art

From Obama to Optical Illusions: Ambitious Spring Season Awaits at MFAH

From Obama to Optical Illusions: Ambitious Spring Season Awaits at MFAH

'Barack Obama' by Kehinde Wiley and 'Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama' by Amy Sherald, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

ANYONE WHO WORKS behind the scenes at a museum will tell you that installing a major exhibition in the time of Covid-19 is no small feat, but Houston institutions continue to step up their efforts to bring great shows to the city and keep their staff and visitors safe. Looking ahead to Spring 2022, four exhibitions are scheduled to go up at MFAH, each equally ambitious in their scope and complexity.

First up is the critically acclaimed Dawoud Bey: An American Project (March 6 – May 30, 2022), a retrospective of more than 80 works by New York-born photographer Dawoud Bey. The exhibit includes Bey’s portraits of Harlem residents — photos he took between 1975 and 1979, inspired in part by the portraiture of Harlem Renaissance photographer James Van Der Zee — as well as Bey’s recent series of moonlit stops along the Underground Railroad, a project he describes as “trying to see through the eyes of a fugitive African American.”

For Bey, who lives with severe hearing loss, photography is both a medium of personal expression and a way to reaffirm the “presence” of his subjects, specifically Black Americans, who are historically under- or misrepresented in museums, be it a skinny, yet confident boy in big sunglasses, holding a carton of milk, or a trio of senior ladies in Sunday church hats, leaning on a police barricade at a neighborhood parade.

Also scheduled for the Spring is M.C. Escher (March 6 – Sept. 5, 2022), a collection of bizarro illustrations and objects by the Dutch master of optical illusion, M.C. Escher, and Extraordinary Realities (March 13 – June 12, 2022), a provocative exhibit of South Eastern- and Persian-inspired miniature paintings by Glassell School of Art Core Program alumnus Shahzia Sikander.

The Obama Portraits Tour (April 3 – May 30, 2022) brings the official portraits of President Barack Obama (by Kehinde Wiley) and First Lady Michelle Obama (by Amy Sherald) to Houston, providing an intriguing counterpoint to the everyday royalty Bey captures so masterfully in his photographs.

M.C. Escher's 'Relativity'

'Horace and Shamari,' by Dawoud Bey

'Intimacy,' by Shahzia Sikander

From Your Site Articles
Related Articles Around the Web
Art + Entertainment
coolest people

Couples and Spa Aficionados Are Seeking Out This Equestrian and NFL Wife’s New Hotspot

LeBrina Jackson (photo by Shamir Johnson)

LEBRINA JACKSON, A noted equestrian with a fascinating story of overcoming challenges to succeed and grow, has always been an entrepreneur with a nurturing spirit. Even as a child growing up in Fifth Ward, she sold homemade popsicles — with fruit juice frozen into Styrofoam cups — for fifty cents, to cool her customers down on hot summer days.

Keep Reading Show less
People + Places
art

This Weekend: HGO Takes on Rarely Staged — and Oft Controversial — Wagner Opera

(photo by Robert Kusel)

Parsifal

TO BE BLUNT, there’s opera, and then there’s Wagner. By the time Richard Wagner had completed Parsifal in 1882, he was using the word bühnenweihfestspiel (“festival play for the consecration of a stage”) instead of “opera” to describe this four-and-a-half-hour epic, where music, drama, lighting, architecture, and quasi-religious ritual come together to create what the Germans called “gesamtkunstwerk,” or a total work of art. In the past decade, only two U.S. opera houses have had the guts to take on Parsifal, which makes the upcoming Houston Grand Opera production even more of a must-see, given how rarely this complex and controversial opera is staged.

Keep Reading Show less
Art + Entertainment