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Art & Parks Tour
This sweet opportunity comes to us from the Downtown Austin Alliance, the Pease Park Conservancy, and Ride Bikes Austin – so we know it's a damned good thing indeed. Take the self-guided Art & Parks Tour to explore the best of what Downtown Austin art and parks have to offer through this selection of curated murals, artworks, and green spaces. You can sign up anytime, so click that URL and get ready to learn the most vibrantly visual parts of your city soon – live and in person. -
Arts
Visual Arts
Landmarks: Self-Guided Walking Tour
Use your smartphone to access self-guided tours of the outdoor public art sited by UT's award-winning Landmarks program any time you feel like it. BONUS: There's also a free, docent-led tour starting at Marc Quinn's "Spiral of the Galaxy" (1501 Red River) on Sun., Jan. 8, 11am.
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Visual Arts
Changarrito Cart: Magaly Cantú
Conceptualized by artist Máximo González in 2004, the Changarrito Cart as it appears in front of Mexic-Arte is an alternative space for art vending. According to the museum, this phrase is a combo of Mexico City slang for a small retail store (“changarro”) and the suffix “-ando,” which Mexic-Arte summarizes as “indicating the act or action of hanging out at a ‘changarro’ with the featured artist.” This month features Fort Worth-based Magaly Cantú, whose ceramic work, printmaking, and drawings all play on her girlhood as a Latina and, the artist says, “exemplifies an exchange of values and the divided relationship they create between immigrant mothers and their Americanized children.” – James ScottJune 14-15 & 21-22
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Arts
Visual Arts
Aisha Imdad: “The Allegorical Gardens”
Gardens loom large in legend. Think the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Shalimar Gardens, the Garden of Eden: each bursting with symbolic beauty, dripping with promises of life and growth. Artist Aisha Imdad explores the lush intricacies of this verdant imagery. Her watercolor works delve into literary and mythological gardens, inspired by Indian, Mughal, and Persian frescos. Each invites closer introspection, a desire to immerse in the vibrant world of her works. Each intricate blossom speck, or gilded turn of a bird wing, vibrates with idealized life. Imdad’s art portrays the possibilities of paradise. – Cat McCarreyThrough July 3 -
Arts
Visual Arts
Captivating Colors: A Group Exhibition
There are entire college courses and certification programs for color theory, aka color science, delving into how colors interact and affect our perceptions and emotions. Fascinating stuff, really – part of why so many restaurants use warm colors like red, yellow, and orange in their branding is due to their tendency to stimulate the appetite. For this group exhibition featuring over 40 Austin artists, Art for the People showcases pieces where “color is not just aesthetic but an active agent shaping meaning and mood.” Visit with artists at a noon-5pm opening celebration on Saturday, June 14, or catch the exhibit sometime this summer and experience color in a new light. – Kat McNevinsThrough August 15 -
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Visual Arts
Christopher Miller & Lily Timberlake: “I Could’ve Dreamed I Was Here”
From 6:30-10pm this Thursday, join two Austin painters for an exhibition celebrating slowness. Amongst the din of the attention economy, Christopher Miller and Lily Timberlake have created a capsule of work that draws your focus to daily pleasures like taking your dog for a walk and contemplating dappled shade on the sidewalk. Miller’s saturated, spacious Texas landscapes and Timberlake’s detail-oriented snapshots of foliage play off of each other to encourage a meditative viewing experience. Tin Whistle Gallery, tucked into the studios on Bolm Road, hosts this duo show through July 5. – Lina FisherThrough July 5 -
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Visual Arts
Jiab Prachakul: Sweet Solitude
Whoever says Austin isn’t a fine art town can get the hell out of here. We continually break artistic ground with innovative and international taste. The Contemporary once again adds to that rep by hosting artist Jiab Prachakul’s first solo museum show. Born in Thailand, living in France, and with a solid film background behind her, Prachakul’s work has a bold style and clear point of view. Heavy graphic lines and soul-stirring colors fill her art. Each moment could be a film still, each stroke staking her claim on a far-too-Western art world. Widely accessible but intensely intimate, Prachakul’s scenes beg for close inspection. Join the Contemporary, and the artist herself, in examining her offerings during Friday’s opening night festivities or in conversation on Saturday, Feb. 1. – Cat McCarreyThrough August 3 -
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Visual Arts
