Image: Wikimedia Commons

Last July, Tim Morton, an English professor at Rice, received an e-mail from the Icelandic pop singer and multi-hyphenate Björk. The two had never crossed paths, but Björk had recently read and admired one of Morton’s many books, Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality, which, according to its publisher, "offers a startlingly fresh way to think about causality that takes into account developments in physics since 1900."

Morton had been listening to Björk ever since the 1980s, when the protean singer was drifting in and out of various bands, constantly experimenting with music, and, increasingly, other forms of art. The professor described inviting friends over to his London apartment to listen to a 12-inch LP from one of those bands, 808 State. "I remember playing it over and over and over again," Morton said. "Just poring over it."

Tim Morton

Morton immediately replied to Björk’s e-mail, sparking an intense, three-month-long colloquy—a “mind meld,” as Morton puts it—that roamed widely across philosophy, art, politics, and music. After about three months they began to talk of collaborating on an art project, only to quickly realize that their conversation—which already comprised about 150 pages of text—was itself a kind of artistic work. An edited version of that dialogue has now been published in one of five volumes of Björk: Archives, the companion volume to the Museum of Modern Art’s major new retrospective devoted to the singer.

Despite having spent hours in virtual conversation, Morton and Björk had never actually met, so late last year Morton flew to Iceland to go over the final text of the book. While there, the English professor met Björk’s artist friends, watched her record music for her latest album, and even enjoyed her cooking.

Although he specialized in Romantic literature while a graduate student at Oxford, today Morton is best known in the academy as one of the major proponents of something called object-oriented ontology (OOO), an anti-subjectivist philosophy that seeks to understand the non-human world on its own terms, rather than in relation to us. 

Björk, it turns out, is one of OOO’s biggest fans. “She’s kind of leading the way in how to inhabit a new kind of being in this era,” Morton said. “I think her work is genuinely futuristic, because it’s trying to summon something from the future into the present. And that’s what philosophy does as well. I think art in general is pulled from the future—it’s things we haven’t been able to put into words yet.”  

Image: © Toshio Matsumoto / Photo: PJMIA

Toshio Matsumoto, For the Damaged Right Eye, 1968, film still from triple 16mm (transferred to DVD), collection of the artist

For a New World to Come: Experiments in Japanese Art and Photography, 1968–1979
Thru July 12
$15; Thursdays free
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
1001 Bissonnet St.
713-639-7300
mfah.org 

Last week, a groundbreaking new exhibition devoted to post-WWII Japanese art opened at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. For a New World to Come: Experiments in Japanese Art and Photography, 1968–1979 includes some 250 works ranging from photo books, to short films, to paintings and sculpture, and examines the efflorescence of the Japanese avant-garde in the late ’60s, when, as in Europe and America, a new counterculture rose up to protest government policies and challenge social restrictions.

In Japan, discontent focused specifically on the impending renewal of the country’s controversial security treaty with the US; the massive expense of staging the 1970 Tokyo Expo (which would end up costing the country about as much as it spent in World War II); the American military bases on Okinawa; and the Vietnam War, in which many Japanese citizens felt the country, as a US ally, was complicit. Like their Western counterparts, Japanese students occupied university buildings and staged massive protest marches. Artists swept up in the anti-authoritarian energy used photography, film, and more traditional media to challenge both aesthetic and social convention, often in the pages of avant-garde magazines like the fittingly titled Provoke, which lasted only three issues but introduced the highly influential are bure boke (rough, blurred, out-of-focus) style characteristic of much of the exhibition’s photography.

The exhibition was organized by Yasufumi Nakamori, the MFAH’s associate curator of photography, with the help of Allison Pappas, the museum’s curatorial assistant of photography. Nakamori was born in Japan in 1968 and grew up in Osaka. His major new essay, “Experiments with the Camera: Art and Photography in 1970s Japan,” is included in the 250-page exhibition catalogue along with contributions from 11 other scholars and curators. The show is on view in the MFAH’s Beck Building until July 12, after which portions of it will travel to two New York venues: NYU’s Grey Art Gallery (Sept 11–Dec 5) and The Japan Society (Oct 9–Jan 11).

We sat down with Nakamori and Pappas at the MFAH earlier this week to discuss the show.

Image: © Keizo Kitujima

Keiz? Kitajima, Installation Photograph of the Exhibition Photo Express: Tokyo, 1979, inkjet print, collection of the artist

Houstonia: How did the idea for this exhibition first come about?

Yasufumi: I wrote a dissertation about 10 years ago [at Cornell] focusing on the ’50s and ’60s in Japan. I looked into what happened in architecture during that period, and architects’ collaborations with artists and writers—that kind of cross-pollination of media. The late ’60s are very important, not only for Japan but everywhere in the world—everything was transforming at the time. [Now], as a curator of photography, I wanted to find a way to frame the importance of photography at the time. So naturally we looked into artists, paintings and sculptures, and even architects. I also wanted this exhibition to examine the emergence of photo-conceptualism. There was an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, Light Years[2011], that examined photography and conceptual art, and that show did not have any artists from Asia or Latin America—it was really kind of a North American and European–centric exhibition. Then there were two exhibitions of postwar Japanese art in the last few years in New York, at The Museum of Modern Art [Tokyo 1955–1970: A New Avant-Garde] and the Guggenheim [Gutai: Splendid Playground], but photography was excluded from the dialogue. The MOMA show used photographs only to document performance art.

Pappas: It was didactic. They used them as illustrative material, not works of art. 

Yasufumi: So we felt there was a need for a show focusing on photography as a medium that enabled artists to create their experimental moment as society made a seismic transformation in the late ’60s. Our schools and systems were shutting down because of protests, so the artists in this period had a lot of freedom. And there was strong anti-American sentiment throughout the nation because of the Vietnam War and Japan’s role in it, because of our treaty with America. A lot of research has been done by curators and academics, but photography hasn’t really been discussed at all.

Takuma Nakahira, from Circulation: Date, Place, Events, 1971, gelatin silver print, printed 2012, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum purchase funded by Joan Morgenstern, Peter Lotz, and Photo Forum 2013.

Why do you think that is? 

Yasufumi: From the perspective of Japanese art history, photographic history is relatively neglected. It is important, people realize that, but it still comes second to mainstream art history. And there aren’t enough people who cover that kind of history in the US—there’s only about five of them, basically. And also I think it’s getting harder to do nation-focused exhibitions, because art, after all, is a global practice. But this show is not just about Japanese art and photography; it’s about how the artists relate to the wider global dialogue on photo-conceptualism. So this show has many roles other than just showing specific works and artists from Japan. 

Pappas: It strikes me that when people have focused specifically on photography in postwar Japanese art, they celebrate Provoke—that’s the work that we show in the first gallery—as the culmination of what was happening. That was so critical and so influential and so important that it’s gotten all the attention. It’s just that people haven’t really taken the next step to move into the following decade. 

Yasufumi: There have been a few exhibitions focusing on the are bore boke style—the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art did a kind of superficial exhibition devoted to that aesthetic. But I thought it was important to discuss what happened after that, in the ’70s.

