best may art

VR trip to space, Beyoncé's jewelry, and 6 more can't-miss Houston art shows for May

Houston art galleries and museums get ready for summer as several blockbuster shows open this month. New exhibitions are popping up all over the Museum District, including the CAMH and Center for Contemporary Craft — where Beyoncé's Miss Honey earrings will be on view. In what has become an annual tradition, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston decks the Cullinan Hall with another immersive installation. Meanwhile, our favorite university art venues (aka Rice's Moody Center and UH’s Blaffer) bring us stunning new contemporary art shows. All that, and we’re launching into orbit with "The Infinite."

“Space Explorers: THE INFINITE” at Sawyer Yards (now through June 30)
The immersive VR experience that uses footage from the International Space Station is back to take us on the ride of a lifetime. With cinematic VR technology that seems to plant you outside the ISS, the stunning 3D images of the Earth below makes for photographic art you aren’t likely to forget. But once the VR ride is over, don’t miss “The Universe Within the Universe,” the large scale light and sound installation from experimental electronic composer and visual artist Ryoji Ikeda. Along with a mind-expanding light art show, the installation seeks to mimic the experience of weightlessness and floating in the vast expanse of space.

“1000 Faces” at The Silos at Sawyer Yards (now through June 22)
This might be the most abundant of the gallery shows opening this month, as Houston artist Tony Paraná, curates over a thousand individual works created by ten local, national and international artists, including Alejandro Caiazza (NY), Alexandra Kontrimaite (Houston, TX), Barbara Montarroyos (RJ, Brasil), Cirlete Knupp (RJ, Brasil), Dircene Martins (Houston, TX), Joe Bloch (NY), Lauren Luna (Houston, TX), Lindsay Cline (Austin, TX), Tra Slaughter (Houston, TX), Tony Paraná (Houston, TX). Each artist has created a series of 100+ portraits, representing a diversity of human backgrounds, as well as painting styles and methodology. These paintings telling the stories behind every face.

"Jacolby Satterwhite: A Metta Prayer" at Museum of Fine Arts (May 18-November 10)
Houston art lovers know that it wouldn’t be summer without an immersive installation in the MFAH’s vast Cullinan Hall in the Caroline Wiess Law Building. Originally commissioned for the Great Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, this 4-channel multimedia installation will beckon viewers into artist Jacolby Satterwihite’s fantastic computer generated world with a fusion of music, choreography, and 3D animation. Inspired by Buddhist Metta prayer and video games, Satterwhite seeks to create a new digital space that represents love, joy, and resilience. A soundtrack produced by the artist pulses with energy, providing the video with its driving beat. Look for additional programming around the installation, including a live, in-person performance by the artist on May 18.

“Gabriel Lester: Odeon” at Blaffer Musuem (May 17-August 11)
This first U.S solo museum exhibition of preeminent European artist will focus on Lester’s interest in themes of light and shadow, the seen and unseen. Lester has gained international acclaim as an inventor, visual artist, and filmmaker, creating work in a spectrum of mediums including spatial installations, video installations, sculptures, performances, and short films. For this Houston exhibition, Lester will respond to the city, its fossil fuel industry, and being the home of NASA to create a series of experiential installations and kinetic sculptures. This exhibition pierces heavy, weighted geometries with the delightful, if perplexing, magic of discovery.

"Theaster Gates: The Gift and The Renege" at Contemporary Art Museum (May 17-October 20)
Inspired and influenced by Gates’s continued multi-layered engagement with historic bricks from Houston’s historic Freedmen’s Town, this exhibition features a series of large-scale paintings, sculptures, and installations that explore labor history, material legacies, and the sociopolitical architecture of the acts of building. For the exhibition, Gates calls attention to Freedmen’s Town's place in history as a community first built by newly freed Black people, who formed a vibrant community anchored by handmade and laid brick streets. “The Gift and The Renege" is the latest project born out of the CAMH and Houston Freedmen’s Town Conservancy (HFTC) ongoing Rebirth in Action project and its mission to promote Freedmen’s Town as a monument of Black community, agency, and heritage.

“The Gift and The Renege is my attempt at demonstrating the ways that industrial landscapes, displacement, and the historical fight for land rights push the boundaries of modernist and formalist architectural approaches in my practice,” explains Gates on the themes and objectives of the exhibition.

"Disclosure: The Whiteness of Glass" at Houston Center for Contemporary Craft (May 25-August 24)
This exhibition by the artist collective Related Tactics (Michele Carlson, Weston Teruya, and Nate Watson), is a research driven project and also an act of social engagement, uniting two groups of artists for collaborative glassmaking and community-building. The collective invited a series of artists to creatively translate hard data about the demographics of those working in the glass field. The resulting work in the exhibition range widely in scale and form, from ephemera of the glass studio — shards, raw materials, and artist sketches — to neon and sand-cast glass sculptures.

