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What's your experience of living in this increasingly cybernetic world, citizen? UT's Department of Theatre and Dance presents Erica Gionfriddo's investigation of embodiment and virtual identity, a staged rehearsal of possible realities that uses live streaming, emergent technologies, and performance to explore elements of cyborg and queer theories. We reckon if anyone's going to make this work (and work engagingly), it'll be that ARCOS Dance co-founder Gionfriddo.

Austin Playhouse presents Ev Lunning in a livestreamed exploration of the revered author's historic and enduring influence on the Lone Star State. Sounds good already, but this talk also features dramatic readings from Marc Pouhé, Andrea Osborn Ginder, and Katherine Schroeder. Bonus: Live Q&A follows. Note: It's one night only for this Dickens of a show.

Here's a team of theatre artists from across the country – a cast and crew of nearly 30, with the majority from Austin, but with others from Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and more – presenting the premiere of a brand new musical. Yes, it’s online. And, yes, they’re doing it in quarantine. This musical is a satirical horror comedy that looks at the unsavory ways women are treated in the workplace, with book and lyrics by Mallory Schlossberg and music by Schlossberg and Alexandra Smith. Choreography and movement by Kelly Hasandras. Look: Our Robert Faires interviewed the playwright right here.

Robert Kelly's Live at the Village Underground debuted on Comedy Central and is now available on Netflix; Ms. Pat's been all over your screens, with appearances on NBC, Netflix, Nickelodeon, and probably some nonalliterative national nodes as well. It's a good time to catch these two comics live onstage at the Paramount this weekend, y'think?

This is a group show by relay, begun in July of 2020 as a method of socially distancing a community in the height of the pandemic: Artists took turns alone in the space, each adding to the exhibition. Now, as it nears its close, the exhibition resembles a community in which work converses and overlaps. With Adreon Henry, Vy Ngo, Dawn Okoro, Leon Alesi, Matt Steinke, Sev Coursen, Stella Alesi, and more.

Here's a one-man show that explores the social and historical conditions that led to the development of Conjunto music as an expression of cultural resistance and liberation, written and performed by Nicolás Valdez, streaming online via the Teatro Vivo website.

Enjoy Thanksgiving weekend with the Venardos Circus just up the road a piece, when the roving company of amazing acrobats and shimmering showpeople returns to live-audience performances in a Broadway-style, animal-free production at Buck’s Backyard in Buda.

Hey, you! Globally aware art connoisseur! Don't miss this show of bold visuals from some of the most famous European street artists – like Banksy, Striker, Zero, and Cee Pil – now sharing wall space with works by Austin's own Jason Eatherly, Dave Lowell, and that Impossible Winterbourne.

Lauren Briére’s art escorts the viewer on a visual journey into outer space, the fun of sports, walks in nature, and various adventures and shenanigans, as Art for the People showcases 200-plus sketches that are the artist's penciled beginnings to creating her whimsical "Robots in Rowboats."

The local powerhouse of figurative painting, the art school that's the smart school for artists of all kinds, they've got a painting-along-at-home series going to help you keep your skills honed in these socially restrictive times, featuring live costumed models posing on camera and a thriving community of creatives rendering that lovely human biotecture from their separate studios. "Join us for a three-hour costumed-model drawing session. Use any supplies you wish, listen to music, share your work, chat with others. It’s a great way to stay connected with your art community!"

This year – this relentlessly crazy-ass year – Ballet Austin brings their Nutcracker Gift Barre online to offer a great selection of holiday gifts, including nutcrackers, ornaments, tiaras, and T-shirts – with curbside pickup, delivery, or beyond-Austin shipping available. Note: 100% of proceeds will benefit Ballet Austin.

This show features images by activist photographers of the Civil Rights Movement, telling a visual story of the struggle against segregation, race-based disenfranchisement, and Jim Crow laws in the 1960s. These photos capture the day-to-day struggles of everyday citizens and their resolve in the face of violence and institutionalized discrimination – with more than a dozen additional images representing activism and protest in Austin's own history.

If anyone can make sense out of this dumpster fire of a year, it's probably the artists of Camiba. Valerie Fowler, Edward Lane McCartney, Kate Bradshaw, Lee Albert Hill, Orna Feinstein, Adreon Henry, Zoe Schulman, and more – these bright talents will provide much food for thought and images to conjure with as we slide into what we can only hope isn't the out-of-the-frying-pan-and-into-the-fire situation of 2021.