Laguna Gloria
This local treasure of a venue, run by those Contemporary Austin folks who also bring us the Jones Center shows Downtown, is all about the outdoors – which is perfect for these trickily navigated times of ours, n'est-ce pas? Recommended: Stop by and breathe in the air, enjoy the lawns and gardens and the many examples of world-class sculpture arrayed across the property, and (as Frankie used to say) r-e-l-a-x.Thu.-Fri., 9am-noon; Sat.-Sun., 9am-3pm -
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Visual Arts
Lance Myers: “Frequencies in the Static Bloom”
Lance Myers’ previous work as an animator (Space Jam, A Scanner Darkly) inherently involved movement. With this exhibition he slows things down to a complete stop. The still lifes and portraits are a study in stillness, but there’s life in every brushstroke with flowers bursting with color and figures with proportions that are almost imperceptibly exaggerated. Throw some insects into the mix and you have a gently surreal and passionate display. Just because there isn’t any action, doesn’t mean you can’t be moved. – James RenovitchThrough July 6 -
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Visual Arts
Michael Velliquette: “The Distance Within Us”
Slow down, stroll the gardens, enjoy a specialty cocktail, and see sculptures nestled in the green gardens at Umlauf this summer. Velliquette’s solo exhibition shows off his largest presentation of sculptures made of paper and powder-coated metal. These works invite visitors to take a moment to breathe and focus on the present moment, with an awareness of the shared human experience. “It’s about reaching inward and outward at once, and the ways that symbolic forms can guide us toward greater awareness and connection,” Velliquette said. – Sammie SeamonThrough August 22 -
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Museum of Illusions
Enter the fascinating world of illusions in this new venue that boasts a stunning array of intriguing visual, sensory, and educational experiences among new, unexplored optical wonderments.$20-24.11010 Domain #100 -
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The Museum of Fine Arts, Austin
Art by Charles Walter, Benjamin Bayne, and other international, national, and local artists.Sundays, 3-5pm. Donations accepted.1638 E. Second #326 -
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The Museum of Natural & Artificial Ephemerata
This place, ah, it's one of our favorite places in the entire city; and of course they're properly corona-closed. But check 'em out online right now – it's a rich, wonder-filled website – to whet your appetite for when things get back to … uh … are we still calling it "normal," these days? -
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Visual Arts
Valerie Fowler’s “Entanglements” & Benné Rockett’s “Grown in Darkness”
It’s a pleasure to see Austin’s bevy of talented working artists grow and change over the years, exploring new material and thematic fixations. Valerie Fowler is one such mainstay of the scene, and her new summer show at Lydia Street Gallery finds her meditating on the interconnectedness of nature and humanity with signature meticulous attention to detail. In “Entanglements: You Too Are Part of This,” she renders birds’ nests and vines in dazzling Technicolor. Under the same roof, Benné Rockett, an Austin art therapist who’s spent the better part of a decade between Mérida, Yucatan, and her hometown of New Orleans, offers mixed-media encaustic works that render flora and fauna in three dimensions. Watch these works interact with one another starting Saturday, May 24, through to August 10. – Lina FisherThrough August 10 -
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Words and Wonder: Rediscovering Children’s Literature
One of the pleasures of having a first-rate research center and archive in town is how the Harry Ransom Center will regularly comb through its own vast holdings and hand-pick gems to present in a new context. Hence the HRC’s latest exhibit, “Words and Wonder: Rediscovering Children’s Literature,” which pulls from its manuscript, art, photography, film, and performing arts holdings to spotlight early 20th-century authors and illustrators catering to a young readership. The exhibit includes magic lantern slides from Aesop’s Fables, John Tenniel’s illustrations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and Ernest H. Shepard’s indelible images from the Hundred Acre Wood, among other treats. Runs through August 17. – Kimberley JonesThrough August 17 -
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Visual Arts
“Big Pour”