“La Fuente del Deseo (The Fountain of Desire)” at Houston Center for Contemporary Craft (May 25-August 24)
This first, institutional solo exhibition of celebrated Tijuana, Mexico interdisciplinary artist and metalsmith Georgina Treviño will showcase some of her most famous pieces, including jewelry-art worn by Beyoncé and Bad Bunny. Organized around three architectural installations: the pawn shop, the playground, and the plaza, this framework immerses visitors in the artist’s visionary world and source materials.

Look for works ranging from cast-silver jewelry and tableware to custom wearables for celebrities and industrially-scaled sculpture. The pawn shop installation features iconic jewelry pieces, including the Ms. Honey door-knocker earrings worn by Beyoncé in her Renaissance visual album, and the gemstone and chains woven red ski mask worn by Bad Bunny for his Rolling Stone cover issue. The playground installation will also feature her monumental, Siéntase Señora nameplate-necklace bench and swing sets, emblazoned with early 2000s norteño song lyrics.

"Resonant Earth: Contemporary Perspectives on Land and Body" at Rice Moody Center for the Arts (May 31-August 17)
For this latest intriguing themed exhibition, the Moody Center will draw connections between the human body and the land by showcasing the work of six contemporary artists: Kelly Akashi, Lisa Alvarado, Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio, Andrea Chung, Sky Hopinka, and Anna Mayer.

Though these artists work in a variety of media, including sculpture, painting, ceramics, collage, photography, video, and sound, their pieces explore the human bodily connections with nature — underscoring the vital interdependencies between people and the planet. Describing some of the specific pieces like an installation of suspended rubber casts of nonnative trees in Los Angeles, to bronze sculptures of weeds at former Japanese-American internment camps in Arizona, to abstract paintings alluding to generations of migrant farmers along the US-Mexico border, the Moody explains that the artworks in “Resonant Earth” demonstrate a critical engagement with entangled histories of the land, primarily in the Western and Southern United States. The exhibition addresses the local environment while at the same time considering the forced migration and displacement of people and plants across geographies.

Courtesy of Sky Hopinka

Sky Hopinka, Mnemonics of Shape and Reason, 2021. Part of the Moody Center's "Resonant Earth: Contemporary Perspectives on Land and Body"

houston art galleries museum of fine arts jacolby satterwhite openings

December art openings

Discover 6 exciting openings and 5 vibrant markets for Houston art lovers

Photo courtesy of Art Club

Art Club at POST opens in December (The Day We Left Field by Tundra).

If a bustling holiday season gets too overwhelming, visuals arts could be the perfect break. Whether you need some peaceful me-time or a place to bring all those visiting friends and family, December is the perfect catch-up month for Houston art lovers to see all those fall events they might have missed.

From multiverse painted stories to outdoor ceramics to high tech immersive art, the city still has some end-of-the year surprises that are opening this month. We’re also highlighting some of the best holiday art markets for finding those a one-of-a-kind creations to treasure at home.

“Notre-Dame Immersive Experience” at Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (now through January 5)
Paris' great Notre-Dame Cathedral reopens this month after years of restoration following the 2019 fire that nearly destroyed the cultural and spiritual French landmark. For those who can’t catch a flight for the unveiling, this animated, 14-minute, immersive presentation will surround visitors with images of Notre-Dame, simulating the experience of walking through the medieval cathedral. Viewers will go on a virtual journey from the outside of Notre-Dame as day turns to dusk, then move into the candlelit interiors and stained-glass windows. The immersive video will also replicate the fire, its aftermath, and restoration — revealing the cathedral in all its glory.

“Here, Now, and In the Multiverse” at Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (now through February 7)
The MFAH has opened several blockbuster exhibition this fall, but don’t miss this genre-defying little gem of a show with spiritual, scientific, and science fiction themes. Concepts of multiple universes have led to a wealth of alternate reality stories in pop culture and literature. Now contemporary visual artists also play with ideas of multiverses in their own art, depicting heavenly bodies that exist in extraordinary realms. These celestial beings take on the forms of various deities — metamorphosed by references to our complex contemporary lives — while their impossible beauty suggests the infinite possibilities available in the multiverse. In these artworks, the multiverse has transformed into a theoretical realm of epic sagas and cosmic crossroads.

