On August 28, 2013, we talked to Richard Phillips, the artist behind the controversial Playboy Marfa installation. Read more about the art-versus-advertising debate here.FRANCESCA MARI: When were you tapped to do this piece for Playboy?RICHARD PHILLIPS: I was contacted before the New Year by Neville Wakefield, who is the
When Playboy Enterprises—yes, that Playboy Enterprises—erected a forty-foot-tall sculpture near Marfa, it was convinced the town would appreciate its take on the local art scene. Instead it started a revealing debate.
Just over forty years ago, Texas was the kind of place dismissed as hopelessly provincial and culturally mediocre. But then came the Kimbell Art Museum.
Dallas-based photographer Allison V. Smith took over Texas Monthly's Instagram account during her trip to Marfa this weekend. Here are some highlights from her trip.
Last week, a man dressed in a suit and sunglasses casually spray-painted the word "conquista" and stenciled a bull over a 1929 Picasso at the Menil Collection before walking out.
From Fort Worth’s Kimbell to Houston’s Menil, Texas’s museums are home to some of the world's most important paintings and sculptures. 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.
Houston and that brilliant artist of light James Turrell have proved to be an enduring couple, what with the California native’s inspiring work at the Live Oak Friends Meeting house and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. But the Skyspace installation Turrell created to honor Rice University’s centennial is perhaps
In September 1985 this magazine published twenty portraits from Richard Avedon's landmark "In the American West" series. I worked with the celebrated photographer on those shoots, and I documented the making of many memorable images. Here are five great behind-the-scenes stories.
Before cameras were allowed in courtrooms, artist Gary Myrick and his assortment of colored pencils provided Texas television audiences with a vivid look at the state’s high-profile legal proceedings against figures like T. Cullen Davis, Henry Lee Lucas, and Charles Harrelson.
My journey in early Texas art began while I was a student at Southern Methodist University, where I studied Frank Reaugh pastels and met Jerry Bywaters. After 24 years at the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, curating exhibitions and traveling the state, I’ve come up with a list of greatest hits.
More than sixty art insiders gave us their list of favorite works of art to see in Texas. So grab your notepad, sketchbook, or iPad and take the ultimate tour of must-see art in Texas.
The moment that members of the tejano band David Lee Garza y Los Musicales saw a poster by San Antonian John Dyer, they knew they had found the photographer for their next album. “We wanted more than just a face on a cover,” says bassist Richard Garza, “and his poster
Before chronicling the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference for Texas Monthly, New York illustrator Steve Brodner had never been to Austin—but that actually worked to his advantage. “The idea was to capture the scene as someone who just happened upon it,” he says. “I wasn’t trying to get
The Menil removed "The Art Guys Marry a Plant," a controversial performance piece, from its collection, a move that is stirring up Houston's art scene once again.
How Gary Tinterow, the new director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, is convincing the art world that Texas is a must-stop destination for major exhibitions.
As the fiftieth anniversary of the JFK assassination approaches, the eyes of the world will be upon the city, and its cultural leaders are prepared for the attention.
The only American ever to design scarves for the exclusive French fashion house Hermès is Kermit Oliver, a 69-year-old postal worker from Waco who lives in a strange and beautiful world all his own.
Wayne Baize, one of America’s most admired cowboy artists, lives amid the soaring mountains and wide-open plains. But his eye is drawn to something else entirely.
Washington, D.C., has Abraham Lincoln, Salt Lake City has Brigham Young, Philadelphia has Rocky Balboa. And now Austin has Willie. The massive bronze sculpture, which was commissioned by a local group called Capital Area Statues, rests downtown at the corner of Willie Nelson Boulevard (formerly Second Street) and Lavaca outside the new studios of Austin City
The most famous of three tapestry versions of Guernica, Pablo Picasso’s anti-war masterpiece, has found a new home at the San Antonio Museum of Art after being displayed for nearly 25 years at the United Nations headquarters in New York. There, in 2003, officials controversially covered it with a blue curtain during Secretary
The figures in the Tejano Monument, a 275-ton granite-and-bronze statue unveiled on the Capitol grounds in late March, depict the forging of modern Texas. A Spanish explorer gazes over a new world, his clothing and sword placing him in the early 1500’s, when Alonso Álvarez de Pineda became the first
For a quarter of a century, the Art Guys, Michael Galbreth and Jack Massing, have been Houston’s master provocateurs, stirring up discussion with their wacky, thoughtful, and tenaciously marketed “social sculptures.” But have they finally gone too far?