Shigeo Goch?, from Self and Others, 1975–77, gelatin silver print, printed 1992, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum purchase funded by the Meyer Levy Charitable Foundation. © Hiroichi Goch?

My understanding from the exhibition is that in the ’70s Japanese art turned away from the political a bit. It started looking more inward, became more formalist, sort of like in the US with post-minimalism. Why do you think after that tremendous burst of cultural energy in the late ’60s there was a cooling down in the ’70s? 

Yasufumi: There was a kind of big bang—there was the Tokyo Expo in 1970, and the security treaty was renewed the same year. I would really argue that the Japanese avant-garde—in art, music, photography, literature, and so on—ended in the late ’60s. It was a worldwide phenomenon—look at someone like Michael Graves, who passed away last week. Postmodern architecture really emerged in the ’70s.

Allison: I think it’s also cyclical—every time you have an artistic movement that’s so extreme and breaks so many boundaries, you have to take stock and see where you go from there. That moment of pause is almost built into such an explosion. 

Yasufumi: The Expo was an incredible national event. It cost Japan as much as the war, basically. So when that was achieved, there was a kind of fall from that. There was a loss of shared objectives among radical thinkers and creative professionals. And of course the oil crisis was a big deal in Japan—it caused an economic recession. I grew up in the ’70s myself, so I grew up in post-Expo culture. And I’ve always been very curious about the ’70s.

Shigeo Goch?, from Familiar Street Scenes, 1978–80, chromogenic print, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum purchase funded by Joan Morgenstern. © Hiroichi Goch?

What are your memories of growing up in that environment? 

Yasufumi: I remember this Expo tower—it’s a sculptural piece. All the Expo pieces sort of became ruins, because they were meant to be taken down after six months. I remember the remnants of the war. I would go to one particular museum in downtown Osaka with my father as a child—age 7 or something. To get to that museum we had to go through a tunnel, and I remember seeing some people who didn’t have their legs and arms, and they were still wearing their army uniforms—those were the veterans of the war. 30 years after the war there were still people who carried the physical memories. So the ’70s were complex, personally—it was a mix of the past and the future. 

Did people talk about the war?

Yasufumi: Oh yes, people talked about it. But the cities had been rebuilt—Osaka was rebuilt by the end of the ’50s, I think. So there was an interesting gap between what I heard about the past and what I saw growing up. Most of the scholarship done on postwar Japanese art stops at 1970, for the reason I discussed. We feel that the avant-garde died at the end of the ’60s, so there’s not much research on the ’70s and afterward. 

Do you agree with that assessment, that the avant-garde is dead?

Yasufumi: Yes, I do. Don’t you?

Book Signing: Texas Abstract
March 28 from 3 to 6
Beck Building
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
5601 Main St.
713-639-7300
mfah.org 

Around 30 major contemporary Texas artists from every corner of the state will converge tomorrow at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston to celebrate the publication of Texas Abstract, a major new survey of 20th- and 21st-century avant-garde painting and sculpture that was published in December by Fresco Books. Those gathering to sign books and answer questions include well-known Houston-based artists Terrell James, Pat Colville and Gertrude Barnstone, as well as painters from El Paso, San Antonio, Austin and Dallas. (See full list at bottom of story.) 

The book was co-written by Denver-based art critic Michael Paglia and Jim Edwards, the director of the UAC Contemporary Art Gallery at Houston Baptist University. Paglia, an expert on Western and Southwestern art, writes a weekly column for Denver alt-weekly Westword and has also published a book on 20th-century Colorado abstract art. Texas Abstract tracks the rise of non-representational art in the state from its first emergence in the 1930s and ’40s among a small handful of painters, mostly in the major urban centers, to its widespread adoption by contemporary artists. 

Michael Paglia

“Even in New York, artists before the 1930s were very resistant to abstraction,” Paglia said. (New York’s famous Armory Show of 1913, which introduced many Americans to the work of European painters like Picasso and Duchamp, was roundly ridiculed in the American media.) “Stuart Davis would be the exception. But it was really the 1930s with abstract surrealism, and the 1940s with abstract expressionism, that really made abstraction mainstream.”

Texas lagged well behind New York in artistic terms, but it wasn’t long before artists here began experimenting with abstract painting themselves. In Houston, art teachers Ola McNeill Davidson and Emma Richardson Cherry introduced their students to the work of the pioneering European modernists, although their own work remained steadfastly representational. “When I started this project I knew a lot about Texas art, but I also learned a lot,” Paglia told me. “One thing I learned is that Houston is the most important art city in Texas. In the 1930s and ’40s, Houston had the most advanced scene in Texas, and today of course there’s such a rich scene.”

Although the book focuses on artists who were pushing the boundaries, that doesn’t mean they were representative of the broader Texas art market, which has remained relatively conservative. “One of the things that struck me in doing research is how persistent more conservative forms of art were in Texas at the same time that these abstract artists were working,” Paglia said. “A lot of artists who were taken seriously were doing more reactionary work, so these abstract artists were pretty courageous, especially for being in the middle of nowhere.” 

Today, of course, Texas is as plugged into the international art world as any other state. The latest developments in art anywhere in the world are almost instantly available online, and the ease of travel allows artists to attend biennials across the globe. Given our growing interconnectedness, what does it mean to be a Texas artist these days? Is there such a thing? Paglia said he struggles with that question. “I’m very invested in the idea that there are these regional centers with distinct identities. Then again, artists in the ’40s would have had to go to Chicago to see abstraction. Well, now anyone with an Internet connection can see the latest art, so that has a universalizing effect.”

Here's the most up-to-date list of the artists scheduled to attend tomorrow's event:

David Aylsworth, Gertrude Barnstone, Kristen Cliburn, Lucinda Cobley, Pat Colville, Brad Ellis, Ibsen Espada, Garland Fielder, Henri Gadbois, Linnea Glatt, Larry Graeber, Sam Gummelt, Roberta Harris, Jane Helslander, Jane Honovich, Terrell James, Michael Kennaugh, Leila McConnell, Jesús Moroles, Steve Murphy, Tom Orr, McKay Otto, Aaron Parazette, John Pomara, Sam Reveles, Robert Rogan, Margo Sawyer, George Schroeder, Howard Sherman, Charlotte Smith, Richard Stout, Lorraine Tady, Mac Whitney, Leslie Wilkes, and Sydney Yeager.

Image: Robert Kluijver

Islamic Violins, Edition II

Every January, artists and art professionals from around the world descend on New York City for the annual conference of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters. Over the years, numerous smaller conferences and festivals have sprung up around the event, so arts presenters spend the week meeting artists, booking performances, and commissioning new works. It’s a bit like speed dating, said Karen Farber, the executive director of UH’s Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts. In one popular event, presenters like Farber get precisely 10 minutes each with a selection of artists.

“It’s a pitch session, but a pitch session with completely visionary, experimental, interesting artists,” Farber said. “Usually after it’s finished the event dissolves into a lot of people sitting around tables, chatting with artists. A lot of programming happens right there.”

The result of all that pitching and dating can be seen at Houston’s second annual CounterCurrent Festival this month, six days of daring, cutting-edge performance art sponsored by the Mitchell Center. While the fest is headquartered at the FlexSpace gallery in Montrose, performances will take place at locations across the city, from Project Row Houses to 13 Celsius, the Midtown wine bar.

