Art Events in Houston
Menil Collection
Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective: March 2, 2012 - June 10, 2012
Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective is
the first retrospective of the artist’s drawings, as well as the first
major one-person exhibition organized under the umbrella of the Menil
Drawing Institute and Study Center. While Serra’s sculptures have
been widely recognized and the subject of numerous museum exhibitions,
his drawings, which have played a crucial role in his work for over
forty years, have not received a critical overview. This exhibition,
with work from major European and American public and private
collections, traces Serra’s investigation of drawing as an activity
both independent from and linked to his sculptural practice. Organized
chronologically, it addresses significant shifts in concept, materials,
and scale, and culminates with new large-scale works completed for
this presentation.
In the early 1970s Serra drew primarily with ink, charcoal,
and lithographic crayon on paper. At first a means for the artist to
explore form and perceptual relations between his sculpture and the
viewer, the drawings eventually became autonomous works of art. They
increased to human-scale, and bold forms created with black paintstick
exploded the boundaries of the paper support. In the mid 1970s, Serra
made the first of his monumentally-scaled Installation Drawings, the
artist’s original version of the dialectic between radical scale and
radical technique in an architectural context. Working on site, he
attached Belgian linen directly to the wall. Paintstick, melted down
and recast in large heavy blocks, was applied using repetitive and
vigorous physical gestures. The resulting fields of black disrupt and
complement existent spaces and began to occupy entire rooms towards the
late 1970s.
Within the last twenty-five years, Serra has continued to
invent new drawing techniques. In the late 1980s he explored how to
further articulate the tension of weight and gravity by placing pairs
of overlapping sheets of paper saturated with paintstick in horizontal
and vertical compositions. In his most recent work, since the 1990s, he
has embarked on numerous series with a remarkable variety of surface
effects. Often working on the floor and using a mesh screen as an
intermediary between the gesture and the transfer of pigment to the
paper, he persists to achieve effects that offer new ways to consider
drawing. In short, Serra is among a significant group of artists whose
transformative work irrevocably changed the practice and definition of
modernist drawing, and challenged drawing’s role in the traditional
hierarchy of media.
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
The Deconstructive Impulse: Women Artists Reconfigure the Signs of Power, 1973 - 1991: January 21 - April 15, 2012
The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston is pleased to present The Deconstructive Impulse: Women Artists Reconfigure the Signs of Power, 1973-1991,
a survey of leading women artists that examines the crucial feminist
contribution to the development of deconstructivism in the 1970s and
’80s. As the term suggests, deconstructivism involved taking apart and
examining source material, generally borrowed from the mass media, to
expose the ways commercial images reveal the mechanisms of power. Women
had a particularly high stake in this kind of examination and were
disproportionately represented among artists who practiced it. This
exhibition is organized by Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College,
State University of New York.
Project Row Houses
Project Row Houses was initiated out of conversations between a group
of African-American Artists who were exploring how art can be utilized
to create a positive impact within the community and how to provide an
alternative space for the underrepresented minority artists of that
time. Project Row Houses is a product of those initial conversations,
now offering a variety or programming that meets the needs of the
community and Houston area artists.
Virtually all of our arts and cultural programming is referred to as
“Public Art” as they are developed to respond to our community, involve
our community, and reflect our community. To us, arts and community are
integrally necessary for each other to thrive – art is not viable
without community and community is not viable without art.
Utilizing ten of the original 22 shotgun houses, we offer a variety
of programming for both the emerging, mid-career and established
artists.
Please see their website for more information.
** Since more than one exhibit is usually shown at one time, the information above may not be complete. Please check the organization's website for more detailed information. Rice University is not responsible for rescheduling or canceled events. ***
Note: Please check with home institution to confirm all events. Rice University not responsible for rescheduling or canceled events.
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