Sheila Hicks' "The Questioning Column," in Artists and the Rothko Chapel, at the Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University, Houston, 2021, wove vivid hues of the rainbow, creating fantastical towers.
Like Houston’s weather, the art scene in the Bayou City only seems to heat up with a slew of captivating exhibitions on tap. A quartet of shows and an international art book with a Houston connection are what everyone’s talking about in this latest edition of the Houston Art Buzz.
Rock, Scissors … Paper!
In keeping with Avant-Art Gallery’s first anniversary, the Colquitt dealer is mounting the group show “Muse,” which includes the paper wall works of Laura Waldusky, and is opening this Saturday, September 21. The American-born Waldusky, now based in the United Kingdom, defies traditions of sculpture forged from heavy metal to utilize rolls of paper, which can often be supersized.
Waldusky’s unique way with her medium involves meticulously colored pencil drawings, arrayed in rows resembling geological strata, which are in turn crimped and bent. The resulting sinuous sculptures have fluidity and move beyond tropes of minimalism to evoke places and emotions while cheekily subverting notions of craft and drawing.
Waldusky describes her work as “a celebration of impermanence” that speaks to “Time. Nature. Fragility. The familial.”
This Saturday, September 21 through October 14 at Avant-Art Gallery.
Stitched Together: Honduras Threads at Andrew Durham Gallery
In a unique home goods and art world collaboration — one that reaches across borders — Houston’s Andrew Durham Gallery will open its fall season this Saturday, September 21 with “Side by Side, 20 x 20: Honduras Threads.” The exhibition doubles as fundraiser benefiting the mission of a Dallas-founded sewing co-op focused on micro finance by transforming the lives of craftswomen in Honduran villages.
Fall Tabletop
Founded 20 years ago by Peace Corps volunteers M’Lou and Bill Bancroft, the Texas-based nonprofit Honduras Threads debuts in Houston with a 22-artist group show with notably (mostly) Texas talents creating drawings that are translated into embroidered images hand-sewn on pillow covers by four female Honduran artisans. Proceeds benefit these women and their families, providing food, school supplies, health care and transportation so their kids can attain an education.
What an artist lineup too. The headliners span diverse generations, genders and cultural identities, including Latinx artists Susan Plum, Gerardo Rosales and Luisa Duarte, alongside Terrell James (the conduit for the Houston connection), Salle Werner-Vaughn, Rachel Gardner, David Aylsworth, Sharon Kopriva, Joe Havel, Pat Colville, Heather L. Johnson and artist/gallery director Bob Russell, who curates the show.
Bid now: A silent auction runs through this Saturday, September 21, at 5 pm. You can register here.
Heavy Metal: Tara Conley and Tim Glover
This season, we’re yearning for the permanent and timeless, as well as some illumination. In this vein, you might want to investigate a duo of exhibitions that highlight two Houston talents — both known for their prowess with public art — who have their way with heavy metal, chiefly stainless steel.
Now on view at ELLIO Fine Art, “Tara Conley: Lost and Found” explores the sculptor’s multi-decade practice, tracing Conley’s lyrical abstract twirls of steel to her early beginnings as a metalsmith.
“Tara Conley: Lost and Found” is showing through October 21 at ELLIO Fine Art.
Unfurling in October at the University of Houston-Downtown’s O’Kane Gallery, “Tim Glover: Light House” highlights the culmination of four years of lamp design and intense studio fabrication.
“Some of my table lamps contain little narratives while other large floor lamps reference architecture or mysterious biomorphic forms,” Glover says of the new series. “One element surely connects everything — light.”
“Tim Glover: Light House” will be on view October 17 through December 21 at O’Kane Gallery on UHD’s campus.
Spinning a Yarn: Sheila Hicks Volume for Your Library
Nonagenarian artist Sheila Hicks is a cult figure in the art world. Known for her 60-plus-year career with all manner of textiles, Hicks’ epically scaled creations of the past decade — towering works often shown outdoors via cascading skeins of acrylic fiber spun into riotous colors — propel what was once a humble, crafty art form into the realm of the heroic.
Texas-based curator Frauke V. Josenhans — whose day job is at Rice University’s Moody Center for the Arts —brings forth a new book focused upon the artist’s boldest chapter to date with Sheila Hicks: Radical Vertical Inquiries. Like its subject, the volume, published by DelMonico Books and coming out on October 1, features an iconoclastic vertical imprint (in this case, measuring 12 by 5.5 inches).
$45 at DelmonicoBooks.com and BrazosBookstore.com.
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