Photo courtesy Flickr user mbg1122

Open Channel Flow

In the fall of 2009, a piece of installation artwork called Open Channel Flow was installed just west of the Jamail Skate Park and Sabine Street Bridge, along Buffalo Bayou. The sculpture, which made use of existing piping and blended in with the nearby Sabine Street Pump Station, included an old-fashioned handle that could be pumped to produce a shower of water from a spigot 30 feet above.

The sculpture, which was commissioned by the Houston Arts Alliance, was supposed to be operable 24 hours a day, and would be the only shower along the trails that traverse both sides of Buffalo Bayou. It was expected to be a huge hit with runners and skaters making use of the nearby facilities.

The only problem? After the first couple of months, it never did work correctly.

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"Television or the Cat's Cradle Supports Electronic Picture" by James Rosenquist

A new show at McClain Gallery tackles the subject of outer space, but don't expect on-the-nose pieces that reference the planets or extraterrestrials.

"Celestial" features only eight works -- considerably fewer than you'd expect from a show at the gallery -- but it's not short on content. There's plenty to take in thanks to the immense and engaging works by contemporary greats.

The show starts off appropriately with a strange assemblage by Robert Rauschenberg titled Shuttle Buttle/ROCI USA (Wax Fire Works). On reflective steel, the artist paints and transfers the double-image of a space shuttle, as well as places a found wheelbarrow. It's blast-off.

You go from one massive piece to the next with James Rosenquist's centerpiece Television or the Cat's Cradle Supports Electronic Picture taking up the main wall all on its own. The 20-foot wide horizontal canvas depicts a dark sky filled with stars, purple flowers, a splintered face and a multicolored lattice pattern. It's a dynamic piece, full of energy and life, however surreal.

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Work by Vizie.

In our time, there may be no art form more divisive than street art. For decades, the public has debated the merits of the form -- from the criminality of the act to the skill and creativity involved.

The Station Museum of Contemporary Art enters this debate with "Call It Street Art, Call It Fine Art, Call It What You Know" -- a massive show featuring 21 artists known for their work across Houston doing their thing right on the museum's walls.

It's a busy show, from the big wall pieces by Ack! and Eyesore to a whole room devoted to impressive portraits by Lee Washington. Given the number of artists, there's a variety of topics, too, including a powerful cityscape by Wiley Robertson and Bryan Cope across the street on the gas station; Vizie's overpowering memorial graffiti artist NEKST; the mysticism of Angel Quesada's Aura Rising; and overtly, politically charged works by Anat Ronen, Deck WGF, Michael C. Rodriguez and Empire I.N.S. that touch on drone warfare, war mentality and civil liberty.

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"Twilight Epiphany" by James Turrell at Rice University, just one of the artist's Houston installations.

On Sunday, the James Turrell retrospective "The Light Inside" lands at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in an unprecedented examination of the American light artist's work.

It's just one of three independently curated, concurrent exhibitions that explore Turrell's five-decade career, the other two running at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Before the MFAH exhibition opens, you can get a preview of Turrell's work thanks to several commissions and installations in Houston by the renowned light artist. They're must-sees to get the full James Turrell experience in Houston before or during the show's four-month run.

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GONZO247 at work.

It was a sweaty 95 degrees Monday, the kind of Houston heat where you're dripping just standing in place. But that didn't stop three artists from going up and down ladders working on a new outdoor mural at GreenStreet, formerly known as the Houston Pavilions.

Graffiti artists from Aerosol Warfare Gallery are currently at work bringing art to the outdoor plaza between Fannin and San Jacinto streets, acquired last year by Magic Johnson.

GONZO247, who recently completed a Houston-inspired mural close by at Market Square Park, was brought in by GreenStreet to dress up the plaza, which over the next few months will be turned into an urban park.

"We're trying to revitalize these three blocks," said Gonzo. "What was once a corridor to get from one side to the other will eventually be a destination."

Like Gonzo's Market Square Park graffiti piece, GreenStreet's four-panel mural takes inspiration from the "Houston Is Inspired" marketing campaign, down to four of the words used in the campaign -- hip, tasty, funky and inspired. He's joined by three other artists to create a mural based on these keywords. Gonzo is tackling "tasty," while Gabriel Prusmack has "hip," Kelyne Reis "funky" and Wiley Robertson "inspired."

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"Red Abstract" by Mark Rothko

Mark Rothko. Jackson Pollock. They're not the usual suspects you'd associate with Surrealism, but they're some of the biggest names in the Menil Collection's current show "Late Surrealism."

Though they're known for their groundbreaking abstract work, as the Menil exhibition shows, pigeonholing artists can be tricky business. And during the 1930s and '40s, artists working in America were influenced by surrealists as the art capital shifted from Paris to New York.

Curator Michelle White has pulled together 14 artists and 26 pieces from the museum's holdings for the compact show. There are paintings, as well as collages, assemblages, works on paper and sculptures created during for the most part the '30s and '40s on display.

