Straight From the Art
From Fort Worth’s Kimbell to Houston’s Menil, Texas’s museums are home to a diverse and exquisite collection of masterpieces. To devise a list of our ten greatest works on view, we asked more than sixty curators, gallery owners, critics, and other insiders for their favorites. So come along on the ultimate art tour of Texas.
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One of the most beloved works of art in Dallas is tucked away in a terraced hill in the back of the Nasher Sculpture Center’s garden. To access James Turrell’s site-specific “skyspace,” you pass through a small illuminated vestibule into a room that is lined with stone benches and has a square aperture cut into its roof. The opening, which measures nine and a half feet across, is framed by a rim so thin it’s hard to perceive depth. In addition, programmed permutations of red, blue, green, and yellow lights bathe the smooth ceiling. The resulting optical effects—colors appear more intense, the sky seems close enough to touch—are spellbinding. “On a clear day, it looks like there is a color-field painting above you or as if the sky has been pulled, like a sheet, across the opening,” says Jed Morse, the Nasher’s curator. Unfortunately, clouds and the occasional bird aren’t the only things you can see from inside the contemplative space these days: a 42-story condo development going up nearby has begun to obstruct the view. This means Tending, (Blue) has been temporarily closed, but visitors need not fear—Turrell is devising a new concept that the museum hopes to implement as soon as possible. “This work is of particular significance for Turrell because it introduced several of his innovations,” says Morse. “He’ll make sure that it continues in some way.”
MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, HOUSTON
Portrait of a Young Woman (1633)
REMBRANDT VAN RIJN
No one knows for sure who she was. But this flame-haired woman, who had her likeness captured by a 27-year-old Dutch painter named Rembrandt, invites continual scrutiny. Her portrait, painted onto an oval wood panel, is a well-preserved example of Rembrandt’s technical prowess and begs for closer inspection—much to the dismay of the security guards at the MFAH, which purchased the work in 2004 for somewhere around $14 million. You’ll want to pore over every nuance, from the ultrafine touches of hair at her temple to the thick sweeps of white across her collar. Though Rembrandt was prolific, producing hundreds of paintings and etchings and thousands of drawings, Portrait of a Young Woman is one of only two of the old master’s paintings on permanent view in Texas. (The other is Bust of a Young Jew at the Kimbell.) Rembrandt “was able to evoke a personal presence beyond that of the more static portraits of his peers,” writes Edgar Peters Bowron, the MFAH’s Audrey Jones Beck curator of European art. “It is easy to see why the artist was in such demand at this moment of his career.”
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Art © Estate of Robert Rauschenberg/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
The Rauschenberg Roundup
A PRIMER ON THE TEXAS MASTER AND WHERE TO SEE HIS WORKS
There were early signs that Milton Ernest Rauschenberg, born in Port Arthur in 1925, had a creative bent: when he was ten he painted his bedroom with red fleurs-de-lis, and in high school he designed theater sets. But incredibly, Rauschenberg (who changed his name to Robert as an adult) didn’t lay eyes on his first painting until he was a nineteen-year-old Navy medical technician stationed in San Diego. A growing passion for art eventually took him to Paris and Black Mountain College, in North Carolina—where his pals included Cy Twombly and Merce Cunningham—and in 1951 he had his first solo show, in New York. From that point on, he churned out works in a range of media (newsprint, Plexiglas, junkyard finds), constructions (painting-sculpture hybrids, solvent transfers, silk-screen prints), and themes (isolation, pop culture, challenge to authority), doing so with such imaginative flair that by the time he died, at age 82, his obituary in the New York Times hailed him as “irrepressibly prolific.”
Though Rauschenberg’s last visit to Port Arthur was in 1984 (he spent his final decades in Florida), just about every major museum in Texas now owns works of his, and you’d be well served to seek out a few key pieces. Start in his hometown, at the Museum of the Gulf Coast, to see 21 signature originals, including Can House, a collage of tarnishes on brushed aluminum that he donated in honor of Ann Richards. Then make your way to Houston’s Menil Collection, which has several of his defiantly abstract early works, such as Crucifixion and Reflection, a layered piece that includes newsprint and enamel paint. From there, stop by San Antonio’s McNay Art Museum for a look at Black Mail, one of his distinctive “combines,” a mash-up of oil paint, solvent transfer, and mirror on canvas. Finally, head to the Dallas Museum of Art, where his vast eighteen-by-sixteen-foot Skyway, an array of iconic sixties images (from astronauts to John F. Kennedy), towers over diners in the cafe.
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THE ART SCENE
A CONSTELLATION OF SOME OF OUR VISUAL AND VISIONARY MOVERS AND SHAKERS
Fairfax Dorn, 36, and Virginia Lebermann, 42
Co-founders of Ballroom Marfa, Marfa
Since converting an old dance hall into a sleek contemporary gallery in 2003, Dorn and Lebermann have helped perpetuate West Texas’s allure as an arts destination with concerts, film screenings, and dance performances. Their latest project, still in the works, is a drive-in theater in Vizcaino Park.
Rick Lowe, 50
Founder of Project Row Houses, Houston
In the early nineties, the artist and activist spearheaded an effort to buy more than twenty abandoned shotgun houses in Houston’s Third Ward, turning some into exhibition and workshop spaces for visiting artists and others into residences for single mothers. PRH, which showcases new artwork every four months and now hosts after-school classes for local kids, has revitalized the neighborhood.
• Lowe found the inspiration for PRH in the work of late muralist John Biggers, who came to prominence after the Harlem Renaissance and later founded the art department at Texas Southern University.
Margarita Cabrera, 38
Artist, El Paso
It’s been her experience as an immigrant—she moved to the U.S. from Mexico at age eleven—and her proximity to the border that have shaped Cabrera’s sculptures, which range from a series of cacti made from Border Patrol uniforms to soft vinyl replicas of domestic appliances made in maquiladoras. Last December she formally launched Florezca, a for-profit corporation that employs Latin American immigrants to make and sell traditional crafts. A ten-year retrospective of her work runs through August 2013 at the El Paso Museum of Art.
• This fall Cabrera will be working on an installation for Austin’s Mexican American Cultural Center that incorporates alebrijes, Oaxacan wood carvings of fantastical creatures.
Annette Lawrence, 46
Artist, Denton
Using mundane household items—brown paper bags, a year’s worth of junk mail—Lawrence crafts conceptual collages that probe notions of race, gender, and time. A professor of drawing and painting at the University of North Texas, the New York native is best known for her intricate, site-specific string installations, which she has exhibited in museums around the country.
• Lawrence’s installation String Works originated in 1994 at Project Row Houses.
• A Lawrence-designed vortex of steel cables stretches above a VIP entrance at Cowboys Stadium.
Vernon Fisher, 68
Artist, Fort Worth
With more than eighty solo shows and works in upward of forty museums, Fisher is easily one of the state’s most internationally acclaimed postmodern artists. The arc of his four-decade career, which has gone from abstract paintings and text-saturated faux blackboard canvases to narrative-driven multimedia pieces (often featuring pop-culture icons like Mickey Mouse and Dairy Queen), was celebrated in a retrospective at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth last fall.
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