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Houston's Winter Street Studios is reopening after arson attack

Nine months after Houston’s Winter Street Studios was severely damaged in an arson attack, the popular Heights-area artist lofts will reopen to the public as part of an inaugural event called the Sawyer Yards Art Ramble.

Before the Dec. 20, 2022 fire, roughly 90 artists occupied studios and gallery spaces in the building at the Sawyer Yards art complex. About two-thirds of the Winter Street building has been completely renovated, according to Sawyer Yards marketing director Laura Tracy, and the
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Menil Collection says it never accepted Italian antiquities

The items, which were returned in a special ceremony in New York City and include Etruscan vases, ancient Roman coins and mosaics, are believed to be worth tens of millions of euros. Out of 266 Italian antiquities repatriated, 65 were part of a cache that was offered by a collector to the Menil, but never acquired.

A story published last week by the Associated Press erroneously reported that the artifacts were part of the museum's collection. Menil officials say the items were never accepted in
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New solo exhibit at CAMH explores the uncomfortable

Like a lot of people in the early days of the pandemic, artist and filmmaker Jordan Strafer found herself unable to make any sort of art. Grieving the dual tragedies of a global pandemic and the 2017 death of her father, Strafer spent long hours watching television and surfing the internet, especially reading comment sections and social media sites. When she found something that piqued her interest—say a New York Post article about the opulent Walter Reed Presidential Suite where Donald Trump wa
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This Houston street artist's work is expanding far past Texas

On the day before our interview, the Houston-based artist known as Kill Joy had just wrapped up a mural on Navigation Boulevard in the East End. The project, which she finished at the end of June, came in the midst of a massive heat wave that stretched for several weeks and made working outside a challenge. "The heat really took a lot out of me," she told me over email.

It’s a little too fitting that the brutal temperatures are disrupting her process when much of Kill Joy's work centers around
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Houston's new Ming Smith retro looks to the past and future

During a private walkthrough of Ming Smith's new show at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston earlier this week, a person in the crowd of roughly 30 invitees asked the photographer how it felt to see five decades of her work collected on the walls of the museum.

"It's really not about me," Ming replied. "It's about seeing the beauty and wealth of our culture." The moments in her photographs have passed, Ming explained, but the images serve as a documentation of everyday Black life for future ge
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Meow Wolf is coming to Houston

Good news for fans of immersive art experiences: Meow Wolf, the psychedelic playground for adults and kids alike, will open a location in Houston in 2024.

The news comes as Meow Wolf's first Texas location, in Grapevine, prepares to open in July. Other locations include Denver, Las Vegas, and the original in Santa Fe.

Houston's Meow Wolf will be located in a historic warehouse in the Fifth Ward, as first reported by Community Impact Newspapers. In mid-May, Houston City Council approved an ordi
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See a Van Gogh, a Cézanne, and more in Houston this summer

In the early 1980s, as a young curator at the Metropolitan Art Museum, Gary Tinterow helped oversee a show that featured Impressionist paintings from the collection of self-made New York businessman Henry Pearlman.

Now in his tenth year as director of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Tinterow is once again overseeing an exhibit focused on the Pearlman Collection—this time juxtaposed with paintings from the MFAH's own permanent collection. The show, titled Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Ma
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Artists from all over come to Houston for new gallery show

When Houston native Vincent Nguyen started to miss all his friends from art school in New York City, he came up with an idea: Why not have a gallery show and bring them all to Houston?

That show, called Friend of a Friend, will open May 12 at Reeves Art & Design in Montrose. It has two purposes: to bring a group of up-and-coming and established artists to Houston, where viewers can see their work firsthand, and to introduce Houston as a Southern cultural hub to those artists. The exhibit will f
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Explore the history of the Jewish deli in Houston

"The delicatessen is my life" says Ziggy Gruber as he walks through a gallery at the Holocaust Museum Houston on a Thursday afternoon in May. Most Houstonians know Gruber as the co-founder of Houston-based deli Kenny & Ziggy's, but on this day he's playing unofficial tour guide, taking a small group through the museum's newest exhibition.

Called I'll Have What She's Having, the exhibit examines the cultural and historical significance of the Jewish deli, a uniquely American phenomenon born out
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Here's what Owen Wilson saw at the Menil Collection this week

Movie star and native Dallasite Owen Wilson made a stop at Houston's Menil Collection this week, according to a picture from the museum posted to Instagram on Wednesday. The actor, known for movies like Wedding Crashers, Marley & Me, and his longtime collaboration with Houston-born filmmaker Wes Anderson, visited the museum on May 3, according to the post. The image shows Wilson standing beneath one of the museum's stately oak trees outside the Cy Twombly Gallery, and is filled with numerous "wo
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South Texas meets South Asia in new Houston art exhibit

In her work as a curator at the Blaffer Art Museum, Houstonian Erika Mei Chua Holum began to see similarities between artists and creators in Houston and those working in Southern Asia. Holum, who is Filipinx, refers to this as a "South-South relationship."

