Don't Miss List
The Clientele & art happenings top Toby Kamps' list of fall picks
- The Clientele
- Menil curatorToby KampsPhoto by Anton Henning
- From "Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage," "Mz 371 bacco" (Mz 371 bacco), 1922
- "Bluefinger" at Catastrophic Theatre, with frontman Charles Thompson, aka FrankBlack
- Benjamin Patterson, "Two Violins after Paik’s One for Violin," 1991
Editors Note: We've asked Houston arts leaders and CultureMap contributors to pick the jewels from Houston's upcoming arts season — the events that they don't plan to miss. Toby Camps, senior curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH), who joins the Menil Collection as curator of modern and contemporary art on Oct. 1, offers these suggestions:
1.(tie) The CAMH’s Ben Patterson: Born in the State of FLUX/us (Nov. 6 – Jan. 30, 2011) and the Menil Collection’s Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage (Oct. 22 –Jan. 30, 2011). Starting in the 1960s and 1920s, respectively, experimental musician and sculptor Patterson and found-object bricoleur Schwitters charted new and influential avant-garde territories.
2. Bluefinger at Catastrophic Theatre (premieres Nov. 12). This rock opera by ex-Pixies frontman Frank Black, Jason Nodler and the Catastrophic ensemble tells the story of Dutch musician and painter Herman Brood, who committed suicide in 2001. Like everything Black touches, it’ll be full of excellent sound and fury.
3. My own shameless plug: I’m organizing Berlin artist Kirsten Pieroth’s first museum exhibition as my last project at the CAMH (Oct. 1 -Jan. 2, 2011). Pieroth, a brilliant, funny, and low-key conceptualist who’s interested in the surprising stories mundane things can tell, will be reprising Guglielmo Marconi’s early radio experiments and wrestling with a full-size telephone pole in the museum’s basement.
4. My all-time favorite band The Clientele is releasing a new EP, Minotaur, next month. The group loves painter Giorgio di Chirico who was obsessed with Ariadne and Greek mythology, and I bet this record will be full of his crystalline images and metaphysical echoes.
5. Open call! My Menil colleague Michelle White and I will be choosing work for a February 2011 photography exhibition with the working title Texas Talent organized by the Houston Center for Photography and Fotofest. We’re spreading the net wide in our review process and hope all accomplished Lone Star lens people will make sure we learn about their work.
Other don't miss lists:
Houston Grand Opera music conductor Patrick Summers
Alley Theatre artistic director Gregory Boyd
CultureMap arts columnist Nancy Wozny
CultureMap arts contributor Theodore Bale