One of the festival’s nine featured works—or projects, as Farber prefers to call them—is Kenyan-born, Amsterdam- and Berlin-based multimedia artist Ibrahim Quraishi’s latest work in his series “Islamic Violins,” an art installation (and play on words) comprising approximately 20 used violins from Middle Eastern countries currently at war, including Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Quraishi traveled around the Middle East acquiring the violins, had them shipped to his Berlin studio, and then fixed them up, applying polish, lacquer, and white paint, a process that took about five days per instrument. In the exhibition the identical white violins will dangle from the ceiling.

Violins, Quraishi said, originated in the Middle Ages in the Muslim culture of Central Asia but later became symbols of cosmopolitanism and sophistication in Europe, serving as a symbolic bridge between Islam and Christianity. Judaism too found a place for violins, but under the Third Reich Jews were prohibited from playing the instruments in public. Countries like Saudi Arabia also ban their playing, which violates Sharia law. “It has many levels of resonance,” Quraishi said. “It implicates ideas of sound, history, culture, values.”

The artist’s installation will include video of his first work in the series, in which Quraishi wired dozens of violins with explosives and timed them to blow up once an hour on the hour at a gallery in Vienna while spectators watched. “There were small pieces of Semtex I obtained for each violin—legally, of course. Security considerations and all that. It’s controlled, it’s artistic, but it is an explosive element. And you know, some people were shocked, others were laughing. Because it was in Vienna, some people thought I was making fun of Mozart!”

We couldn’t help but wonder: will there be any violence in his Houston installation? “There always is, isn’t there?” he said, grinning mischievously. “It’ll be a surprise.”

CounterCurrent Festival April 14–19. Free. Various locations. countercurrentfestival.org

Image: Courtesy Houston Museum of Natural Science

Mask of human-animal composite creature, c. 1250–1100 BCE. Bronze. Excavated at Sanxingdui, Pit II.

In 1929, a peasant in the village of Sanxingdui, in China’s Sichuan Province, was repairing a sewage ditch behind his house when he discovered a long pit filled with peculiar-looking bronze, jade, ivory and stone artifacts. Although a few of these found their way into antique markets, the site was mostly ignored for the next 50 years while China went through a series of epochal upheavals: the second Sino-Japanese War, World War II, the Communist revolution, and Mao’s Cultural Revolution—the latter a massive rejection of Chinese history and tradition that ensured the site remained unexplored until Deng Xiaoping’s reforms of the 1980s.

When Chinese archeologists finally began digging in 1986, they quickly discovered a second pit also filled with strange objects, which were soon dated to around 1800 BCE. The Houston Museum of Natural Science’s new exhibition, China’s Lost Civilization: The Mystery of Sanxingdui, organized by the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, California, will include about 125 artifacts from the dig—none of which have ever traveled outside China. Thanks to the HMNS’s longstanding ties to the Bowers—for which it can thank recent exhibitions dedicated to the Silk Road and the Terracotta Warriors—Houston will be the only other city in the world to host these rare objects outside of Sanxingdui.

Unlike the Terracotta Warriors, which have been exhaustively studied, archeologists still know little about the Sanxingdui artifacts, which are made up of masks, pottery, jewelry, weapons and other objects whose purpose hasn’t yet been determined. Thanks in part to the absence of written inscriptions on any of the objects, scholars don’t even know why they were buried; no human remains have been found nearby, so it doesn’t appear that they were part of a funeral ceremony. Then there’s the matter of their appearance. “It’s not a technical term, but they are truly weird,” said Dirk Van Tuerenhout, the HMNS’s curator of anthropology. “They were burned and twisted into all kinds of forms before they were buried, and we have no idea why that is—it remains an enigma.” One piece represents a face so strange-looking that some have referred to it as the Alien Head. “It’s not like the Terracotta Warriors, where you can say, ‘These are generals, these are archers, these are foot soldiers,’” Van Tuerenhout said.

Even stranger is the fact that Sanxingdui was almost 1,000 miles from the center of Chinese civilization at the time, located near the present-day city of Nanjing on China’s east coast, yet the objects show extraordinary skill and sophistication. One artifact looks like a wheel with spokes (another mystery—it’s too flimsy to have served as an actual wheel) that was soldered together from six individually cast bronze pieces. Elsewhere, in what had been considered the more technically advanced parts of the country, metalworkers hadn’t yet learned how to solder. “It’s interesting for archeologists, because they always dismissed that part of China as a backwater, so nobody went out to dig there,” Van Tuerenhout said. “But if you don’t dig, you won’t find anything.”

China’s Lost Civilization: The Mystery of Sanxingdui

Opens April 10. $20. Houston Museum of Natural Science, 5555 Hermann Park Dr. 713-639-4629. hmns.org

Image: Portrait by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

Michael Petry

The Campbell Lecture Series: Michael Petry
April 7, 8, & 9 at 6
Rice Media Center
Rice University
6100 Main St., Entrance 8
713-348-6072
campbell.rice.edu 

When pioneering installation artist Michael Petry was applying to colleges in the late 1970s, he was accepted by a number of famous schools. At none of them, however, would he be able to double major in studio art and mathematics—none of them except Rice University. In some ways, Rice was a natural choice. Petry’s father was from Houston, and his great-grandfather had worked as a chef at Rice in its early years.

Growing up in El Paso, Petry displayed a precocious interest in both art and mathematics. “I felt very strongly from a very young age that I was going to be an artist,” he told me. “At the age of 5 I asked my parents if I could take classes at the El Paso Art Museum.”

After graduating as the valedictorian of his high school class, he matriculated at Rice, eventually earning his BA in 1981. This week he returns to his alma mater as part of Rice's Campbell Lecture Series—a prestigious annual humanities series that has previously brought to campus poet Robert Pinsky, novelist Zadie Smith and literary critic Stanley Fish. Petry’s three free public lectures—which he’ll deliver tonight, Wednesday night and Thursday night at the Rice Media Center—will, like the previous Campbell Lectures, later be published as a book by the University of Chicago Press.

At Rice, Petry worked with Dominique de Menil, helping install shows at the Rice Art Barn (which was demolished last year despite protests from faculty, students and alumni). After graduating, he moved to England, where he’s lived ever since, earning degrees from London Guildhall and Middlesex universities while rising to acclaim as a leading avant-garde artist and curator.

During Petry's time at Rice, neo-expressionist painters like Julian Schnabel and Jules Olitski were in vogue, but their brand of flamboyant (and highly lucrative) exhibitionism didn’t appeal to Petry. Instead, he gravitated toward creating temporary works of art meant to be ephemeral—which also meant that they were almost impossible to sell.

“Back then we didn’t really have a name for what we were doing,” Petry said. “In New York it was the big flashy paintings of Schnabel, and it was all about money. And I was doing things that couldn’t be sold—people told me I was crazy.” 

Eventually, what he and his friends were doing did get a name—Installation Art (1994), the title of Petry’s first book, which helped popularize the new multi-media art form. He also undertook daring artistic explorations of homoeroticism in the arts, publishing Hidden Histories: 20th-Century Male Same Sex Lovers in the Visual Arts in 2004, the first major survey of the subject, in conjunction with an exhibition at The New Art Gallery Walsall.