Inspired by the Mexican American Cultural Center's annual La Mujer celebration – and by the first feminist of the New World, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz – this online group exhibit is curated by April Garcia and features womxn-identifying and nongender-specific artists whose artwork is tied to activism, feminism, cultural. and gender identity storytelling, environmental protection, and socioeconomic parity.

This is a new solo show by Court Lurie, weaving together the artist's large contemporary abstract paintings, poetry, photography, drawings, and installation. New works are curated with older pieces, and poetry written decades ago intermingles with an interactive installation in a robust yet tender homage to the experience of liminality. (And as 2020 begins its palsied lurch into 2021, yeah, this is one hell of an experience of liminality.)

ColdTowne's new brick-and-mortar place is totally open, and who knows what they'll shake this city with next? But one truth remains: ColdTowne is a designated den of gold, baby, sweet comedy gold.

Dimension Gallery's front window features the final installment of part one in their Rising Action series, with new works by Dawn Okoro. Incorporating elements of punk and Nigerian fashion, Okoro’s exhibition personifies the weight placed on Black individuals through the subversive nature of respectability politics – illustrated here by paintings, videos, garments, and jewelry that are informed by punk and compositional techniques used in fashion marketing.

It's the culminating piece of Forklift's year-long residency at Downs Field in East Austin: Portraits of the Downs Field community by photographer Cindy Elizabeth, installed at the field for everyone to see. The project explores the importance of Downs Field to the continual flourishing of baseball in Texas, through the past, present, and future.

Yeah, sometimes we just can't help but pimp – er, we mean promote – this arty bastion that's so up north it makes us think twice as we glance at our long-suffering Isuzu. But, listen, this is a show of reclaimed books that have been altered in extraordinary ways by Janice Anderson and John Sager – via collage, via paint, via outright sculpting of the materials. Anderson is new to us, but we saw a few of Sager's bibliophilic alterations over a decade ago and we're still talking about their beauty even now. Recommended, and definitely worth the trip. (Bonus: Check out the excellent Lark & Owl bookstore while you're there, too.)

The Contemporary Austin's 2020 Crit Group show features work by Annie Arnold, Rakhee Jain Desai, Lydia Garcia, Sean Ripple, Alexandra Robinson, Saul Jerome E. San Juan, Michael Stephen, and Cheyenne Weaver.

This interactive, gallery-style experience inside Austin's Native Hostel "follows the journey of Mesmer, an artist and amateur tinkerer who discovers a secret: we and our universe are not alone. Mesmer opens up a portal and is swallowed into the Multiverse and its infinite cosmic curiosities." The created environment features 15 unique art installations, with multiple paths and possibilities, and you know there'll be safety protocols to follow, too, to thwart those pesky 'ronas. ⁠Note: We'll be looking into this and getting back to you with a full report.

Here's a new exhibition at that Canopy-situated space we love to visit. For "Transmissions," Terra Goolsby and Tammie Rubin have curated a pandemic-inspired show that answers, via a diversity of methods, questions like, "What's performance without the expectations of the traditional shared experiences? How to create intimacy and connection mediated through limited audiences, through projected and virtual transmissions?" And the respondents? Urethra Burns, Veronica Ceci, Antonio Cueto, Chloe Curiel, Michael Anthony García, Jay Roff-Garcia, Ryan Hollaway, Delilah Rose Knuckley, Yuliya Lanina, Brendan Lay, Andrea Muñoz Martinez, Pamela Martinez, Gesel Mason Performance Projects, Teresa Moralez, Jessamyn Leigh Plotts, Alexandra Robinson, LaRissa Rogers, Ivy Roots, and St Celfer. And, listen: The performances are a mix of ICOSA by-appointment time at the venue, Zoom livestreaming and pre-recorded works, ICOSA window performances, and limited-contact open exhibition hours; see the website for times, links, reservations, and more. Recommended: Catch all of the action, or just catch some of it, but don't miss this vivid exploration of WTF-does-performance-mean-in-these-constrained-times?

