PAST EXHIBITIONS

2008

Co-sponsored by Brazos Bookstore in Houston and The Feminist Press at the City University of New York

Art League Houston and Voices Breaking Boundaries are very pleased to present We the People: Writers' Voices from Iran, Palestine, and Pakistan featuring authors: Fady Joudah, Farnoosh Moshiri, Sehba Sarwar and Bapsi Sidhwa. Co-sponsors of the event are Brazos Bookstore and The Feminist Press at CUNY. This event is in conjunction with Art League Houston's exhibition We the People..., featuring artists Delilah Montoya, Orlando Lara, and Soody Sharifi, November 7 - December 27, 2008. The reading also highlights the recent Feminist Press publication, And the World Changed: Contemporary Stories by Pakistani Women, edited by Muneeza Shamsie that includes works by Ms. Sidhwa and Ms. Sarwar. Copies of And the World Changed and others by these writers will be available for purchase at the event.

Art League Houston and Nameless Sound are pleased to announce a concert featuring Paul Winstanley and The Nameless Sound Ensemble, which will be presented at the Art League on Sunday, October 12, 2008 from 7:00 - 9:00 p.m. General admission is $10, $8 for students, and young people 18 years and younger free. Seating is limited and is on a first come, first serve basis.

Paul Winstanley, a.k.a. Paul Guilford, will perform on electric bass and electronics, and will be accompanied by the Nameless Sound Ensemble which features Chris Cogburn (percussion), David Dove (trombone), Ryan Edwards (guitar, voice), Sandy Ewen (guitar), Sonia Flores (bass, voice), Lucas Gorham (guitar, lap steel, electronics) and Jason Jackson (saxophones).

Paul Winstanley is from New Zealand, and resided in Houston during the late 1980's and 1990's. He is returning to the city for the first time in 12 years in a residency sponsored by Nameless Sound and Creative New Zealand. His residency includes performance/recording sessions with regional artists and workshops with The Nameless Sound Youth Ensemble, as well as workshops at Houston area high schools.

Winstanley has been in the improvisational/experimental music scene under a never ending stream of assumed names for about 15 years, with each pseudonym corresponding to a new project, each one conceptually or stylistically different from the other. In 1996 he appeared as "Paul Guilford", using a bass triggered synthesizer to play freely improvised music with The Dave Dove/Paul Duo, and recording slabs of avant-ambient-squall as "p.h. Locasta". (David Dove is the Executive Director and Founder of Nameless Sound, and a former member of the legendary Houston band Sprawl.) Around this same time, Winstanley began experimenting with electronic feedback using a mixer and effects processor, and later that year made the first Sci-Hi solo recording. His present list of instrumentation includes: electric bass guitar, electronic feedback, bass drum, percussion, balloons, and synthesizer.

This year Winstanley has performed on electric bass with traditional. blues/gospel duo - Storehouse, and the modern jazz quartet Lippizanas, as well as occasional stints with the William John Hooker Trio, Audible<2, Joe Bell Trio, The Fertility Festival, The Calypso Kings, Sorry See-Saw, The Pacific New Music Ensemble and a variety of ad-hoc groups. This year he has also taken Sci Hi to the Now Now festival in Sydney, Australia in March and to the I Am In Dust festival in San Francisco in October.

HOUSTON (September 15, 2008) - Art League Houston, in partnership with JPMorgan Chase, is pleased to announce the opening of Del Otro Lado (From The Other Side), which takes place at Heritage Hall in the JPMorgan Chase Building in Downtown Houston, and runs from October 1 - October 24, 2008, as a celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month.

The opening reception for Del Otro Lado takes place on Wednesday, October 1, 2008 from 5:30 - 7:30, with Curator Angel Quesada in attendance.

Del Otro Lado is the first in a series of four visual art exhibitions that focus on cultural heritage month celebrations. Celebrating Diversity Through Art is a unique collaboration between JPMorgan Chase and Art League Houston, which highlights emerging artists representative of diverse communities.