"I started to see overlaps in how art is being created," she says, "And I started to think about 'What does it look like to generate knowledge from the South?'"

Those intersections are the subject of a new exhibit curated by Holum, now open
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Tribute to Texas icon Daniel Johnston is coming to Houston

A few years before his death, Marjory Johnston took her brother, the artist and musician Daniel Johnston, on a shopping trip. "I would take him to thrift stores," says Marjory, who still sometimes refers to her brother in the present tense. "That was one of his favorite things."


On this thrifting trip, Daniel fixated on a set of vintage sewing patterns. He liked the drawings of women on the front, and wanted to add them to the collection of ephemera and other knickknacks overtaking his alread
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How a Houston muralist is bringing Juneteenth all across America

A few years ago, Houston artist Reginald C. Adams set a goal for himself to paint 10 new murals by the end of 2022. "It was very ambitious," he says—but maybe not too ambitious. It's taken a few extra months, but by the end of this June, he will have commissioned a total of nine murals commemorating Juneteenth in eight American cities. And it all started in Galveston.

The island just south of Houston is known as the birthplace of Juneteenth because it was there that Union Army Major General Gor
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Two incredible new exhibits just opened at Houston's Menil

Two new exhibits opening Friday at the Menil Drawing Institute look at a pair of relatively obscure mid-century artists who both captured a changing planet and society after World War II.

Like many postwar artists, both Gray Foy and Si Lewen rejected the mechanical precision of realism in favor of more dreamlike scenes. For Foy, those dreams incorporate botanical elements, mysterious worlds, and minute details. Meanwhile, Lewen's works resemble more of a nightmare—the faceless victims of war, t
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Color Factory Houston's new exhibit pays tribute to Texas women

Tina Malhotra, the CEO of Color Factory, lives in Houston. All the same, she was surprised to learn how many famous female singers hail from the Lone Star State. She knew about Beyoncé, Janis Jolpin, and Lizzo, of course. But there were others she didn't know were born here, including Selena Gomez, Hilary Duff, and Tayna Tucker.

That discovery has led to a brand new installation which opened earlier this month at Color Factory Houston called "A Royal (Disco) Ball" that pays homage to more than
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These artists turned Houston's natural beauty into a walking exhibit

Houston may seem like an urban art paradise, but just 40 minutes northeast, at the edge of the Sam Houston National Forest, is a massive 177-acre compound and gallery space founded by two of the city's most influential artists of the past 50 years.

That compound, known as the Locke-Surls Center for Art and Nature, just outside of Splendora, Texas, will host a massive, multidisciplinary outdoor sculpture exhibition co-organized by DiverseWorks, opening April 22 and 23 in honor of Earth Day.

Cal
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Houston author Nick Flynn channels dead mystic in new adaptation

Houston author Nick Flynn has spent the better part of a decade trying to bring an epic poem by Romantic writer William Blake to the stage. During that time, he's endured hurricanes in the North Sea and a global pandemic. Now, a film version of that performance is set to make its world premiere in Houston this weekend at the Silos at Sawyer Yards.

The performance, called The Nine Dreams, will be an immersive experience featuring nine filmed vignettes, each about five minutes long, installed ins
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All the events leading up to Houston's Art Car Parade

Driving around Houston this past weekend, you may have already seen signs of one of the city's most iconic events: the Art Car Parade, now in its 36th year. Whether it's Cheerio the Hippo or that vehicle covered with singing fish, art cars have already begun descending on the Bayou City in preparation for one of the largest outsider art events in the United States.

For the uninitiated, art cars are vehicles that have been modified or embellished in some way. For the most part, art car "cartists
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One of Houston's coolest museums reopens this weekend

After closing for nearly a year, The Printing Museum (TPM) in Houston will reopen April 1 in its new location, a smaller but more flexible space in Midtown Houston.

The museum, founded in 1979, is dedicated to championing the history and power of the printed word. It houses more than 10,000 objects relating to the industry and technology of printing, including antiquities dating back to 3000 BCE. The museum is also well-known for its workshops on papermaking, bookbinding, letterpress printing,
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Houston art-world giant James Harithas dead at 90

James Harithas, who served as director of Houston's Contemporary Arts Museum for a spell in the 1970s before going on to found both Houston's Art Car Museum and Station Museum, has died at the age of 90. His death was first reported by Orange Show curator of programs Pete Gershon on Facebook this weekend. Gershon, who authored a book about Houston's art scene from 1972 to 1985, called Harithas "without a doubt the most influential force on the Houston art scene over the past 50 years."

Harithas
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