In his Rice lectures, Petry will look back on his long, productive career. “That’s been the most difficult thing,” he said. “How do you take 35 years of work and make sense of it in an hour? It’s just impossible. And the work looks very different over the different periods—it looks like it’s been made by about 30 or 40 different people. However, it’s all very conceptual, and it’s all been made in response to what’s been going on in my life.”

One constant for Petry is his interest in mathematics, the subject that brought him to Rice in the first place. “I thought when I graduated from Rice that I would never use mathematics again, but of course I’ve gone on to use it throughout my career,” he said. “In mathematics you can refer to a proof as beautiful, and what you mean by that is that it takes the minimal number of steps to get to the solution. That’s different from what most artists would think of as beautiful. If you tell an artist today that something they made is beautiful, they would generally take that as an insult, because that really means it’s vapid and superficial. So I’m trying to sort of rehabilitate the idea of beauty.” 

Image: Courtesy of the artist

Mahwish Chisty, Untitled, 2015.

FotoFest: Sensor
Thru May 9
Free
Silver Street Studios
2000 Edwards St. 
713-223-5522
fotofest.org 

Yesterday, President Obama announced that US drones had accidentally killed two innocent hostages, an American and an Italian, in a strike against an Al Qaeda camp in Pakistan in January. The news was merely the latest development in the controversial recent history of American drone warfare, which began in Afghanistan after 9/11 and has since expanded into Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, and other Middle Eastern countries. Although early versions of so-called Unmanned Aerial Vehicles were used in World War I, UAVs, better known as drones, have come to play a leading role in US counterterrorism operations over the past decade.

Sensor, an ongoing exhibition at Silver Street Studios presented by FotoFest, showcases work by six international artists who critically examine the implications of our increasing reliance on drones in combat zones around the world. Approaching the mammoth Silver Street complex, you find yourself walking over a life-sized painted outline of a Predator UAV, a sinister-looking machine with a 50-foot wingspan similar to the one that killed the hostages in Pakistan; inside the warehouse-like exhibition space, there’s another outline of the even larger Reaper UAV. (See an earlier example of the same work below.) Both were created by British artist and writer James Bridle and are intended to give viewers a visceral sense of the drones’ menace—these are not the small, innocuous drone copters that deliver Domino’s pizza.

Image: Courtesy of the artist

James Bridle, Drone Shadow 007, London, 2014

“Bridle says that you have to draw the world in order to understand it,” said the exhibition’s curator, Jennifer Ward. “And I think that’s so true.” 

The other artists in the exhibition “draw the world” in other ways. Trevor Paglen, whose work also appeared in the Contemporary Arts Museum’s 2013 show about contemporary graphic design, displays a video taken from a hacked drone feed, allowing viewers to see what the UAV’s American-based controllers saw. Lisa Barnard takes classically composed still-life photographs of Hellfire missile fragments from the mountains of Pakistan’s Waziristan region. She also creates gorgeous blue aerial landscape photographs of the same region, evoking a drone's-eye perspective of the world (see below). 

Image: Courtesy of the artist

Lisa Barnard, Landscape #8, from the series Too Thin, Too Blue, 2012. Project Whiplash Transition, 2010-2014

Ward said that some visitors, attracted by the photographs’ beauty, were shocked to learn what they actually depicted. “They were drawn by Lisa’ blue landscapes, but they didn’t really realize what they were looking at,” she said. “They were intrigued and kind of put off by being captivated by an aesthetic image and then learning what it’s really about. It’s like her photographs of the missile parts—they’re aesthetically pleasing, but then you realize that that these are used to kill people.”  

Sensor follows in the long tradition of socially conscious FotoFest exhibitions; previous shows have addressed global warming, the war on drugs, and border issues. Last year’s FotoFest Biennial was dedicated to photography from the Arab world, much of it explicitly political. Ward first became interested in the subject of drone warfare back in 2010, when some of Paglen’s work was included in a FotoFest exhibition. Then, in 2013, she encountered a digital work by the data visualization studio Pitch Interactive, “Out of Sight, Out of Mind,” that allows viewers to see data on every known drone strike carried out in Pakistan between 2004 and 2013, as well as every victim of those strikes. That work, which is available online and also included in the current exhibition, spurred Ward to find other artists whose work also addressed the subject. 

“That piece blew my mind,” Ward said. “You see information ordered and structured like that—every drone that’s been used, every Hellfire missile that’s been fired. It’s unbelievable, because we’re not given information about that. You hear about it in the news sometimes, but you don’t see the full picture.”

Image: Courtesy Dan Dunn

Dan Dunn, speed painter

On a warm, sunny afternoon a few months ago we took a scenic drive through rural Montgomery County, passing churches, fields of grazing cattle and the sprawling estates of the landed gentry before finally arriving at an ordinary-looking two-story home on a shady, quietly prosperous street in Magnolia. Inside, we were greeted by a man wearing a formal black tailcoat and clip-on black bowtie. The tailcoat was spattered with paint in every color of the rainbow, as if an enormous bag of Skittles had exploded in his hands. 

Dan Dunn, 57 years old and perhaps the world’s greatest speed painter, usually dresses more casually for his performances—jeans, an untucked dress shirt and Chuck Taylors. He buys the jeans and shirts online, in bulk, since he has to dispose of them after every gig. But for fancier events, like charity galas or the show he’s doing with the Houston Symphony this month, he brings out the tailcoats. Dunn found this one at a garage sale. “This is after just one performance,” he tells me, gesturing at his attire. 

Growing up in Spring Branch, Dunn dreamed of drawing Spiderman comics. Instead, after studying art at Sam Houston State, he drifted through a series of advertising and graphic design jobs before eventually discovering his true métier as a caricaturist. Soon Dunn was being hired to provide entertainment at parties all over the city. The growing demand for his services—his ability to draw a caricature in five minutes helped ease his late-career transition into speed painting—forced Dunn to hire other local artists. At its peak, the company he founded employed around a dozen caricaturists and worked 200 events a year. “I became the top caricaturist in Houston, working the bar mitzvah circuit and all that,” he says. “I put five kids through school on that.”  

But in 2004, Dunn reached a personal crisis—his family was swamped in credit card debt, and caricatures just weren’t paying the bills anymore. He thought back to 1981, when he saw Denny Dent (yes, a real name, just like Dan Dunn) appear on The Late Show with David Letterman. A scraggly-looking artist with an unkempt beard and a beer belly, Dent had nonetheless painted a profile of Jimi Hendrix in approximately two minutes. “I started screaming for my wife,” Dunn remembers. “I said, ‘Oh my God, this guy has invented a new kind of rock and roll! Look at what he’s doing!’” 

Years later, while suffering from financial woes, Dunn discovered that Dent—a speed painting pioneer—had recently died, which left the field open to potential successors. Dunn rented a 12-by-14-foot storage shed in Spring Branch and spent the next nine months learning to paint really fast. His first public appearance was in 2004 at The Woodlands’s annual Fourth of July festival, Red Hot and Blue, although his breakthrough moment came two years later when a producer in Atlantic City booked him as part of a variety revue at Resorts Casino. Video of that show, in which Dunn used a rotating easel to paint a tabletop-size portrait of Ray Charles in a little under six minutes, became an early viral sensation on YouTube. (At its peak, the clip was the site’s 45th most viewed.)

