Home Events Arts Visual Arts

Visual art studios, artisan retail, and interactive installations: Enjoy local libations and music while you peruse these new art spaces at Canopy.

Keith Sonnier’s videowork from 1973 is the latest to get the big-screen treatment in this ongoing series from your friends at UT's Landmarks program.

It's a picture show. It's an array of motion-picture screenings. It's both of those things, actually, as the cultural instigators at Raw Paw present a night of photography by sophie goodwin, de randle, jackson schwartz, cristelle martins, rachel lacoss, emily basma, and others – and short films by urzulka, jinni j., hannah dubbe, sarah mccaskill, leo aguirre, brittany reeber, derek beck, lars matilda, and many more.

The Asian American Resource Center presents four exhibitions that reflect on community, cultural heritage, and nature in various mediums: "Colours of Life: An Indian Perspective" by Shruti Mehta; "Pink Lotus" by Marcella Kourkova; and the group shows "Everything That Matters" and "Abstractions of AVAFest."

This is an extensive group exhibit focused on the personal philosophies of premiere Austin and Central Texas artists. Sacred geometry, the importance of family, life and death, our connection to nature, and spirituality are among the perspectives that the artists (Randall Reid, Sam Yeates, Jan Heaton, Faustinus Deraet, David Leonard, Denise Fulton, and John Sager, among others) have focused on. What a fine follow-up to that excellent "Lone Star Wild" show, and what a glorious way to bid 2019 farewell!

Tom Bandage, inspired by the machinist’s craft and the volumetric simplicity of Bauhaus, attempts to capture the shape of thought through geometric contortions of material, removing traditional construction materials such as concrete, metal, and acrylic from their urban contexts and applying them to abstract conceptions of form and space.

Sarah Fox's new show at this excellent Eastside gallery is about the nature of little boys and the men that they become. "It is an exhibition," says the artist, "that I made in an attempt to be a better mother and to create a safer world for my son."

Is it too obvious to say "all hail" to this new exhibition of work by that storied creator of graphic psychedelia Matt Rebholz and the modern Magellan of sculptural form and texture Terra Goolsby? In any case, we recommend this "array of intimate pieces that meditates on notions of transfiguration, intracorporeal transit, and planetary departure, offering encounters with bodily and terrestrial alternatives for an uncertain future." It's this sort of thing.

The Visual Arts League of Shalom Austin JCC presents four artists whose works display different techniques of abstraction: Patti Troth Black, Diane Sandlin, Jane Fier, and Ashley Mayel.

The Brazilian artist Lucas Simões "thinks of his new works as drawings, even though they carry no graphite and have some dimensionality. He draws with an industrial laser, cutting angular or curved shapes into blackened steel plates, essentially turning them into elaborate paperclips that pinch, pull, and compress his trademark stacks of tracing paper." It's like … a little metal shibari for sheets of pulp? Ingenious, to be sure, and visually intriguing.

Brooke Burnside, Diego Mireles Duran, and Carlos Rosales-Silva use use their unique perspectives to understand the residues of colonial histories and expand the Western cultural vocabulary to include the traditions of their homelands and ancestors, the visual and the spatial offering an alternative to the codified and inequitable linguistic and logical mathematical approaches that most educational structures are built on.

Let's get small, with works by 53 local artists.

The artist Rehab El Sadek continues her exploration into issues related to immigration, belonging, communication, and language, using sound installation, photography, and the written word to inspire consideration of residential spaces and our relationship to them and to each other. Visitors to this intimate Eastside gallery are invited to add their own reflections on where they live and where they have felt most at home. Note: The closing celebration features a reading by Naomi Shihab Nye and friends.

That's right, one of Austin's best little galleries is back – bigger and better than ever, now in a new space south of the river. And what a way to inaugurate this fresh venue – with a sort of sequel to last year's excellent "Witches" show, this one curated by Laurel Barickman and Katie Cowden and featuring a plethora of artists drawing their subjects from folklore and occultism's darker spaces and from deep inside the shadows of human nature. They're embracing – and displaying – all of it here, though: the light and the dark, the good and the bad, the holy and the evil in everyone. The devil, as we know, is in the details.

From griffins and giants to demons and dragons, monsters have enthralled people throughout time. In medieval art and literature, these fanciful creatures give form to fears, curiosities, and fantasies of the unfamiliar and the unknown. This new exhibition, organized by the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, presents a lively array of monsters that appear in more than 50 illuminated manuscripts from the European Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Each of the three sections of the exhibition – "Terrors, Aliens, and Wonders" – will explore the ways monsters functioned as the embodiment of power, the representation of marginalized groups in society, or the inspiration for awe.

This installation presents new work that expands Lily Cox-Richard’s research into the contextual history of materials, making visible unseen systems that dictate materials’ production, value, and use, and engages larger questions of natural resources, labor, the specifics of place, and the politics of viewership.

The complex relationship between contemporary art and anthropology shapes the subject of "The Sorcerer’s Burden: Contemporary Art and the Anthropological Turn," an 11-artist exhibition representing a wide range of media – including painting, sculpture, photography, video, and performance. And here's our own Robert Faires with a full review of the show.

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?

Here's the 15th annual exhibition at Austin City Hall, presenting a wide array of painting, sculpture, drawing, and other media by 113 local artists. This year, the exhibition includes a special selection of photographs: The Bold Beauty Project of Texas, featuring images of Texas women with disabilities taken by photographers from across the state.

Yeah, no, this is a monumental showing of work – including a series of paintings commissioned for the exhibition – by one of the best, most provocative artists working on this planet. The former Austinite (he taught at UT for 20 years) Michael Ray Charles "is known for art that investigates the legacy of historic racial stereotypes of African Americans. Since the 1990s, he's created complex, layered paintings that challenge stereotypes, power dynamics, and social and cultural hierarchies." Ah, words can't even – but our Arts Editor Robert Faires offers a fine preview right here.

"Inspired by datamoshing, quantum mechanics, and the hyper saturation of imagery found in daily life, Gilmer creates oil paintings that explore the psychological effects of the figure through physical mutations that distort and merge various realities. Benton's figurative ceramics also portray a dialogue of the human condition, using symbolism as well as physical mutations to explore the depths of the subconscious. Less than reality and more than a dream, Benton and Gilmer’s work strives to give the viewer an alternative connection to the self." Note: This stuff will burrow into your optic nerves and make you feel a little weird, maybe, about the odd beauty it contains. So, yes: recommended.

Stephanie Concepcion Ramirez and Betelhem Makonnen explore immigration and transnational identity, political repression, and the impact of silence in family narratives.