained glass windows and church ritual fabric pieces using them the forms to recount stories of queer agency and liberation. As a whole, the show works to deconstruct the traditional hierarchical structure of the Church in order to emphasize principle tenets of community and fellowship.

“Visions via Riding High” at Art League Houston (now through April 20)

Creating paintings that deal with the relationship between cars and memory, the Detroit-born, Houston-based artist Alexis Pye’s work certainly resonate with both cities. Many of the works in the exhibition depict a real neighborhood in the east side of Detroit, but with painterly embellishment that take the images into the fantastic. ALH notes that in Pye’s art, the car becomes a moving exploration of Black culture within and outside of its marginalized constructs. The images challenge perceived ideas of Blackness that are constantly moving forward and becoming looser and abstract.

“FotoFest Biennial 2024: Critical Geography” at Silver Street Studios (now through April 21)

We always embark upon a journey when wandering through a new FotoFest exhibition, but this year theme’s takes that figurative idea and makes it literal and logistical as the Fest’s artists take a critical eye to geography in its myriad of forms, with a special focus on environmental issues. The exhibition highlights a range of unorthodox strategies these photographers use to construct new narratives around place and community while imagining alternative organizations of social space.

Periwinkle by The Color Condition Ribbon Cutting and Celebration

Photo courtesy of The Color Condition

City Place presents Periwinkle by The Color Condition.

“Our intent is that the 2024 Biennial, featuring both existing and newly commissioned works from local and international artists, will allow viewers to engage in important dialogues around the social dimensions of space and our shared planet,” says Steven Evans, Executive Director of FotoFest. “We look forward to once again celebrating Houston’s vibrant art and photo community while embracing these new perspectives around place-making, the image, and geography.”

The Art Car Museum (closing April 28)

As CultureMap reported the only-in-Houston, iconic museum dedicated to the art car is set to close next month. Don't miss a chance to take one last spin around the museum. The latest, and now likely last, of the special exhibitions the museum presented over the years is “Creative Era of Ann Harithas,” a showcase of the work of the museum’s co-founder. The exhibition stands as both a retrospective of Harithas's body of work as an artist and a tribute to the era of creativity ignited by Harithas. Featuring pieces from her extensive body of collage works from the 1980s to the 2010s, the exhibition also showcases her own art car creations and those she commissioned and collected.

“Periwinkle” by The Color Condition at City Place (now through June)

This month the north Houston mixed-use development City Place will unveil the first of a new series of Instaworthy pop-up art installations, “Periwinkle” by Dallas based installation creators, the Color Condition, a.k.a Sunny Sliger and Marianne Newsom. The creative collaborators use long streamers to reshape and add color to outdoor landscapes and interior spaces. The immersive and expansive installation blends vibrant colors, patterns, and movement to create fantastical realms reminiscent of Candyland, Peter Pan, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

"True North 2024" along Height Blvd. (now through December)

For the last decade, spring has given Houston art lovers the perfect reason to take a walk along the boulevard — Heights Blvd that is — for a look at what new contemporary sculptures have grown amid the tree-lined esplanade. From whimsical to topical, the works always stop traffic and give us reason to get out and take a slow stroll through the artwork. As always, this artful treat is thanks to an all-volunteer team, along with the Houston Heights Association in cooperation with the City of Houston Parks and Recreation and Public Works Departments and the Houston Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs.

This year’s eight chosen Texas artists are Nela Garzón, Dion Laurent, Wyatt Little, Suzette Mouchaty and Patrick Renner, of Houston, and Clayton Hurt, Ricardo Paniagua and Art Shirer, of Dallas, with the installations going up throughout the month. Houston artist and biology professor (UH-Downtown) Mouchaty, who is also a UH-Downtown biology professor, has already erected "Monument to Sea Slugs,” inspired by marine nudibranchs, and Nela Garzón’s "Pre-Columbian Unlooted Bat or Vampire for the New World" has also been seen hanging in the 800 block area.

Samora Pinderhughes: "The Healing Project” at Eldorado Ballroom (March 21)

While we might only have one night to catch this performance artwork, several leading Houston art organization partnered to bring Pinderhughes’s work to Houston, including Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts, Project Row Houses, and Hobby Center for Public Affairs at the University of Houston. As a vocalist, pianist, artist, and filmmaker Pinderhughes creates large, multi-disciplinary projects, which invite audiences to examine what is visible and what is hidden in our daily lives, and how to make social change. “The Healing Project” is an examination of the prison industrial complex in the United States, amplifying the testimonials of those affected by incarceration, policing, violence, and detention through original music and film.

Yet, Pinderhughes also calls the work an empathetic experience for both artist, subjects and audiences, uniting those who have been silenced with storytellers to create deeply affecting art rooted in connectivity and compassion.

"Ruth Asawa Through Line" at Menil Drawing Institute (March 22-July 1)

Though perhaps more widely known for her sculpture artwork, the pioneering artist made drawing a lifetime practice that was the foundation of her creations. This retrospective of her works on paper features drawings, collages, watercolors, and sketchbooks alongside stamped prints, paperfolds, and copper-foil works, showing the breadth of Asawa’s innovative practice.

