FOR THE HOLIDAYS and new year, Houston’s art scene is vibrant and alive. Make note of our hot list!
1. Get Groovy
Houston Contemporary Dance Company
Houston dance lovers are still talking about last January’s powerhouse performance by Ishida, the only U.S. company recognized in Dance Magazine’s “25 to watch” for 2024. See what the fuss is about when Ishida presents keepsake (Jan. 12-13), an evening of poetically imagined cutting-edge movement. And in the spring, Houston Contemporary Dance Company embodies the title of its show Electrostatic Attraction (Apr. 20), with a world premiere by Houston Ballet’s Jack Wolff and audience faves from the past four seasons.
2. 'Family' Man
Bestselling, award-winning author Bryan Washington, whose muse is the city of Houston, dropped his second novel, Family Meal, in the fall. “The broken queer men of color” in Family Meal, per a WaPo review, “are written as neither symbols nor archetypes but as an achingly and beautifully etched ensemble of young Americans learning to navigate a more universal and human struggle: grief.”
3. Galleries Galore
‘Giant Deer’ by Shayne Murphy
Houston’s galleries are always an embarrassment of riches — and that’s never more true than during the holiday season. Don’t-miss exhibits include Redbud Art Center’s Coastal Gardens (Dec. 2-30) — haunting, allegorically-based watercolors by Michael Collins. On view at Inman Gallery is Something Nice With Swans (through Jan. 13), David Aylsworth’s latest batch of wittily titled abstract paintings. Over at Anya Tish Gallery, Shayne Murphy brings his waking dreams and nightmares to life with Cataplexy (through Dec. 30). In Dyaspora at The Jung Center of Houston (through Dec. 21), Haitian-born artist Mathieu JN Baptiste’s oil-and-acrylic paintings decipher the American dream from the perspective of a first-generation immigrant. And with holiday shopping in mind, Hooks-Epstein Galleries presents Wear It Out, a group art jewelry invitational with all manner of baubles, bangles and beads crafted by nine different artists.
4. Totally 'Rad
Midtown’s popular beer-garden-slash-music-venue Axelrad, which has become beloved by the jazz community for its Wednesday-night jam sessions, has dropped its first album, a collaboration with Wonky Power Records. Live at Axelrad features five different jazz groups recorded at the venue on Sept. 6, and is available via its Bandcamp page.
5. Lab Grown
CAMHLAB featured artist Nate Edwards
Downtown’s Post Houston building is home to a fab food hall, cool rooftop garden, a bumpin’ music venue — and a few artists-in-residence. Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston’s CAMHLAB program at Post currently features the work of four local artists or collectives, all of which have created projects inspired by and telling the stories of Freedman’s Town, a neighborhood established in Houston in 1865 by more than 1,000 formerly enslaved people.
6. Holiday Hits
Houston Ballet’s ‘The Nutcracker’
This season, the Houston Symphony offers a range of holiday programming, including Tim Burton’s stop-animation film The Nightmare Before Christmas projected on the big screen as the score is played live (Dec. 9-10); Duke Ellington’s swinging version of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker (Dec. 12); and Handel’s Messiah (Dec. 15-17), featuring the angelic voices of the Houston Symphony Chorus. Meanwhile, the Alley Theatre’s annual production A Christmas Carol (through Dec. 30) is comfort food for the soul. At Stages, the Cheshire cat meets Bad Bunny in Panto Alicia in Wonderland (Dec. 1-31) — an all-ages, Latinx spin on the Lewis Carroll classic. And the Ballet’s Nutcracker takes center stage through Dec. 27.
7. 'Over' and Above
An untitled Janet Sobel painting
Janet Sobel’s paintings, featuring her “all-over” abstraction methods, may bring to mind the work of Jackson Pollock — but the skilled New York artist preceded Pollock by a few years. In February, the Menil hangs her major paintings all together for the first time in more than six decades.
8. Page Turner
A must-read thriller for 2024 is Nishita Parekh’s Night of the Storm (out Jan. 16). Set in Sugar Land during Hurricane Harvey, Parekh’s debut features a multigenerational Indian-American family who find themselves trapped by floodwaters in a house with a murderer — an inventive update of the classic “locked-room” mystery.
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ON DEC. 12 at Jones Hall, the Houston Symphony Orchestra teams up with the 15-member Jazz Houston Orchestra for a special performance of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker Suite and Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s witty, re-imagined big band version of the ubiquitous, 19th-century classic.
If the thought of yet another performance of The Nutcracker puts you to sleep faster than a bowl of spiked eggnog, then this is the concert for you; movements from Tchaikovsky will alternate with those of Ellington, giving the audience a chance to hear a familiar piece of music in an entirely new way. (As an added bonus, Houston’s favorite bow-tie-wearing meteorologist Khambrel Marshall will narrate the performance.)
And this being Ellington, there will be soloing, something you rarely hear outside of a cadenza in performances of classical symphonic works. “That’s very true,” says Vincent Gardner, founding Artistic and Education Director of Jazz Houston. “You used to hear soloing in orchestral music two or three hundred years ago, but somehow, it slowly was phased out.”
Founded in 2017 by Gardner and his wife, Jazz Houston is just one of two institutions in the US supporting a resident jazz orchestra, the other being Jazz at Lincoln Center, an organization Gardner has been a part of for 23 years. Experiencing first-hand the growth of JALC from a summer concert series to full-fledged constituent of Lincoln Center and non-profit organization that operates its own performance space, Gardner was inspired to create something similar. “While most major cities will have an orchestra, a ballet, and an opera company, but most don’t have a counterpart organization that cultivates jazz,” says Gardner.
After considering other parts of the U.S., he chose to do it in Houston, where there is a philanthropic base, a jazz-loving community, and a long legacy of the music. “Texans and Houstonians have had a major part of every era of jazz music,” says Gardner, echoing Houston artist and DJ Tierney Malone’s assertion that you cannot talk about jazz and not talk about the great state of Texas.
Born in Chicago, and raised in Hampton, Va., Gardner and his wife now call Houston their home, and are committed to developing more opportunities and professional environments to ensure Houston jazz musicians are able to stay in Houston and sustain a professional career.
“The city is ripe for it,” says Gardner. “It’s a great environment.”
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