Grab a last look or first glimpse at opening and closing museum exhibitions and installations throughout Greater Houston in April 2021.
This month, Houston museums and institutions get in the swing of the spring season with new exhibitions at UH’s Blaffer Art Museum, Archway Gallery, Holocaust Museum Houston, Art League Houston and more.
April also brings the closing of more than a dozen installations across town, including those at Menil Drawing Institute, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Holocaust Museum Houston and many others.
Click here to check out more ongoing installation and exhibitions in museums around Greater Houston.
Last Chance: Closing Exhibitions & Installations in Houston
- Silent Revolutions: Italian Drawings from the Twentieth Century at Menil Drawing Institute | Sunday, April 11, 2021 | FREE – Featuring 70 drawings by Umberto Boccioni, Lucio Fontana, Maria Lai, Carol Rama and others, this exhibition showcases the high level of innovation in artistic movements and the realm of drawing at the turn of the 20th century.
- Wall Drawing Series: Jorinde Voigt at Menil Drawing Institute | Sunday, April 11, 2021 | FREE – Commissioned as a site-specific installation at the Drawing Institute, Jorinde Voigt’s epic new work responds to the vegetation and natural resources endemic to Houston and the Gulf Coast region.
- UH School of Art 43rd MFA Thesis Exhibition at Blaffer Art Museum | Through Sunday, April 11, 2021 | FREE – Every spring, the Blaffer presents works from the University of Houston School of Art’s Masters of Fine Arts degree candidates. Works span the school’s five studio programs: Graphic Design, Interdisciplinary Practice and Emerging Forms, Painting, Photography/Digital Media, and Sculpture. The exhibition showcases highly developed bodies of work produced in a studio intensive environment over a three-year degree program.
- Magic Birds in the Night by Tania Botelho at Jung Center | April 14, 2021 | FREE – By feeding birds during the day, Botelho captured real expressions and actions that transformed into drawings and paintings during the night, now on display at the Museum District Jung Center.
- Weave Houston: Celebrating 71 Years of the Contemporary Handweavers of Houston at Houston Center for Contemporary Craft | Saturday, April 17, 2021 | FREE – In celebration of the founding of Contemporary Handweavers of Houston in 1949, this exhibition features work from the diverse membership of the organization, with works from emerging practitioners alongside longtime fiber artists, such as Dr. Mary Ruth Smith.
- Stories of Survival: Object, Image, Memory at Holocaust Museum Houston | Sunday, April 18, 2021 – This exhibition brings together more than 60 personal artifacts belonging to Survivors of the Holocaust, along with photography from documentarian Jim Lommasson and handwritten responses by Survivors or their family members. Included in museum admission.
- Estructuras Monumentales at Buffalo Bayou Park | Friday, April 23, 2021 | FREE – Explore four larger-than-life sculptures created by 105-year-old Cuban artist Carmen Herrera on the Fondren Foundation Meadow (located along Allen Parkway at Gillette Street). The big, bulky shapes boast brilliant hues and striking shapes in this temporary installation co-presented with New York’s Public Art Fund.
- Rick Lowe: New Paintings & Drawings at Art League Houston | Saturday, April 24, 2021 | FREE – Art League Houston’s 2020 Texas Artist of the Year, Rick Lowe, showcases the artwork he’s created over the course of the last few years. The work visualizes Lowe’s signature, vivid explorations of color and complex visualizations of compositional space.
- Celia Álvarez Muñoz: Obras at Art League Houston | Saturday, April 24, 2021 | FREE – Art League Houston’s 2020 Lifetime Achievement Award in the Visual Arts, Celia Álvarez Muñoz, displays her dynamic range of work. It emphasizes her innovative transitions between photographic media, installations-based work, sculpture, and book art.
- Drew Bacon: Stutter & Spill at Museum of Fine Arts, Houston | Sunday, April 25, 2021 – The Houston-native artist has created a two-channel video built upon a montage of the 1912 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, exploring both the increasing obsolescence of print media in the digital era and the ways in which meaning becomes fluid in the rapid evolution of both the spoken and written word.
- Carmen Herrera: Structuring Surfaces at Museum of Fine Arts, Houston | Sunday, April 25, 2021 – The Cuban American artist, who just turned 105 in May, devoted her work to expanding the boundaries of geometric abstraction through paintings, drawings, prints, wall structures and objects which will be on display at this retrospective of more than thirty of her works.
- Slowed and Throwed: Records of the City Through Mutated Lenses at Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston | Through Sunday, April 25, 2021 | FREE – Revolving around the legacy of the late Houston legend, DJ Screw, this interdisciplinary exhibition examines the creative process of DJ Screw, his contribution to rap, and assembles a field of artists that appropriate mash-up, collage, and slow down time to emphasize how remixing of “sampled” materials is a radical aesthetic act utilized by both artists and musicians.
- Consequential Journeys by Becky Soria at Archway Gallery | Thursday, April 29 – Soria’s new abstract works explore the pull of both human fragility and strength in difficult times. In her paintings, Soria approaches the human figure less from its familiar shapes, and much more from within, making visible its visceral emotional life.
Click here to check out more ongoing installation and exhibitions in museums around Greater Houston.
Save on 1-Day & Multi-Day Museum Passes Around Houston
First Look: Opening Exhibitions & Installations in Houston
- Consequential Journeys by Becky Soria at Archway Gallery | Saturday, April 3 – Soria’s new abstract works explore the pull of both human fragility and strength in difficult times. In her paintings, Soria approaches the human figure less from its familiar shapes, and much more from within, making visible its visceral emotional life.
- Rendezvous: The Assembly of a Legacy at The Bryan Museum | Saturday, April 10 – On view for a short time, this exhibition explores the craftsmanship and artwork of Leo Naumann, a Texas rancher, cowboy, saddle maker, artist, and Rocky Mountain trader.
- Detention Nation & Hostile Terrain 94 at Blaffer Art Museum | Saturday, April 17 – These two artist-activist installations explore current and far-reaching questions about immigration and border issues. Undocumented Migration Project’s Hostile Terrain 94 consists of over 3,200 handwritten toe tags that represent migrants who have died trying to cross the Sonoran Desert of Arizona between the mid-1990s and 2019. The toe tags are geolocated on a map of the desert to show the exact places where their remains were found. Detention Nation by the Sin Huellas Artist Collective is a multimedia work consisting of video, audio, detainee letters, cyanotype body prints and plaster body casts huddled in Mylar emergency blankets.
- Journeys Remembered by Sandi Seltzer Bryant at Jung Center | Saturday, April 17 – The collage painting artworks on display in this series of three separate, unique bodies of work reflects the artist’s experiences in various environments that have played a role in the current stage of her life journey, including the geothermal baths of Iceland and Wild West landscapes.
- Reading the Weather by Hong Hong at Art League Houston | Friday, April 23 – Houston-based artist Hong Hong has created a large-scale paper-work installed on the facade of Art League Houston’s building adjacent to the Sculpture Garden. The work will interact and react with the environment while on view over the course of a month, visually evidencing shifts in our environmental atmosphere and recording the passage of time.
- Withstand: Latinx Art in Times of Conflict at Holocaust Museum Houston | Friday, April 30 – The Museum’s first juried exhibition brings together 100 multi-media artworks of Houston Latinx artists that explore themes of social justice and human rights. Specific focuses include border relations, gender roles, domestic violence, the immigrant experience and social and political turmoil.
Click here to check out more ongoing installation and exhibitions in museums around Greater Houston.
Save on Multi-Day Museum Passes Around Houston
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