There, across 14 front yards on Bellvue Avenue: A sign of hope! Signs of hope, actually – the pro-Biden/Harris (or, as the artist puts it, Joe/Kamala) artworks of Austin's David Hefner. It's an excellent opportunity for a lift-up-your-spirits drive-by or walking tour: good stuff, visually, even beyond its message. Also a good excuse – go ahead, do it – to check out that Hefner's website, peruse some of the other works he's done.

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.

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.

Borrowing a metaphor from Fight Club (when Tyler Durden disfigures Angel Face, remember?), this show picks up where the artist’s labored perfection ends and his unbound "self-important vandalism" begins. Yeah? Listen: This is the work of Chad Rea, former advertising copywriter, whose creations are vivid and clever and nigh on unforgettable, whose succinct-as-fuck visual takes on our modern times will kick your eyes' ass in a pleasurable fashion.

Meghann Riepenhoff makes her images with an antiquated photographic printing process – no camera, no lens – and thinks of her work as a collaboration with the ocean, the landscape, and precipitation, her dynamic cyanotypes taking on varying shades of blue to give the impression of water in motion, and much of her work is large enough to feel immersive, almost overwhelming.

Payton McGowen's first solo exhibition with the gallery features nine new acrylic on canvas paintings that explore the idea of returning to nature.

This is a collaborative exhibition by Adrian Aguilera and Betelhem Makonnen, conceived in the wake and continuing aftermath of the Black Lives Matter uprisings that were reignited in May 2020. "Over a series of masked and socially distanced exchanges, mostly in the natural spaces outside both their studios, Aguilera and Makonnen tried to give form to the overwhelming personal and collective emotions of rage, disappointment, exhaustion, and bruised hope that they experienced in the last six months. Cultivating their continuous curiosity about the relationship between symbols and collective identity, transnationality and diaspora perspectives, as well as history's inextricable hold on the present, Aguilera and Makonnen introduce new multimedia work in conversation with existing work to reflect on this (re)current moment in our country." Recommended: Make an appointment for viewing; check out the gallery's front window for a preview.

An exhibition of new collage works by Austin's own Lance Letscher might be just the thing we need to ground us in these tumultuous times. Or, contrarily, to lift us above the unnerving political fray. That whole thing about art "comforting the afflicted," right? Many of us are trending rather afflicted of late, and the artist's painstaking paper creations will, we insist, mitigate that visually, through graphic reinvention of previous forms, offering a reassuring sense of patterns and meaning to our eyes.

Northern-Southern presents an outdoor exhibit of work by Sterling Allen, the entire show arrayed across the exterior grounds of an easily missed, unleased building on West Anderson Lane. Constructed both in his studio and on site, each artwork exists in conjunction with the surrounding environment, slipping between obvious and invisible. Subscribers will be emailed links to a map to the site and information about the works, and they can explore the enhanced grounds themselves.

On August 18, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, giving women the right to vote. On August 6, 2020, the Elisabet Ney Museum debuted this new show for which women photographers nationwide were invited to share photos that comment on the Centennial of the Ratification of the 19th Amendment. The most eloquent images were chosen and are included in this online exhibition.

In the early 20th century, Western artists began exploring abstract, nonrepresentational forms for the first time. Several decades later, abstraction's practitioners experimented with new materials and techniques: Dripping, pouring, staining, and even slinging paint became common, as did the use of non-traditional media such as acrylic and industrial paints. Artists also ditched the flat, rectangular format to create sculptural texture and dimensionality. Now, can you guess whose corporate collection is particularly strong in such paintings of the 1960s and '70s? If you guessed "The Blanton Museum of Art," then you'll especially want to get an eyeful of this major new show, subtitled "Pushing the Boundaries of Painting in the Americas," organized by the venue's own Carter E. Foster.

"My goal at Women & Their Work," says Brianna McIntyre, "is to experiment with textile waste as a viable, usable, buildable material." Using a previous bent lamination shelf design as a template, she'll create structured forms that show the visual continuity and material evolution of the design.

This is Ray Donley's gallery of art by Native Americans, located in that company of artistic glory called Canopy and resplendent with creations from the original people of our struggling country.

That Welsh rabble-rouser, painter extraordinaire, and punk rock pioneer Jon Langford sinks his teeth into the world with new paintings and prints. See what grisly graphic brilliance he's bitten off – via the Yard Dog website or by making an appointment for an in-person visit.