Collaboration’s the name of the artistic game here, with the newest exhibition at MASS being a three-way split showcase of Erin Miller, Audrey Blood, and Alexandre Pépin. Their pieces find shared experiences in the process of paper-making and reflect their navigation of “vulnerability, trust, and transformation through making.” Displayed alongside their separate works will be community-made pulp paintings, which were created during a MASS-hosted community paper-making day. Opening reception’s this Saturday, so take a page from these entangled artistes and invite all your friends. – James ScottThrough July 12 -
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“Collective Minds”
At Flatbed, printmakers of all styles, inspirations, techniques, and levels of experience find a home for their expression. Collective Minds, their annual in-house showcase, celebrates the collaboration and support that connects 22 diverse artists and staff members working out of the community studio. Get a feel for Flatbed’s 36-year legacy as Austin’s premier home for print and the dynamic spirit that keeps their work contemporary at the showcase’s opening event Saturday, as you meet local printmakers and admire their recent works. – Caroline DrewThrough July 26 -
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“Dog Days”
When the profound connection between dog and human has become fetishized and monetized for clicks, where’s a soulful dog person to go? Why not this group exhibition, which pays sweet tribute to our four-legged fam? Referencing the origins of “dog days” as a time of unrest in ancient times, DORF curators Sara Vanderbeek and Eric Manche are using the show to advance a different narrative: “that in a time of global uncertainty and rising temperatures, the steady, loving presence of a dog can be a grounding force – a source of comfort, stability, and meaning.” Friday’s pet-friendly opening reception will have on-site adoptions, live dog portrait painting by Ami Plasse, and a doggy dance party with DJ Dana Scully. – Kimberley JonesOpening night, May 23; runs through Sept. 6 -
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Visual Arts
“duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, grayDUCK!”
Okay so: What’s with all the ducks? If you count them, it’s one duck for each year that this art gallery has been hosting art. This anniversary exhibition, curated by Los Outsiders collective, has a work of art representative of each year in the life of grayDUCK. It’s kinda like one of those videos where someone takes a photo of themselves every year, except in this case it’s something beautiful or poignant, and isn’t that better? Kicks off this Saturday, May 24 and runs through June 28. – James RenovitchThrough June 28 -
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Events
“Roots Unveiled: Exploring the Chinese Experience”
Among the many anti-civil rights bills creeping their way through the Texas Legislature is Senate Bill 17, which would bar Chinese and many other Asian citizens from buying land here. Denounced by detractors as racist and reminiscent of 19th-century laws targeting Asian immigrants, its 2023 origins, along with growing anti-Asian sentiment after the pandemic, inspired Houston artist Jane Xu to found the multi-city Asian American Art & Culture Initiative and initiate this multidisciplinary exhibit. Curated by renowned international independent curator Sylvia XuHua Zhan, it brings in-depth research and archives along with work from a wide range of artists to offer a look at the rich history of Chinese Americans in Texas. Opening reception is Sunday, May 18, noon. – Kat McNevinsThrough August 31; opening reception, May 18 -
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“Terra Forma”
This group exhibition featuring 10 local artists reimagines cartography as a skill endemic to artists, not scientists. Before the 17th century, maps were painted according to bodies, the show argues. These bodies were a lived, agreed-upon experience of a place not bound by data-driven management, the purpose of which is solely “to help outsiders drive through a land in which they had no real interest – except for locating resources to be exploited.” That’s Co-lab quoting from the book that lent the exhibition its name, Terra Forma: A Book of Speculative Maps by Frédérique Aït-Touati, Alexandra Arénes, and Axelle Grégoire. In an age of at once increasingly policed borders and forced migration due to a changing Earth, the show argues that “humankind is no longer solely in control.” – Lina FisherThrough July 19 -
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“The Floating World: Tokyo to Texas”
Step into a colorful space filled with music, dance, and Daryl Howard’s exhibition of Japanese woodblock prints. The Central Texas artist will be displaying his ukiyo-e inspired collection of surreal landscapes and vibrant florals. There will be Japanese appetizers, drinks, and cocktails for viewers to enjoy. Make sure to enter the raffle to win a $150 gift card, good for all Uchi restaurants in Austin. Traditional taiko drummers are scheduled to perform for this celebration of Japanese and Japanese-American culture, free and open to the public. – Sammie SeamonThrough September 7