Fame, and even some fortune, followed. Since then, Dunn has performed in 27 countries, from Nigeria to Azerbaijan, and appeared at countless fundraising events and halftime shows. He’s performed twice at Madison Square Garden too, but his favorite memory is a 2010 appearance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. (“He’s a prince, and he was a fan of my work.”) To Dunn, it felt like following in his idol Dent’s footsteps. 

For his Houston Symphony performance, which will be led by Principal Pops Conductor Michael Krajewski, Dunn plans to execute between eight and ten paintings—more than double the number in his standard act—so he’s been rehearsing 12 hours a day in his studio while soaking up the music to which he’ll be painting. “I’m a rock and roll guy, and this is classical, so for the last year or so I’ve just been listening to more and more classical, trying to get some education along those lines,” he said. “I listen to The Planets”—selections from which will be on the program—“all the time around here now. That’s fantastic music. But I keep coming to Michael and going, like, can we do ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ or something?”

Image: Flickr

Several of David Addickes's giant presidential heads

Houston is the town too busy for taste, the town that loves its big gestures and its shiny things. From Heritage Plaza downtown, a nondescript steel and glass skyscraper that for reasons inexplicable sports an ersatz Mayan temple on its roof, to J.J. Watt—pitchman, sackmaster, shimmering gift from the Hall of Odin—Houston is a haven for stuff that’s enormous and loud and just a little bit goofy. Clutch City? Nah, man. We’re Kitsch City. 

This is not a criticism. Houston is the most refreshingly honest metropolis in the state, maybe the entire country. We like what we like. We is who we is. We ain’t too pretty, we ain’t too proud, we might be talking a bit too loud, but that never hurt no one, am I right? 

Consider our neighbors: Dallas is the Hyacinth Bucket of cities, its veneer of culture and breeding hiding chaos, all grit and grime and gridlock, to say nothing of the eerie jack-o-lantern visage of Jerry Jones. San Antonio’s entire economy is based on a couple of mediocre restaurants along a glorified drainage ditch, and the citizenry’s unreasoning veneration of an ancient, crumbling pile that should have been dismantled and forgotten years ago. But enough about the Spurs.

Image: Flickr

Heritage Plaza and its faux Mayan temple

Austin? Austin is an enormous Whole Foods Market, overpriced and overhyped, the parking lot filled with Mercedes GL350s sporting decals that say things like “My Child Plays Lacrosse at a Private School So Exclusive You’ve Never Even Heard of It.” The gentle hippies remain, a sad troupe of performance artists with dreads and Greenpeace buttons working the registers—just enough somnambulistic inefficiency to delude you into thinking that the place is still Weird. As for El Paso, well, I have no beef with El Paso.

Houston isn’t like those other places. Unlike Dallas, Houston doesn’t suffer from pretentions, or delusions of grandeur. This is Texans Country, the one place in the state where the Spirit of the Bull trumps Cowboy Pride. To date, the Texans’ greatest achievement is Bill O’Brien’s chin dimple. It’s hard to be insufferable when you’re a Texans fan.  

We don’t wallow in nostalgia like San Antonio. Earl Campbell finished his career with the New Orleans Saints; Hakeem Olajuwon got traded to the Toronto Raptors; and if the Alamo had been in downtown Houston, we would have replaced it with a parking lot and a Burger King years ago. Our weirdness is honest weirdness, without a shred of self-awareness or irony, the weirdness that comes from being completely comfortable with who you are, and completely unconcerned with what the rest of the world thinks about it. 

Image: Flickr

Memorial Hermann Memorial City Medical Center and its glass crown

I know a lady in Houston who puts up her Christmas tree in July, a garish silvery thing with white twinkling lights and blue ornaments, simply because that tree really makes her happy. Do that in Austin and some pale dude in a thrift store vest and a pair of Chuck Taylors will interview you for his blog, praising you for your wry commentary on commercialism and social conventions, and asking if you happen to have Monika Rostvold’s phone number.

Houston is just Houston. This is a young city, even by American standards, and like impetuous youth everywhere, what we like is driven less by training and culture than by unrefined enthusiasm. We’ve got no time for John Ruskin’s “Let it not be for present delight nor for present use alone” soberness; the only question we ask is, “Does it look cool?”

This “Does it look cool?” aesthetic gave us such sublimely, unrepentantly kitschy public monuments as the Water Wall and the strangely phallic Williams Tower, the Galleria’s answer to the age-old question, “Is that a Philip Johnson skyscraper in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?” On the corner of Westheimer and Dairy Ashford, a strip center parking lot is ringed by large replicas of ancient Greek statuary, smiling nymphs in gauzy robes bidding welcome as you head to the pawn shop. A bank off Highway 59 is modeled faithfully after Monticello, complete with the drive-thru window Jefferson surely would have added to the original, if only he had thought of it.  Further north, Memorial Hermann Memorial City Medical Center’s bland beige box is topped with an enormous glass headdress, like something Cher would wear to the Oscars. At night, blue and red lasers shoot from it; you can see them for miles. It’s overblown. It’s ridiculous. And it looks cool.

Image: Flickr

The Williams Tower

We do have places of genuine culture, places like the Menil Collection, but they’re the civic equivalent of a dinner menu pulled from the pages of an Alice Waters cookbook, specially prepared to impress guests: delicious, but not our everyday fare. The rest of Houston, the real Houston, is more of a deep-fried-Oreo-at-the-monster-truck-rally, humongous-roasted-turkey-leg-whilst-mingling-with-inebriated-women-at-the-Renaissance-Fair kind of place. Our teenager tastes tend to be big, brash and completely unsubtle, like a six-pack of Taco Bell Volcano Tacos, or Kate Upton.

If there is a patron saint of Houston art and design, it must be David Addickes, the visionary who gave us the giant cello player near the Wortham and the Easter Island–worthy collection of oversized presidential busts that are best viewed while driving past downtown on I-10. (There’s nothing more Houston than art that must be viewed from the highway.) An Addickes work is insane and awful and huge and concrete, but weirdly loveable, too—just like Houston. It might not be Art, but it does look cool, and that’s good enough for us. In the immortal words of Marvin Zindler, another icon of Houston kitsch: “Whatever makes you happy.” This is Houston, so go big!

Or go to Dallas.

On a warm, sunny afternoon a few months ago we took a scenic drive through rural Montgomery County, passing churches, fields of grazing cattle and the sprawling estates of the landed gentry before finally arriving at an ordinary-looking two-story home on a shady, quietly prosperous street in Magnolia. Inside, we were greeted by a man wearing a formal black tailcoat and clip-on black bowtie. The tailcoat was spattered with paint in every color of the rainbow, as if an enormous bag of Skittles had exploded in his hands. 