Curator Angel Quesada is an Austin-based artist who was raised along the Texas Borderlands/Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, a place rich in history and folklore. He grew up in a number of border towns, including Laredo, Eagle Pass, and Del Rio. Both his parents still live and work along the border for the United States government. He attended the Massachusetts College of Art and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where he studied painting, printmaking, and interrelated media. Quesada has had exhibitions at venues that include Mexic-Arte Museum in Austin, Galeria Vito Alesio Centro Corporal in Saltillo, Mexico, and the Casa De Sousa in Los Angeles. He has curated shows at Texas A & M University in Corpus Christi, and the Mexican American Cultural Center, Mexci-Arte Museum, and the International Center in Austin. His most recent curated exhibition was Enmascarados: an homage to Lucha Libra for Pump Projects Art Complex in Austin, Texas.

Art League Houston is pleased to announce the opening of "Melissa Miller, Texas Artist of the Year 2008" September 5 - October 10, 2008. Melissa is well known for her poetic and enigmatic narrative paintings of animals set in environs where one may find the wolf with the lamb or the llama with a herd of cows. This exhibition will feature paintings and prints from the 1980's and '90's, as well as more recent work.

The opening reception for "Melissa Miller, Texas Artist of the Year 2008" is Friday, September 5, 6:00 - 8:00 p.m., beginning with an artist talk by Melissa Miller at 6:00 p.m. A catalogue, with an essay by Michelle White, accompanies the exhibit.

Michelle White says of Miller and her work,

Miller [arranges] her animals in a remarkable variety of unlikely and sometimes outlandish combinations, a hare is perched on the back of a primate, who screams in the moonlight. A jack rabbit and a team of Rhesus monkeys teeter on stilts for prancing frogs, a cheetah, a sheep, and a fox line up and gaze at the viewer in peaceful, but unexpected accord. In a contemporary context, animal painting is indeed anachronistic, but therein resides the power of Miller's seemingly unassuming subject. Representations of animals have long been carriers of metaphor, allegories of the equally enigmatic social and psychological behavior of human beings. Miller's work continues in this tradition and like many renderings of animals in the visual landscape, her paintings have the uncanny ability to tell us about ourselves.

Art League Houston is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition Thunder Within The Earth, a drawing exhibition curated by Beth Secor, and featuring the works of Jack Livingston, Philip Maysles, Matthew Sontheimer, Marco Villegas and Liz Ward The exhibition is on view in the ALH main gallery July 11 - August 22, 2008. The opening reception for Thunder Within The Earth is July 11, 2008 from 6-8 p.m., with a curator and artist talk at 6:15.p.m.

In 1981, Beth Secor and Jack Livingston were in an exhibition entitled "Coming to Meet" at the Center for Art and Performance (CAP) on Almeda Boulevard in Houston, Texas. Secor recalls, "Jack and I worked together at Texas Art Supply, and had taken the title of our show from the I Ching, also known as the Chinese Book of Changes. Even at that time, I greatly admired Jack's work, for although there was a certain nervous tension within it that was similar to mine, there was also a quietness that I admire and have yet to achieve in my own work."

This theme of similarity and yet great difference underlies Secor's selection process for all the artists featured in Thunder Within The Earth, a title once again chosen from the I Ching. Thunder Within The Earth specifically refers to the hexagram "Fu" (Return or the Turning Point) and conjures up an image of a quiet but powerful force. "I took the image from "Fu/Return" because each of the artists, at one time or another has lived in Houston, and I imaged this exhibition as symbolizing a return to the city. When I initially selected them, I hadn't come up with a profound theme or a thread that would hold the show together, but had simply thought of people whose work I strongly admire, and who draw in one fashion or another- whether it be in gouache or silverpoint or floor wax and ink, It wasn't until I began to receive images for the show that I realized all the works have a certain powerful quietness to them, a most fortuitous coincidence. None of the works shouts or screams, but all of them possess some quality that resonates strongly upon the psyche," says Secor.

