This month brings some vivid early fall colors to museums and galleries across the city. The MFAH grows their already world class Cuban collection. Forms and memory emerge at the Menil, and Rice’s Moody Center showcases artistic process.
Plus, several shows around town turn a spotlight on environmental issues. As the weather cools, we’ll also head outdoors to discover a mysterious tunnel at Discovery Green.
"Do Ho Suh: In Process" at Rice Moody Center for the Arts (now through December 21)
As a truly international artist, having found homes in Seoul, New York, and London, Do Ho Suh’s art examines themes of home, migration, displacement, and the passage of time. Perhaps appropriately, the Moody Center will play with definitions of an art exhibition, allowing Do Ho Suh to use the galleries as a studio-like space to present his on-going research and collaborative projects. “In Process” will showcase two completed installations, including the monumental, “Inverted Monument” but will also allow visitors views into in process projects, including Suh’s collaboration with Rice University engineering students on his research for “The Bridge Project,” his work to conceptualize a bridge connecting his homes in Seoul, London, and New York.
For more of Suh’s work around town, be sure to check out his “impossible” sculptural installation “Portal” in the tunnel between the MFAH’s Kinder Building and Glassell School.
“The Tunnel” at Discovery Green (now through October 6)
For a different kind of tunnel, head downtown to Discovery Green for this interactive art installation from Canadian immersive public art design organization Big Art. Built as an array of 16 vaguely diamond shaped, definitely alien-looking structures, “The Tunnel” entices explorers to enter and begin a cosmic journey. “Pilots” use an interactive device to manipulate the array, creating an infinite number of patterns of light and sound, making each journey unique. The 3D design uses over 150 LED bars — made of over 8,000 individual LEDs — that are pixel-mapped to create a vortex of light pulling visitors through the structures.
“CRYSIS” at the Museum of Fine Arts (September 13)
Visual and performing arts meet with this immersive theatrical experience from local Houston artist Chandrika Metivier. Responding to the MFAH’s mammoth summer 4-channel multimedia installation “Jacolby Satterwhite: A Metta Prayer,” Metivier will perform an immersive adaptation of a section from Ariana Reines’ Obie-winning play Telephone. Step into a kaleidoscopic universe of multimedia magic as Metivier blends theatrical elements with a cappella harmonies — creating an ode to love and resilience.
"Light Needs Shadow Needs Light…” at Art League Houston (September 13-November 23)
This exhibition of artworks by Texas photographer Kathy Vargas will include four series of hand-painted, silver gelatin photographs. Vargas uses her mastery of the photography process, layering, and painting to tell intricate stories.of family, heritage, death, and consumerism. The collection includes photos of intricate fabric with price tags that explore the cost of fashion as well as blurred portraits of Vargas’s loved ones layered with flowers and writings to symbolize human connection and family.
"Rising Water” at Art League Houston (September 13-November 23)
Winner of ALH’s 2024 Texas Artist of the Year, Beili Liu creates material-and-process-driven, site-responsive installations and performances. This celebratory exhibition showcases a compilation of Liu’s work that explores how climate issues intersect with labor, migration, and social concerns. Working with common materials such as thread, needle, scissors, feather, salt, wax, and cement, Liu creates artworks that trace the complexity of global environmental issues and crisis.
"Out of Thin Air: Emerging Forms” at Menil Drawing Institute (September 20-January 26, 2025)
“The process of becoming,” this is how the Menil describes one commonality of the 29 drawings and works on paper on view in this new exhibition. With works from some renowned modern and contemporary artists, including Lee Bontecou, John Cage, Gustavo Díaz, Hiroyuki Doi, Sonia Gechtoff, Gregory Masurovsky, Alan Saret, and Hedda Sterne, the show will examine how some artists use drawing as a meditative process to find images and forms for their work. The exclusive exhibition will include drawings acquired by John and Dominique de Menil as early as the 1950s, several gifts to the collection, and a recent acquisition.
“Out of Thin Air: Emerging Forms is a show about discovery and possibility, and the artworks on view — some of which have never been displayed at the Menil — can be considered as portals to personal reflection,” MDI curatorial associate Kirsten Marples said in a release.
"Fragments of Memory” at Menil Drawing Institute (September 20-January 26)
The personal and historical become art in this second new show at the MDI opening this month. The exhibition illustrates how artists use material forms of memory, including photos, collage, dottles, and even grocery lists within their works to depict the past in forms personal, cultural, and historical. To explore these themes, curator Kelly Montana has selected important 20th and 21st century works from the Menil’s collection including pieces by artists Wardell Milan, Gael Stack, Luc Tuymans, James Lee Byars, Jacob El Hanani, Joe Goode, Jasper Johns, Mark Lombardi, Jim Love, Walter Tandy Murch, Denyse Thomasos, Cy Twombly, and Danh Vo.
“The artists in this exhibition demonstrate a desire to say more than what personal ephemera, historical accounts, and selective memory leave behind,” assistant curator Kelly Montana said. “We hope that these works, many of which are new additions to the museum’s collection, will encourage visitors to reimagine how fraught memories and contested histories are accessed and how these recollections impact our present.”
“River on Fire” presented by DiverseWorks (September 27-November 16)
Art often provokes or makes a urgent call to action, and this is certainly true when it comes to a current issues like climate change. With a complexity we’ve come to expect from a DiverseWorks show, this multidisciplinary exhibition features 14 local, national, and international artists who wrestle with environmental issues in their work. Organized around both the ideas of Houston as the energy capital of the world and our venerability to the changing climate, the exhibition poses questions on how artists and creative practices can shift the narrative and introduce possible solutions in a city with such a complex ecosystem.
"Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography" at the Museum of Fine Arts (September 29-March 16, 2025)
An already prominent collection of Cuban photography becomes preeminent, as the MFAH celebrates its acquisition of 300 Cuban photographs from Chicago-based collectors Madeleine and Harvey Plonsker. This new exhibition will showcase 100 works from the collection which both traces the use of photography in Cuba over 60 years and tells the story of Cuba’s history from the mid 20th century to today.
Organized both chronologically and thematically, the exhibition will be divided up into distinct sections with focuses on the “Epic” generation of photographers working during the Cuban Revolution; life in Post-Revolution Cuba; a section titled “Memory, the Body, and Identity,” featuring photographic art in Cuba after the end of the Soviet Union and their economic support of Cuba; and a final section on contemporary, 21st century work.
“The strengths of the Plonsker Collection are unparalleled, in terms of telling the complex and compelling story of post-Revolution Cuban photography,” Malcolm Daniel, MFAH’s curator of photography said in a statement. “Combined in this exhibition with works already in the Museum’s holdings, the collection allows us to chronicle that story from the ‘epic generation,’ whose work would define the image of the Cuban Revolution, to the succeeding generations of photographers, who questioned the power of photography and its relationship to political authority and who created highly personal work in the context of a greater awareness of international contemporary art.”
Photo courtesy of Joe Robles
DiverseWorks presents "River on Fire"