Dan Dunn, 57 years old and perhaps the world’s greatest speed painter, usually dresses more casually for his performances—jeans, an untucked dress shirt and Chuck Taylors. He buys the jeans and shirts online, in bulk, since he has to dispose of them after every gig. But for fancier events, like charity galas or the show he’s doing with the Houston Symphony this month, he brings out the tailcoats. Dunn found this one at a garage sale. “This is after just one performance,” he tells me, gesturing at his attire. 

Growing up in Spring Branch, Dunn dreamed of drawing Spiderman comics. Instead, after studying art at Sam Houston State, he drifted through a series of advertising and graphic design jobs before eventually discovering his true métier as a caricaturist. Soon Dunn was being hired to provide entertainment at parties all over the city. The growing demand for his services—his ability to draw a caricature in five minutes helped ease his late-career transition into speed painting—forced Dunn to hire other local artists. At its peak, the company he founded employed around a dozen caricaturists and worked 200 events a year. “I became the top caricaturist in Houston, working the bar mitzvah circuit and all that,” he says. “I put five kids through school on that.”  

But in 2004, Dunn reached a personal crisis—his family was swamped in credit card debt, and caricatures just weren’t paying the bills anymore. He thought back to 1981, when he saw Denny Dent (yes, a real name, just like Dan Dunn) appear on The Late Show with David Letterman. A scraggly-looking artist with an unkempt beard and a beer belly, Dent had nonetheless painted a profile of Jimi Hendrix in approximately two minutes. “I started screaming for my wife,” Dunn remembers. “I said, ‘Oh my God, this guy has invented a new kind of rock and roll! Look at what he’s doing!’” 

Years later, while suffering from financial woes, Dunn discovered that Dent—a speed painting pioneer—had recently died, which left the field open to potential successors. Dunn rented a 12-by-14-foot storage shed in Spring Branch and spent the next nine months learning to paint really fast. His first public appearance was in 2004 at The Woodlands’s annual Fourth of July festival, Red Hot and Blue, although his breakthrough moment came two years later when a producer in Atlantic City booked him as part of a variety revue at Resorts Casino. Video of that show, in which Dunn used a rotating easel to paint a tabletop-size portrait of Ray Charles in a little under six minutes, became an early viral sensation on YouTube. (At its peak, the clip was the site’s 45th most viewed.)

Fame, and even some fortune, followed. Since then, Dunn has performed in 27 countries, from Nigeria to Azerbaijan, and appeared at countless fundraising events and halftime shows. He’s performed twice at Madison Square Garden too, but his favorite memory is a 2010 appearance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. (“He’s a prince, and he was a fan of my work.”) To Dunn, it felt like following in his idol Dent’s footsteps. 

For his Houston Symphony performance, which will be led by Principal Pops Conductor Michael Krajewski, Dunn plans to execute between eight and ten paintings—more than double the number in his standard act—so he’s been rehearsing 12 hours a day in his studio while soaking up the music to which he’ll be painting. “I’m a rock and roll guy, and this is classical, so for the last year or so I’ve just been listening to more and more classical, trying to get some education along those lines,” he said. “I listen to The Planets”—selections from which will be on the program—“all the time around here now. That’s fantastic music. But I keep coming to Michael and going, like, can we do ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ or something?”

Houston is the town too busy for taste, the town that loves its big gestures and its shiny things. From Heritage Plaza downtown, a nondescript steel and glass skyscraper that for reasons inexplicable sports an ersatz Mayan temple on its roof, to J.J. Watt—pitchman, sackmaster, shimmering gift from the Hall of Odin—Houston is a haven for stuff that’s enormous and loud and just a little bit goofy. Clutch City? Nah, man. We’re Kitsch City. 

This is not a criticism. Houston is the most refreshingly honest metropolis in the state, maybe the entire country. We like what we like. We is who we is. We ain’t too pretty, we ain’t too proud, we might be talking a bit too loud, but that never hurt no one, am I right? 

Consider our neighbors: Dallas is the Hyacinth Bucket of cities, its veneer of culture and breeding hiding chaos, all grit and grime and gridlock, to say nothing of the eerie jack-o-lantern visage of Jerry Jones. San Antonio’s entire economy is based on a couple of mediocre restaurants along a glorified drainage ditch, and the citizenry’s unreasoning veneration of an ancient, crumbling pile that should have been dismantled and forgotten years ago. But enough about the Spurs.

Austin? Austin is an enormous Whole Foods Market, overpriced and overhyped, the parking lot filled with Mercedes GL350s sporting decals that say things like “My Child Plays Lacrosse at a Private School So Exclusive You’ve Never Even Heard of It.” The gentle hippies remain, a sad troupe of performance artists with dreads and Greenpeace buttons working the registers—just enough somnambulistic inefficiency to delude you into thinking that the place is still Weird. As for El Paso, well, I have no beef with El Paso.

Houston isn’t like those other places. Unlike Dallas, Houston doesn’t suffer from pretentions, or delusions of grandeur. This is Texans Country, the one place in the state where the Spirit of the Bull trumps Cowboy Pride. To date, the Texans’ greatest achievement is Bill O’Brien’s chin dimple. It’s hard to be insufferable when you’re a Texans fan.  

We don’t wallow in nostalgia like San Antonio. Earl Campbell finished his career with the New Orleans Saints; Hakeem Olajuwon got traded to the Toronto Raptors; and if the Alamo had been in downtown Houston, we would have replaced it with a parking lot and a Burger King years ago. Our weirdness is honest weirdness, without a shred of self-awareness or irony, the weirdness that comes from being completely comfortable with who you are, and completely unconcerned with what the rest of the world thinks about it. 

I know a lady in Houston who puts up her Christmas tree in July, a garish silvery thing with white twinkling lights and blue ornaments, simply because that tree really makes her happy. Do that in Austin and some pale dude in a thrift store vest and a pair of Chuck Taylors will interview you for his blog, praising you for your wry commentary on commercialism and social conventions, and asking if you happen to have Monika Rostvold’s phone number.

Houston is just Houston. This is a young city, even by American standards, and like impetuous youth everywhere, what we like is driven less by training and culture than by unrefined enthusiasm. We’ve got no time for John Ruskin’s “Let it not be for present delight nor for present use alone” soberness; the only question we ask is, “Does it look cool?”

This “Does it look cool?” aesthetic gave us such sublimely, unrepentantly kitschy public monuments as the Water Wall and the strangely phallic Williams Tower, the Galleria’s answer to the age-old question, “Is that a Philip Johnson skyscraper in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?” On the corner of Westheimer and Dairy Ashford, a strip center parking lot is ringed by large replicas of ancient Greek statuary, smiling nymphs in gauzy robes bidding welcome as you head to the pawn shop. A bank off Highway 59 is modeled faithfully after Monticello, complete with the drive-thru window Jefferson surely would have added to the original, if only he had thought of it.  Further north, Memorial Hermann Memorial City Medical Center’s bland beige box is topped with an enormous glass headdress, like something Cher would wear to the Oscars. At night, blue and red lasers shoot from it; you can see them for miles. It’s overblown. It’s ridiculous. And it looks cool.

