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"