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"Yes, It Works" by Jennifer McCormick

Sometimes two organizations come together in a way that seems totally bonkers but it's just crazy enough to work. Theatre Under the Stars (TUTS) teamed up with the Texas Art Asylum for a Tupperware-inspired art show, which opened this past Friday night. Has TUTS gone home shopping on us? Not at all. The theater company is promoting its new one-woman show Dixie's Tupperware Party, which is about a sassy southern gal who regales the audiences with tales of her Tupperware travels and opens June 4 at the Hobby Center. Texas Art Asylum, in its new-ish home, is the perfect match for such a themed event; the place is filled with anything and everything you can imagine, Tupperware included.

The guidelines for the show were simple. Artists were to repurpose a piece of Tupperware donated by TUTS, the Texas Art Asylum or from their own junk drawer into whatever crazy design they could come up with. Ramona Brady, the co-owner of Texas Art Asylum, put a call out to artists through social media and friends and the result is 20 artists participating in the show. Some are regular names in the Houston scene as well as a few artists whose first show this is. The artists in the show are Erin Baer, Nicole Bean, Bonnie Blue, Mitch Cohen, Lacey Crawford, Adrienne Duncan, Mike Esparza, Megan Freemantle, Marsha Glickman, Robin Hanning, Khanh Ho, Jennifer McCormick, Kiki Neumann, Pat Padilla, Chasity Porter, James Scott, Brian Neal Sensabaugh, Chris Smith, Loni Sproles and Sam VanBibber.

While every piece is unique there are some commonalities between a few: Barbie. Yeah, her.

"For some reason lots of people incorporated Barbie," says Brady. "Maybe when you think of Tupperware you think of Barbie? Who knows?"

Or maybe there is a kitschy factor to it.

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Collecton of Ryna and David Alexander

A historic meeting between two of Mother Russia's legendary leaders? Never happened. "Lenin and Stalin in Gorki, 1922" by an unknown Russian artist, 1949.

In these days where even the most basic of computers has Photoshop or some photo manipulation software, it's easy even for the non-techy to, say, create a visual or chef Mario Batali's head on Angelina Jolie's body. Or place their pet dog at the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Or have a beloved deceased relative "looking over" a current family reunion snapshot.

But in previous decades and even centuries, photo manipulation was a painstaking craft and art form, and only the best practitioners made the piece look "real." This skill and their results are celebrated in the exhibit "Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop" at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Originally organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the 180 photos in this exhibit - spanning the 1840s to the 1990s - run the gamut of impetus from art and political persuasion to commerce and whimsy.

So whether it's a man juggling seven versions of his own decapitated head, or an air zeppelin docking at the tip of the Empire State building, or a sit down meeting between Russian leaders Lenin and Stalin which never actually occurred, "Faking It" plays a lot of tricks on the mind's eye.

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In 1966 artist and writer Robert Smithson wrote an essay entitled "Entropy and the New Monuments," in which he deconstructs selected works in a beautifully written critique comparing the art to science, fiction and society in a philosophical, and somewhat metaphysical manner. Smithson says, "Questions about form seem as hopelessly inadequate as questions about content." In terms of abstract art, Smithson has struck a chord.

It is this essay that is the thread that ties together the work of artist Pamela Fraser in her new exhibition, "The Fourth Dimension was Ha-Ha, in Other Words, That it is Laughter," which opens June 1 at the Blaffer Art Museum. The title of the show alone questions form in and of itself.

At first glance Fraser's art seems simple. Most of her pieces are made from acrylic or gouache, and are in the form of well-known shapes, triangles or squares. But upon further examination these pieces ask you to question form and the answer is "inadequate" or inconsistent; there is no answer, only color and shape.

Fraser is a Tennessee native now living in Vermont and while she has shown across the United States, this is her first Texas exhibition. This show has been several years in the making as Fraser met curator Nancy Zastudil when Zastudil was still the associate director of the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts. The two women say that they were eager to work together and it was just a matter of timing. In the build-up for this show, Fraser pieced together paintings that she wanted to showcase but the theme came somewhat later on.

"The selection was somewhat organic." Fraser says, "The Smithson essay was the thread that tied everything together."

From Fraser's perspective there is an element that Smithson writes about in which laughter comes from a place of seriousness. Fraser sees abstract art as also embodying the playfulness that comes out of the solemn and often humorless art world. Fraser wants her art to be seen as fun.

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Houston artist Adela Andea's light installations and sculptures are true crowd pleasers, captivating artists at galleries, art fairs and, last winter, Art League Houston's outdoor garden-turned-bio-electronic environment, "Primordial Garden." The Romanian-born artist returns to the Montrose art space -- this time indoors -- for the site-specific installation "Cocomirle."

Andea's work has been described in the past by this paper as akin to an "Eastern European disco -- in a good way." As if taking that dynamic to its logical conclusion, in her latest light show, Andea brings music to the disco, too, thanks to a collaboration with experimental sound group CHIN XAOU TI WON.

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