New Kid on the Block
The Menil Collection has received so much attention that its opening this month may seem anticlimactic. The only unknown is what the director plans to do with it all.
Writer-at-large Michael Ennis is a longtime Dallas resident whose writing for Texas Monthly has included award-winning art criticism and political commentary as well as in-depth reporting on business and national defense. A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, with a degree in history and a former Rockefeller Foundation fellow in museum education, he is also the New York Times best-selling author of historical novels that have been published in twenty languages worldwide. He is currently working on a “historical novel set in the future” about the breakup of the United States, the transformation of politics and culture by deeply immersive virtual reality, and the competition among next-generation tech giants to develop human-level artificial intelligence.
The Menil Collection has received so much attention that its opening this month may seem anticlimactic. The only unknown is what the director plans to do with it all.
Using a circular saw and a shrewd commercial sense, Plano housewife Sandy Stein chiseled a new life for herself as a sculptor.
An innovative folk art exhibition at the San Antonio Museum of Art affirms the irrepressible spirit of the Mexican people.
Melissa Miller’s lions and tiger confront demons, dance under the moon, and reflect the ambiguity of the modern world.
Two gleaming office towers are going up face to face in downtown Austin. Now their marketing managers have to rent the town asunder.
UT is testing this device that works like a BB gun, only it’s a little more powerful—it’ll be able to shatter a Soviet warhead speeding through space.
At the heart of this ancient culture were cruelty, self-mutilation, and ghostly visions.
A Texas lab that look s like the set for a Buck Rogers movie is actually the frontier of the Star Wars weapons research effort.
“Art Among Us/Arte Entre Nosotros” reveals the delightful madness of San Antonio’s barrio art.
Houston’s upper crust and underclass mingle at Jo Abercrombie’s Wednesday night fights.
At the Crescent’s opening, old, excessive Texas came face to face with new, designer Texas.
Photographer Robert Frank held up a mirror to America. Now Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts turns the mirror on him.
With dogged independence, amazing endurance, and a rugged romantic vision, photographer Laura Gilpin helped create the way we see the West today.
Want to unload your business? With Stan Hazelwood, it’s not much harder than getting a date.
At the singles bar of the eighties, is it’s not love, it could still be a good investment opportunity.
In a Twilight Zone-like pocket near UT there are some kids who aren’t ready to grow up.
In the current Rauschenberg exhibit at Houston’s Contemporary Arts Museum the artist finds his first thirty years a tough act to follow.
Christian recording mogul Chris Christian knows what the Rock of Ages really means.
NorthPark Mall inaugurated an epoch twenty years ago. It’s still the standard for upscale shopping.
Today’s with-it seniors are settling in American’s newest retirement boomtown—Kerrville.
Triathletes converge upon Lake Lavon to compete in the sport of the eighties.
One man’s whim-turned-obsession is changing Houston’s McKee Street Bridge and its faded environs into one of the few really original artistic images of the city.
Sitcom City on Channel 27
The Kimbell’s exhibit of seventeenth-century Spanish still lifes is dazzling enough to cause a modern photo-realist to look again.
Dallas' Fifth Texas Sculpture Symposium proves it's time for us to look to our sculptors for public artworks.
The impressive canvases that make up “Fresh Paint” at the Museum of Fine Arts prove that Houston has finally arrived as a significant art-making center.
With his rough-hewn sculptures that speak to mankind’s most basic needs, James Surls is fast becoming the dean of Texas art.
Whistler had nothing on the 22 artists represented in a survey of Hispanic art.
From lacquered debutante to fossilized ol’ gal, her greatest virtue is endurance.
Sculptor Donald Judd had the vision. The Dia Art Foundation had the money. Now they’ve had it with each other.
On Sunday it is legal to buy beer but not baby bottles, screws but not screwdrivers, disposable diapers but not cloth ones. No place but Texas.
German landscape artist Hermann Lungkwitz saw romantic vistas in the Hill Country at a time when most Texans saw only hardscrabble farmland.
Five Texas artists are among those selected for “Paradise Lost/Paradise Regained”, this year’s American entry into the Venice Biennale.
Robert Frank took casual but expressive snapshots that captured dramas of American life and altered the course of modern photography.
Houston’s brash “alternative spaces” are doing more than the city’s mainstream galleries to keep Texas art fresh, rich and diverse.
Photographer Carlotta Corpron moved to Denton in 1935, and the burst of avant-garde work she produced is, so far, unsurpassed in Texas.
Danny Williams of Dallas has a clear grasp of the modern masters and unequaled ambition and skill.
It’s a Xanadu of condos, restaurants, gardens, and gyms, a high-tech haven that can outritz nearby Dallas. It’s Las Colinas, a home for corporations that appreciate the finer things in life.
Texas' glass artists are leading a revolution in an ancient craft.
A spectacular show at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts reexamines the genius of El Greco.
A new book on the Amon Carter Museum’s photography collection chronicles one and a half colorful centuries of America in haunting black and white.
Roy Fridge’s curious assemblages reflect the cryptic world he created to replace the one he left behind.
Who’s who, and who’s doing what to whom: a brief guide.
What you won’t see from Dallas designers is lots of froufrou. What you will see is a look tailored for the working woman.
Photographer George Krause draws the viewer into a twilight world where jocks, saints, and nudes seem almost mystical.
He was wildly eccentric, he lived in a shanty on the Gulf, he subsisted as a bait fisherman, he had bizarre notions of eternal life. He may have been the best artist Texas has ever produced.
For years no one would drink Lone Star beer because rednecks did; then one enterprising man figured out that if it was marketed right, everyone would want to drink Lone Star precisely because rednecks did.
An evocative American portrait is one of 75 masterpieces from the Phillips Collection now on display in Dallas. A photographic exhibit in Austin on family life covered just about everything but the family.
To a plastic surgeon, your face is just the beginning.