For those who brave July’s sultry climes, a visual banquet awaits. A tradition for more than three decades, the summer city-wide open house ArtHouston unfurls Saturday, July 14, in a day-to-night art trek that offers fare blue-chip to edgy, with a side of performance and fashion. PaperCity is once again media sponsor. And here’s a note for your acquisitions radar: Whitney Biennial talents ranging from Julie Mehretu and Yun-Fei Ji to Shahzia Sikander and Leandro Erlich once soloed at ArtHouston, which was originally conceived as “Introductions” to unveil new creative types to the collector community. ArtHouston 2012 includes more than 30 esteemed shows, including these must-sees: James Turrell’s “Six Holograms” at Hiram Butler Gallery (compelling 3-D photo works on glass plates that anticipate the big Turrell retrospective coming Spring 2013 to the MFAH); a lively Latin mix at Deborah Colton Gallery, including richly impastoed figuration by Becky Soria and the always Pop Michael Macedo Meazell; Jelaine Faunce’s sexy photorealist cakes at Dean Day Gallery; and University of North Texas MFA candidate/painter of the dizzying abstracts Trey Egan at McMurtrey Gallery. Kudos to Harris Gallery for pulling it all together; stop by Harris’ Museum District space for realist Robert Winter Hughes’ Southwest-inflected still lifes. Also recommended are the droll “Board-Walk Circus” series by Houston woodworking man Doug Forrest at Koelsch Gallery (a homage to folk signage); Laura Rathe Fine Art’s duo shows for abstractionist Luc Leestemaker and surrealist Anke Schofield: G Gallery’s Diane Barber–curated view for a group of up-and-coming Spanish painters; RISD prof Susan Doyle’s confluence of myth-informed paintings and lithographs at PG Contemporary; and PF2 at Wade Wilson Art, curated by Zoe Jackson-Jarra and Debbie Treviño Porter, which involves some cool paper fashion, crafted from — what else? — current PaperCity mags. I’ll be art-walking in a June 2012 ensemble. Catch the lineup at arthouston.com.
IMAGE: James Turrell’s Untitled, 2010, at Hiram Butler Gallery. Photo courtesy Hiram Butler Gallery.