At Dress for Success and Women of Wardrobe's annual Summer Soiree, generously hosted by Tootises, fashion-forward attendees dressed in pretty pastels, bold patterns and lots of ruffles — many designed by Houston's Hunter Bell, who showed off her fall line alongside jewelry by Claudia Lobao. Chairs Karishma Asrani, Courtney Campo, Allie Danziger and Melissa Sugulas welcomed guests to the event, which toasted the 20th anniversary of Dress for Success, and raised more than $20,000 for the org.
HAPPY FALL EQUINOX! It’s the start of a new season of art, music, theater, and plenty of other groovy happenings around the city — including superb new shows up at all six galleries at 4411 Montrose, the grey, brutalist-styled building you may have overlooked in between trips to the MFAH and the CVS on Alabama for your combo seasonal flu shot and new COVID vaccine. (Seriously, folks. Get your shots. You don’t want to miss all the cool stuff coming up this fall.) But as art-lovers will attest, and ART IS BOND gallery owner Janice Bond puts it, “the building has a history,” and history continues to be made this month.
After a summer retrospective dedicated to photographer Ming Smith, ART IS BOND is shifting gears to present a group show called Golden Ratio: Mapping Self, Space, and Other. It’s a vibrant exhibit of works by eight uniquely talented artists, including Mia Ghogho, Tomiwa Arobieke, Floyd Newsum, Jasimin Penelope Charles, J. Johari Palacio, Payton Harris-Woodard, Sonja Henderson and — one of our faves — Houston-based artist Wayne Bell. Regarding the installation, ART IS BOND’s website states, “the meticulously curated arrangement adheres to the golden ratio.” We encourage Fibonacci fanatics to leave their measuring tape at home and just bask in the glow of the rich selection of figurative and abstract art on the walls.
Jasmin Penelope Charles's 'Zen Garden Security Guard' at ART IS BOND
Next door to ART IS BOND, the relatively new kid on the block Foto Relevance is showing With Hands Clasped Tightly, the first solo show by Los Angeles-born multi-disciplinary artist Daisy Patton. In these large-scale works, Patton combines abandoned family photographs of unidentified subjects with layers of juicy colors, vintage patterns, and unfurling strands of alien flora. The results are sublime and a bit spooky. Anyone with memories of a long-distance, now-deceased relative they may or may not have met as a child will wonder if Patton has somehow tapped into their ancestral dreaming.
'With Hands Clasped Tightly' by Daisy Patton
Meanwhile, over at David Shelton Gallery, you’ll want to check out Marigold, a suite of paintings by Brooklyn-based artist Benjamin Edmiston, each named after a type of flower and each full of colorful contrasts inspired by the natural world.
Up one flight of stairs at Anya Tish Gallery is Pattern and Power, the gallery’s debut solo exhibition of 30-year-old, Houston-born, South Asian-American artist Ruhee Maknojia, whose work draws inspiration from the aesthetics and philosophies of ancient and contemporary Indo-American culture. This vibrant show includes ten acrylic-on-canvas paintings or “Magicalscapes,” each with its own mysterious tale to tell, an animated film charmingly narrated by Maknojia, and a site-specific, walk-in installation of Banarasi fabric and artificial grass titled Manufactured Paradise.
Across from Anya Tish Gallery at Assembly is Mumbai-born, multimedia artist Manjari Sharma’s Surface Tension, a beautifully installed exhibit of photos, video, and installations that explore the artist’s personal connection to the archetypal power and poetry of water. The theme of nature continues at Barbara Davis Gallery with The Trees are Humming, a stunning solo exhibition by 75-year-old Japanese-born American artist Yuriko Yamaguchi of mysterious, spectral-like sculptures, each constructed with hand-cast resin, paper pulp, and steel wire that seem to hover in mid-air.
A colorful piece by Ruhee Maknojia
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IT’S OPEN SEASON for Houston’s fine-arts community. Next up: On Friday, Sept. 29, at the Wortham Center, DACAMERA opens its 36th season with the Houston debut of Isidore String Quartet, one of the hottest young quartets performing and touring today.
The program, titled Awakenings, includes Mozart’s Quartet No. 19 in C Major, nicknamed "Dissonance" due to the first movement’s slow, spooky and harmonically ambiguous introduction; Mendelssohn’s regal Quartet No. 5 in E-Flat Major, Op. 44., No. 3, the third from a set of three quartets he dedicated to the Crown Prince of Sweden; and Time’s Dialogue, a new, commissioned quintet by Houston-based composer Nicky Sohn, featuring DACAMERA artistic director Sarah Rothenberg on piano.
Born in Seoul, Korea in 1992, Sohn was the sole classical composer among Houston CityBook’s Cool 100, but her star was certainly rising before then. She has received commissions and enjoyed performances by some of the world’s preeminent performing arts institutions, including Stuttgart Ballet, National Orchestra of Korea, St. Louis Symphony, Aspen Philharmonic, and New York City Ballet. Here in Houston, Sohn is composer-in-residence of Houston’s 16-member, conductor-less Kinetic Ensemble string orchestra. Kinetic premiered her violin concerto Home, inspired by the stories of previously unhoused graduates of The Women’s Home, featuring soloist Mary Grace Johnson and dance choreography by Kayla Collymore.
For Time’s Dialogue, Sohn was inspired by the 1957 recording of “Bye, Bye, Blackbird” by the legendary trumpeter and band leader Miles Davis; both the tune itself, along with Miles’ immediately identifiable approach to playing and improvising with a melody, were touchpoints for Sohn in the creation of her own “dialogue” with the recording as well as the two quartets on the Awakenings program, each composed by Mozart and Mendelssohn when they were in their late 20s. “I’m usually the youngest composer to be programmed, but I’m going to be the oldest composer to be performed on this concert,” says Sohn.
Sohn cites jazz as a major influence on her compositional output and hears it as a uniquely “organic way of making music that sounds like a conversation.” Conversational textures abound throughout Time’s Dialogue, which whizzes by in less than six minutes, with intervallic and harmonic content from “Bye, Bye, Blackbird” embedded in the individual and combined parts like strands of musical DNA. It doesn’t feel like “jazz,” but Miles never liked that word anyway, and reveled in doing the unexpected, which is another thing Sohn admires about the man. “He always came up with new styles of music,” says Sohn. “He was always looking for new ways of expression.”
Sohn also alludes to but doesn’t elaborate on, coming to terms with some painful personal experiences this past spring that led her to listen to sadder, blues-infused music in the vein of classic Miles. “Music is such a powerful tool for expression where I can be as abstract or as specific as I want,” says Sohn. “It’s almost like keeping a diary.”
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