We do have places of genuine culture, places like the Menil Collection, but they’re the civic equivalent of a dinner menu pulled from the pages of an Alice Waters cookbook, specially prepared to impress guests: delicious, but not our everyday fare. The rest of Houston, the real Houston, is more of a deep-fried-Oreo-at-the-monster-truck-rally, humongous-roasted-turkey-leg-whilst-mingling-with-inebriated-women-at-the-Renaissance-Fair kind of place. Our teenager tastes tend to be big, brash and completely unsubtle, like a six-pack of Taco Bell Volcano Tacos, or Kate Upton.

If there is a patron saint of Houston art and design, it must be David Addickes, the visionary who gave us the giant cello player near the Wortham and the Easter Island–worthy collection of oversized presidential busts that are best viewed while driving past downtown on I-10. (There’s nothing more Houston than art that must be viewed from the highway.) An Addickes work is insane and awful and huge and concrete, but weirdly loveable, too—just like Houston. It might not be Art, but it does look cool, and that’s good enough for us. In the immortal words of Marvin Zindler, another icon of Houston kitsch: “Whatever makes you happy.” This is Houston, so go big!

Or go to Dallas.

It's Friday night and downtown's MKT Bar is packed. Drinks are flowing, the DJ is spinning and the main attraction is a new collection of tile. Yes, tile. But not just any new tile collection, but the most unique and fascinating tile collection to ever come out of Houston. 

For over a decade La Nova Tile has stayed largely under the radar as an importer of contemporary tile from Spain and Italy, despite being a favorite among local designers for their chic, often minimalist wares. But for La Nova's first in-house collection, owner Erick Calderon wanted to do something totally different.

Calderon is a resident of Houston's Eastside and a big fan of the local street art scene. Inspired by a Spanish tile brand that incorporated Banksy's graffiti art into tiles, he rounded up 13 of Houston's most profilic graffiti artists who agreed to license images of their works into a new tile collection. The result is "Rethink! Houston Streets," a colorful, limited-edition collection of 50 individual tiles that feature high-res snippets from 47 local Houston murals by Wiley, Gonzo247, Mr. D, Dandee Warhol and others.

"We're known for contemporary products, so gray is a big theme," says Calderon. "In general there's a lack of color and a lack of art in the tile business. This is an opportunity to use tile as an art piece."

Each 18x18 tile depicts an almost life-size segment of a mural, meaning that though a few are immediately recognizable—the Biscuit Paint Wall by Mr. D, for example, or Gonzo247's Houston mural near Market Square Park—others are more surreal; abstract collections of color, shape and pattern that are almost guaranteed to challenge a viewer to figure out where they've seen each one before.

"They are kind of weird by themselves, it only really works when you see them together," says Calderon.

The collection is limited to 10 sets of 50 tiles and is available in random sets of 10—the only way to guarantee that any particular tile would be included is to buy an entire set of 50. Calderon has plans to use part of the collection in the entranceway of his house, where all his visitors can see them.

"My biggest fear is that this goes into a powder room or a game room and is never seen again. My goal with this collection is to see one restaurant or coffeehouse or commercial public setting in Houston install it somewhere that people will interact with it," says Calderon.

If the collection gets a strong response, Calderon plans to travel to cities like New York, Austin, Chicago and Los Angeles this summer with a photographer to start working on a graffiti tile collection that features street artists nationwide. 

Houstonians can check out the "ReThink! Houston Streets" tile collection this weekend at La Nova's booth at the Pop Shop America Summer Festival this Saturday and Sunday at Silver Street Studios.

"It's a validation," Calderon says of the enthusiastic response that the collection had in its MKT Bar debut. "I love color. I think people need more color in their lives."

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston recaptures an era of opulence with Habsburg Splendor: Masterpieces from Vienna’s Imperial Collections. Curated by David Bomford, the head of the museum's European Art Department, the exhibition chronicles the affluent lifestyle of the dynasty through more than 90 pieces of fashion, artifacts and artworks.

Giant, iridescent tapestries hang over viewers like windows into a different world, their remarkable preservation, museum director Gary Tinterow pointed out at a recent media preview, imparting a sense of antiquity to the entire gallery. “We’re introducing tapestry to Houston audiences,” Tinterow said. “Dyes fade, but this tapestry has been well-preserved.”

The pieces on display span the family's art-collecting beginnings in the late Middle Ages through the end of its reign in the early 20th century. Personal and intimate items like love letters and ball gowns are on display, as are pieces like sleds and carriages. The family seemed to appreciate almost anything as art, even turning walrus tusks into curvacious female forms.

One of the family's most enthusiastic art collectors was Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, who lived in the 17th century and compiled a mass of paintings by the renowned artists of the period. Many of these left Austria for the first time this summer, making their debut first in Minneapolis, and now Houston, before their journey completes in Atlanta. The works presented, which hail from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, display the likes of Caravaggio, Correggio, Giorgione, Rubens, Tintoretto, Titian and Velázquez. “Even in Vienna, they don’t have these pieces all together in the same room,” Bomford said.

A standout is a portrait of the royal empress, Isabelle d’Este, who holds her gaze steady as the oils that comprise her complexion immortalize a youth that had ended even before the painting was created. (She had the painter, Titian, paint her twice—first in her old age and then as she had looked 30 years before. The location of the first work remains unknown).

Flintlock rifles appear in glass cases, monocles instead of scopes clamped over the trigger. A long velvet gown that belonged to Empress “Cici” Elizabeth (the “princess Diana of her day,” Bomford claims) stands in a room that’s illuminated by a video of the funeral of Jozéf Franz. The death of the last great emperor of the Habsburg dynasty marked an end of power for the family, but not an end of art appreciation. 

Tickets are $18 for the installation, which opened this past Sunday, and will remain until Sunday, Sept. 13. Tue & Wed 10-5; Thu 10-9; Fri & Sat 10-7; Sun 12:15-7. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1001 Bissonnet. 713-639-7300. mfah.org

Houston artists David McGee and Benito Huerta get together for a special talk this weekend at Houston Museum of African American Culture, discussing art, politics and Huerta's latest exhibition Works on Paper. The show is centered around themes of politics, money, war and Mexican culture, and is on display through August 16.

"What I was trying to do here was make people stop to contemplate and think about what we're all seeing right in front of us," says the artist, a Corpus Christi native who now lives here. What audiences can see in front of them, as far as the exhibition goes, is 40 years of works by Huerta, including drawings, watercolors, prints and multimedia works made of photographs, collages and paper drawings, many of which explore historical moments. For instance, a grim pencil drawing depicts a hijacked plane about to collide with the Twin Towers, with the work's title, Intermission, written across the middle. "It's a sense of reflection," adds Huerta. "I want people to think about how they should judge what they see in front of them both in art and society."

Before and after the talk, attendees can see the artist's works, which, according to HMAAC's CEO John Guess, reflects upon the social environment in Houston and beyond. "His concept that there is a discussion that goes on at the center of the world between what is heavenly and what is earthly...I thought was representative of the social, political and economic dynamics working their way through Houston right now," says Guess. "We're working through this whole contemporary and future identity of the city. That's why places like HMAAC are important and thats why I wanted to bring the work here."