Organized thematically around Asawa’s creative period, influences, and medium, the exhibition touches on the complexity of Asawa’s work from the inspiration of origami, to her love of patterns and how her sculptures became an extension of her drawings.

“Ruth Asawa’s drawings are complex and rich, owing much to her striking creativity, her curiosity about the world around her, her cultural background as an American artist of Japanese descent, and her European-based artistic training in the Bauhaus tradition,” states Menil director, Rebecca Rabinow. “The Menil Collection and the Whitney Museum of American Art are honored to present this first retrospective survey of her drawings.”

Bayou City Art Festival Spring Downtown Art Festival at Sam Houston Park (March 23-24)

If it’s March, it’s time to head downtown for one of our favorite outdoor art seeing and buying events. This year the Festival has gathered more than 250 artists from around the country, representing 19 different disciplines, to showcase their art. The featured artist for the Spring Festival is Karina Llergo, a mixed media artist from Chicago who strives to capture the dynamic energy of the human body and its soulful essence transforming figures into fluid entities, incorporating dance, air, and water to create an otherworldly likeness. Don’t miss an exhibition of student artwork composed of the top 30 finalists from the Middle School Art Competition.

Come for the art but stay for the food and entertainment, as the fest also features two entertainment stages, a food truck park, a craft beer and wine garden, additional live entertainment and beverage stations throughout the festival, an Active Imagination Zone, a VIP Hospitality Lounge, and more.

“Night Light” along the Buffalo Bayou East trails (April 6)

Yes, we’re putting this media art event on our calendar a little early, but we don’t want to miss this night of art light, as it only comes around once a year. Presented by Buffalo Bayou Partnership and the Aurora Picture Show, the evening will showcase four new, site-specific art installations located throughout Tony Marron Park with video works projected on surfaces along a half-mile stretch of waterfront trails. Look for abstract and experimental video and light artworks from celebrated Houston artists Ronald Llewellyn Jones, Violette Bule, and the duo of Nick Vaughan & Jake Margolin. These distinct pieces will engage with and animate infrastructure and site features, including the water itself. The evening will also feature the premiere of “HomeBayou,” a stop-motion short film about the Buffalo Bayou East area created by artist Ezra Wube in collaboration with East End and Fifth Ward residents.

Best September Theater

12 best plays, musicals, and ballets opening on Houston stages this month

Photo by Jeremy Daniel

Broadway at the Hobby Center presents The Sound of Music

As this summer’s Odyssey demonstrates, audiences seem ready for new versions of the classics. Houston theater and performing arts companies are giving an ovation to this trend as they begin their daring and dramatic fall seasons. Major award winners, literary masterpieces, and contemporary classics will ignite Houston stages this month from Romeo and Juliet to The Sound of Music to Manon. Houstonians looking for something more recent and edgy will want to see 21st century Pulitzer and Tony winners, plus a cool comedy or two.

Photo by Jeremy Daniel

Broadway at the Hobby Center presents The Sound of Music

Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties from Mildred’s Umbrella (September 3-19)
Five women with little in common but their first name, Betty, meet in this contemporary mad comedy from Jen Silverman. And as the Houston theater that focuses on plays about and by women, no company is better to bring the five Betties to life than Mildred’s Umbrella.

From an affluent New York society woman to a would be actress to the owner of a boxing gym, these five Betties find connection and an outlet for their collective rage by forming a theater collective and staging “Pyramus and Thisbe,” the mini-farce within Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. Yes, this is a play about the making of a play within a play, as Silverman creates comedy by shattering the roles women adhere to.

Pecos Bill from Houston Ballet (September 11-20)
Houston Ballet leaps into a new season with three works that illustrate the depth and breadth of the company’s skills. Have some down-home fun with Stanton Welch’s rollicking ballet depicting the adventures of the mythic cowboy, Pecos Bill. The company will also show off its classical expertise with George Balanchine’s elegant and dynamic Symphonie Concertante. For a debut treat, HB will perform celebrated choreographer Lar Lubovitch’s Meadow. While this will be the first time the company dances a Lubovitch piece, HB co-artistic director Julie Kent was in the original cast for its world premiere by the American Ballet.

Proof from 4th Wall Theatre (September 11-October 3)
The first of two Tony and Pulitzer double winners on this month's must-see list, Proof was a Broadway hit then film in the early 2000s and since has become a emotional showcase for regional actors around the country. Twenty-five years after its debut, this complex story of family, trust, grief, and genius still resonates. As the play unfolds, the audience meets Catherine, who has given up years of her life to take care of her brilliant mathematician father as he wrestles with mental illness. After his death, Catherine is adrift in the world. Can she find the courage to prove her mental stability to her doubtful sister and her own math genius to one of her father’s former students?

Cold War Choir Practice at Main Street Theater (September 12-October 11)
Perhaps this month's most undefinable show, this comedy, with choral music interludes, earned critical acclaim when it debuted off Broadway earlier this year. The play follows the adventures of 10-year-old Meeks, who is not exactly an average girl growing up in the late 80s. Her father is a former Black Panther who now owns a roller rink and her uncle a prominent security advisor in the Reagan administration, with a mysteriously ill, white wife who also might be a cult member.