“Cistern Illuminated” at Buffalo Bayou Park (December 6 – December 31)
For what’s becoming one of Houston's favorite holiday art traditions, Buffalo Bayou Park brings back a multidisciplinary work by artist/engineer Kelly O’Brien that first debuted two years ago. For the holidays, lighting instruments controlled by customized software cast colored light throughout the space. The special angle of these lights creates an uncanny reflection of the Cistern’s ceiling on the glassy water below. On select evenings, Cistern Illuminated will be the setting for live choral performances by downtown Houston’s Co-Cathedral of the Sacred Heart’s choir, Schola Cantorum. This year’s program, titled “Voices of Light: A Mystical Holiday Soundscape,” offers a journey through centuries of music, from 4th-century chanting to the works of Hildegrad von Bingen and modern compositions.

"Ceramics in the Environment” at Houston Center for Contemporary Crafts (December 7-March 8)
The fifth iteration of this outdoor exhibition series features site-specific ceramic sculptures created by students from the Museum of Fine Arts’ Glassell School of Art. Led by former HCCC resident artist Jeff Forster, the artists in his Special Topics class are tasked with exploring the narrative potential of HCCC’s Craft Garden and creating artwork inspired by the land’s flora and fauna. Visitors will see interactive sculptures inspired by avian life, an imagined visual network of a live tree, contemporary “dialogues” within and between natural elements, and thought-provoking installations that challenge perceptions about the environment.

Art Club at POST (opens December 7)
This new venue inside the immense POST cultural space will house galleries featuring cutting-edge immersive light and sound installations, as well as lounge/bar and black box theater spaces. For its first season, Art Club will showcase 13 exhibits and installations from a wide range of national and international artists working in light, sound, and multimedia material, including Shoplifter / Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir, media.tribe, Lachlan Turczan, Lumus Instruments, Daniel Anguilu with Taylor Knapps, Reynier Leyva Novo, Skyler Smith, Boris Acket, TUNDRA, Aka Chang, Setup, and Nerdy Artist Union.

Annual Fellowship Exhibitions at Houston Center for Photography (December 12-January 26)
HCP opens three new winter exhibitions, including the work of HCP fellow Mona Bozorgi and Carol Crow fellow Terri Warpinski, both juried by Liz Wells alongside gallery artist Nurra Yazici. Bozorgi’s “Threads of Freedom” shares stories of Iranian women using the photographs they have taken of themselves during the recent uprising and protests in the country. Viewed together, the works question traditional representations of women in Iran.

Warpinski’s “Restless Earth” is research-intense, mixed media, assemblage and installation project rooted in the histories and futures of Earth's fragile ecosystem. Also opening along with the fellow exhibitions is Yazici’s “Stains and Clouds,” a meditation on clouds as “the spots that are the symbol of unmeasurable time and ultimately of temporality.”

Holiday and Seasonal Art Markets

Center for Contemporary Craft Holiday Pop-Up Sale (now through December 24)
The Center’s Asher: Off the Wall shop offers an expanded selection of handcrafted jewelry, objects, wearables, prints, and sparkly gift items made by more than 30 local and national craft artists. Just a few highlights from the sale include papier-mache ornaments by Andrea Condara, earrings by Younha Jung, fun apparel by Baby Cats of CA, vegan handbags by Ceibo, ceramics from Gabo Martinez, and clever wooden whistles by Connie Roberts.

2024 Studio School Student Art Sale at MFAH’s Glassell School of Art (December 5-8)
Find an artful gift created by some of the up-and-coming Glassell student artists. Browse a huge selection of jewelry, ceramics, paintings, sculpture, prints, photographs, and more. Many of the artists also staff the sale and so are there to answer questions and give buyers the art scope of the work and process. Remember, today's student artists will someday be featured professionally in galleries and studios around town.

Third Coast Clay & Friends Art Festival at Third Coast Clay (December 7 and 8)
Located in Independence Heights, this ceramics studio will celebrate small businesses and local artists by featuring handcrafted treasures from over 25 talented creators working in various mediums, including pottery (both functional and sculptural), jewelry, painting, photography, leather-working, printmaking, and glass. There will be live artist demos throughout the day, including alternative firing techniques, wheel throwing and hand building, and surface designs and techniques.

Holiday Vibe Markets at POST (December 7-8)
Head downtown for this artisan shopping experience that will feature hand-crafted gifts like fine art, ceramics, leather goods, blown glass, and more. There will be over 120 local artists, creatives, and makers each day, local music creators, complimentary cocktails, an art gallery featuring local artists, Topo Chico lounge, Santa photos, and 10 different restaurants.

Flea By Night Holiday Market at Discovery Green (Saturdays through December 21)
For 10 years Flea by Night at Discovery Green has been an important and popular venue for Houstonians to discover new small businesses. This open-air market at the downtown park features local artisans and small business owners selling vintage, handmade, recycled, and repurposed goods. Part of Discovery Green’s mission is to shine a light on the diversity of talents that exist in Houston, including the entrepreneurs and creatives making a living in the city.