Saturday, June 27. 2. Free. Houston Museum of African American Culture, 4807 Caroline. 713-526-1015. hmaac.org

Remember the colorful, winding art piece that sat in the middle of the road in Montrose so long, it felt like it had always been there? The one that turned Houstonians into real-life Frogger characters, scampering across the street from the Art League Houston to take selfies in front of? The one that looked like the skeleton of Falkor from The Neverending Story? Of course you do. And yes, we miss it, too.

The good news is, you can drive a few hours east to relive the memories, as Houston artist Patrick Renner's much-loved Funnel Tunnel installation lives on, having found a new home in New Orleans.

This new incarnation of the serpentine figure is made from the same tangled steel and scrapwood reclaimed from an old cotton gin, flecked and painted all the colors of the rainbow, but it's 155 feet long, 25 shorter than the Houston version (#EverythingIsBiggerInTexas). The work landed in the Big Easy this past weekend, assembled by Renner and local volunteers piece by piece on a street median under a freeway overpass, in the Poydras Corridor. (Now that we think of it, the thing looks like a jazz trumpet.)

Since Nola.com has reported on its premiere, the reactions from locals have been positive. "It's really cool!" says one commenter. Another art lover pointed out that it "looks like Chinese handcuffs to me. Just sayin'..." Just sayin' is right! And, finally: "How far will it fly during the next hurricane?" 

Funnel Tunnel, we love you. You're welcome back in H-Town anytime. 

After 12 years as director of the Menil Collection, Josef Helfenstein will be stepping down at the end of the year to take a post as director of Switzerland's Kunstmuseum Basel, one of the country's largest and oldest museums. Helfenstein will take a nine-month sabbatical before assuming the new position in his native Switzerland in September of 2016.

Under the direction of Helfenstein, the Menil Collection's annual attendance doubled and its endowment increased by 54 percent. More than 1,000 works were added to the collection, including pieces by Claes Oldenburg, Richard Serra and Kara Walker.

The announcement comes just months after the museum broke ground on its new $40 million Menil Drawing Institute. The free-standing building is the first in the US designed for the study and exhibition of modern and contemporary drawings. 

For artist Allison Hunter’s new project, Video Bomb Houston, she explored the city's traditionally underserved areas to create a four-part series whose first installment debuts tonight. Each piece of the work takes on a different area. "I’m as guilty of not knowing my area as well as I could and I kind of tend to stay in my own three mile radius of stuff that I know," she says. "That’s why I started to ask people, 'What area do you think is really under-served?'"

These four sites chosen become landscapes for the exhibit, for which she projects short, colorful animations onto neighborhood buildings and loops sound over them. Many of her images depict animals that inhabit Houston, such as turkey buzzards, rats and grackles. The work's not overtly political, but creating it, says Hunter, is a political act in itself. "Even having it in this particular area is political, because it’s just not done," Hunter says. "People just don’t go there, but I’m asking people to do that...This area needs food, but it also needs art, and art is essential, not a luxury," she says. 

Video Bomb Houston, Part 1 takes place in Community Family Centers, in Magnolia Park, tonight at 7 p.m. The projection begins at 8:30 p.m. The series continues on July 20, August 3 and August 17; there are no details yet on the additional screenings, but we'll update you. 

FotoFest's I Am A Camera couldn’t have come at a better time. The photo exhibit, which opens Thursday at Silver Street Studios, looks at the diversity of the LGBTQ community through 225 images, three videos and one installation commissioned by several artists from around the world.

The exhibition features works from Sunil Gupta, Lindsay Morris, Irina Popova and other artists who identify as LGBTQ or who are allies to the community. Black-and-white prints, staged photos, portraits and journalistic images are included. “Dealing with the artists, it became clear that there was a lot of work out there about the intersection of LGBTQ issues and identities,” says FotoFest executive director Steven Evans. “It’s about how that [diversity] can lead to the creation of communities and how that becomes expressed in society at different times and locations.”

Evans says the art is intended to be thought-provoking. “It is possible that some members of the audience will be challenged by the work in the show, and I think that’s a good thing,” he says. “One of the functions of art is to teach us about society and teach us about things we don’t know."

The exhibit runs through August 29 at Silver Street Studios. 2000 Edwards St. home.fotofest.org

Local artist Ed Wilson—known widely for his Heights Blvd. esplanade installation of a paper airplane made from steel—creates three-dimensional objects and landscapes for his latest exhibition, Stories in Steel.

The show, which goes on display this Friday in the lobby of the Heritage Plaza downtown, includes several large-scale works that play with perspective. There will be a mix of older and relatively new creations, which, according to the artist, can take anywhere from two days to two years to complete, depending on size, complexity, and whether they involves a lot of casts and molds.

For the artist, it’s the pliability of steel that's always attracted him. “You can make almost anything out of it. You can make strong lines go through space almost effortlessly,” says Wilson, who moved to Houston in 1981 for grad school and set up shop as a working artist.

Keeping up with his somewhat unconventional approach to art-making, Wilson applies a patina instead of paint to the surface of the metal he works with, oxidizing it to create an incredible range of colors. “It’s not always obvious on the first look, and some you may never figure it out,” says Wilson. “There’s a story behind it.”

Stories in Steel runs July 10 to November 19 in the lobby of Heritage Plaza at 1111 Bagby St. downtown.

In 2013, mentally handicapped death row inmate Elroy Chester was executed at the Huntsville Unit for his 1998 killing of a Port Arthur firefighter. Instead of focusing on the crime’s lasting effects on the victim’s family, artist Stephen Wilson chose to reflect on the family and community of the accused.

Wilson’s latest multimedia exhibition at Fresh Arts, Ultimate Justice, mixes photography with drawings, notes and videos and highlights his discoveries of the criminal and the crime. For a month prior to the execution, Wilson—who was a production assistant on the Dutch documentary about Chester, Killing Time—lived with Chester’s family in Port Arthur, a city where Chester committed multiple heinous acts, including four additional murders and three rapes.

"For me, this was a chance to take a look at a specific case in our state and apply it to a larger sociopolitical narrative," says Wilson. "I'm hoping to encourage imagination about the generational and familial affects of what Rick Perry calls the 'Ultimate Justice.' It's an abstract recording and presentation of crime and punishment."

Even though previously being an inmate in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s Mentally Retarded Offenders Program and scoring below 70 on multiple IQ tests, Chester was deemed legally competent to be executed based off his forethought and planning. Like the documentary Wilson helped with, the exhibition explores the realms of capital punishment and political theory within our state’s legal system. In light of the evidence and ruling, Wilson is reluctant to side with the state. "I don't think our legal system here is equipped with the type of accountability necessary for a system to justifiably hand out death sentences," notes the artist.

Wilson’s imagery reflects the effects of poverty and disenfranchised families in the featured communities and aims to explain how surrounding environments produce irrational behavior and violent outcomes.

"I felt intrusive, manipulated, vulnerable, depressed, entertained, awestruck, accepted and approved...I felt and witnessed a complex mechanism of unconditional love at work between [his] sisters, their children and their children’s children. Family came first."

Ultimate Justice opens at Fresh Arts (2101 Winter Street) this Friday, July 17, and runs through August 28.

Fresh Arts, 2101 Winter St., 713-868-1839, fresharts.org