With Christmas around the corner, Meeks keeps busy with choir practice and building a bomb shelter in her basement. But with her uncle’s unexpected visit, long-simmering tensions within the family begin to boil and national secrets are in jeopardy, as the world prepares for the disarmament summit between Reagan and Gorbachev.

The Music Man presented by Theatre Under the Stars (September 15-27)
Musical lovers just can’t say no to that conman with a heart of gold, Harold Hill, a.k.a the Music Man. Since it first debuted in the 1950s, the feel-good musical seems to get a Broadway revival or tour with regularity. Now, Theatre Under the Stars opens its 2026-27 season by presenting the latest national touring production of the comedy about charming Harold who gets conned himself by small town sincerity and the love of a good librarian. With big dance numbers and songs like "(Ya Got) Trouble,” "Seventy-Six Trombones,” and "Till There Was You,” the show remains one of the great American musicals.

Amadeus at Rec Room (September 17-October 10)
After a several months hiatus as it moves from a calendar year season to a fall/spring one, Rec Room is back and celebrating its 10th anniversary with a show that hasn't been performed locally in quite a while. The now classic 20th century play is about the (mostly one-sided) rivalry between composers Antonio Salieri and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart; it explores themes of creation, jealousy, and the nature of genius.

As one of Houston’s most intimate spaces, Rec Room has managed to produce epic productions on its small stage thanks to the creative team’s ability to ignite its audiences’ imaginations. Anticipate the same kind of theatrical magic for Amadeus, which the company describes as a “theatrical séance where memory, ritual, and myth converge.”

Rhinoceros from Catastrophic Theatre (September 18-October 10)
The blasts from the past continue as Houston’s home for avant garde theater, Catastrophic, revives its hit production of Eugene Ionesco’s epic absurdest play, Rhinoceros. Several of the cast members and creative artists from its last staging in 2017 will return to this story about a small town whose citizens begin to transform one-by-one into destructive rhinoceros until almost no humans are left. Written in the late 1950s, Rhinoceros has some of the markings of a horror film of the time period. Using absurdist imagery, it warns how easily fascism and authoritarianism can rise when people feel the call of the herd. Yet the play still has moments of outrageous dark comedy.

Purpose at Ensemble Theatre (September 18-October 11)
The oldest and largest professional African American theatre in the Southwest celebrates its 50th season with one of the most award-winning plays of the last few years. Earning both the Best Play Tony and Pulitzer Prize, Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins’s drama depicts a political prominent family as it gathers together for something of a celebration, homecoming, and bitter going away dinner. The Jasper patriarch was a leader in the Civil Rights movement, but the two adult sons struggle to live up to their father’s legacy, while their mother attempts to keep the family together and family secrets hidden. Meanwhile, an uninvited guest gives the proceedings an outsider's perspective.

Come From Away at Stages (September 18-October 18)
The true story of a small town in Newfoundland that rallied together to host thousands of stranded international travelers when planes were grounded world wide on September 11, 2001 made for one of the most poignant and hopeful musicals in decades. It’s been a few years since Come From Away toured nationally, so Houstonians should be looking forward to seeing Stages begin its season with this homegrown production filled with some of the company's best actors.

While the show has been a hit all over the world that speaks to human connection and kindness even during the greatest of tragedies, it also has some deep Texas roots. Among the many stories the musical sings, one of otheur favorites is the glimpse into the extraordinary life of Texan Beverley Bass, the first female captain at American Airlines.

Manon from Houston Ballet (September 24-October 4)
For its second production of the month, Houston Ballet pirouettes from one act dances to Sir Kenneth MacMillan’s lush, romantic tragedy, Manon. With music by French composer Jules Massenethe, the ballet journeys from glamorous parties in Paris to the bayous of Louisiana to recount the doomed love story between the irresistibly beautiful femme fatale, Manon, and impoverished student, Des Grieux.

Romeo and Juliet at Alley Theatre (September 25-October 11)
There might not be a dry eye in the Theater District as the Alley also opens its fall season with a romantic tragedy that literally originated the term "star-crossed lovers." The entire Alley resident acting company will take roles in Shakespeare’s wrenching tale of young lovers crushed between their warring families.

The production also marks the debut of a new initiative between the Alley and the University of Houston that expands the existing MFA in Acting program at the University of Houston by placing third-year acting students in residence at the Alley, working directly with the full-time acting company. For Romeo and Juliet, several of those students will have roles in the ensemble and as understudies.

The Sound of Music presented by Broadway at the Hobby Center (September 29-October 4)
Houston's month of classics ends with arguably the most beloved musical of all time, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music. This new touring production that celebrates the musical’s 65th anniversary features new direction from three-time Tony Award winner Jack O’Brien (Hairspray).

Devout Music fans shouldn’t worry, because, while a new generation of actors take on the roles of Maria, Captain von Trapp, and that gaggle of singing von Trapp kids, the story of love, family, and bravery in the face of evil remains the same. Prepare to hum along (quietly) to classics such as “Climb Every Mountain,” “Do-Re-Mi,” “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” and, of course, “The Sound of Music.”