Dinner Dates

Supporters of the Memorial Park Conservancy hit the trails and headed to the Forest Club for the organization’s annual Picnic for the Park event. Organic, free-flowing florals and a menu of comfort-food classics spoke to fun-loving and laid-back nature of the event, which also championed the progress of Memorial Park’s master-planned makeover. Meanwhile, an intimate dinner catered by Swift + Company toasted Rienzi’s 20th year as a part of the MFAH. Rienzi Society members contributed nearly a quarter-million dollars toward the acquisition of two 18th-century antiques.

Ann Bastian, Catherine Badger and Trish Millard at 'Picnic.'


Ann Bastian, Catherine Badger and Trish Millard at 'Picnic.'
Party People

Alonso, inset, and her acrylic-on-canvas painting 'Birds'

BASED IN HOUSTON, Cuban-American painter Erika Alonso is a self-taught, self-described “painterly painter,” with a playful and very idiosyncratic take on abstract expressionism, mark making, and automatism, where the artist works quickly and intuitively, relying upon the subconscious to guide the artistic process. Her work can be found in numerous private collections across the United States and Europe, including that of beloved Houston collector and art fanatic Lester Marks. On Friday, Sept 8., from 7-9pm at Lanecia Rouse Tinsley Gallery, Alise Art Group's Art House presents Alonso’s solo exhibition Birds Are People Too (And Other Thoughts . . . ).

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Nik Parr and The Selfless Lovers

THE WORD “FUNK” has been around a long, long time. In the mid-1950s, New Orleans drummer Earl Palmer popularized the word as a musical term when he instructed musicians on recording dates to “play a little funkier.” In his book Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy, historian Robert Farris Thompson goes back even further, and traces the origin of the word “funky” to the Ki-Kongo word lu-fuki, meaning “positive sweat,” an olfactory term used to praise an individual for the integrity of their art.

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