Ingebrigt Håker Flaten´s creative and highly original bass playing has been highly regarded all over the world and he has done several performances with major international artists such as Evan Parker (UK), Paul Lytton (UK), Joe McPhee (US), Joe Lovano (US), Yusef Lateef (US), Tony Oxley (UK), Iain Ballamy (UK), Dave Liebman (US), Chris Potter (US), Zim Ngqvana (SA), Benoit Delbeq (FRA), Dr.L.Subramaniam (IND), Billy Cobham (US), Jean Luc Pounty (FRA). He has frequently appeared at important international jazz festivals in Den Haag, Liége, Montraux, Athens/Georgia, Cape Town, Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Paris, Istanbul, Saalfelden, Nice, Groningen, San Francisco, San Sebastian, Lüc, Nancy, London, Perpignan, Molde, Perth, Kongsberg, Berlin, Houston and legendary clubs such as New Morning in Paris, Quasimodo in Berlin, Ronny Scotts and Pizza Express in London, Knitting Factory and Tonic in New York, Empty Bottle in Chicago, Blue Note in Yokohama and Hemlock Tawern in San Francisco. His musical expression is based on the language of jazz and improvised music, acoustic and electronic, but his interest in rock and ethnic music also shows through his collaborations with the Norwegian rock bands Motorpsycho and Cato Salsa Experience as well as his work through Rikskonsertene. In July 2003 he released his solo-CD "Double bass" on the norwegian label SOFA. He has at the tender age of 33 already managed to establish himself as one of the most important exponents of the younger generation of musicians on the european scene today. In July 2004 Ingebrigt Håker Flaten was awarded Kongsberg Jazzfestival official "Vitalprisen" - the highest award for jazz musicians in Norway.

Art League Houston's annual Summer Exhibition and Benefit Art Sale takes place on Friday, June 20, in the Art League Houston galleries, 1953 Montrose. The evening will include music, hors d'oeuvres provided by Whole Foods Market, door prizes, cash bar, and a sale of art created by students enrolled in the Art League's Studio School and the Healing Art Groups. Festivities from 5:30 until 9:00 pm. The exhibition will be juried by Kerry Inman of Inman Gallery.

Proceeds from the sale will provide free art classes and art supplies to members of Art League Houston's Healing Art Programs serving those with HIV/AIDS and cancer related illnesses, Multiple Sclerosis, Fibromyalgia, and other physical challenges.

Art League Houston is pleased to announce the opening of Observer's Event Horizon, an exhibition of new glass works by Stacey Neff, May 3 - June 13, 2008 in Art League Houston's Main Gallery. Observer's Event Horizon is an exhibition of sculptural souvenirs from a fancifully imagined territory of malleable time and space. This is Ms. Neff's first opening in Houston. The opening reception for Observer's Event Horizon is May 3, 2008 6-8 PM, with an artist talk by Stacey Neff at 6:15.

Neff's unusual glass works pair supplies found in automotive/nautical factories with the ancient material of glass, combining multiple units hand blown in a traditional glass style into singular, large forms. Taking the well formed ideas of science on artistic adventures, Observer's Event Horizon explores a frontier of equalized relativity between the macrocosmic and microcosmic worlds. The works included in this exhibition are sculptural snapshots encompassing a panoramic view from the Hubble telescope to the micron microscope, converging between the known and the imagined. For example, The Great Rhombi Cub octahedron and Icosahedrons geometric bases of her Star Seed pieces exist as visually manifested echoes between a star nursery in a far away galaxy and a bacteria on a human heart. Her Europa loop, which references one of Jupiter's moons, describes a world and an orbit, a particle and a wave. Breathing Stone VI, without the anchor of relativity, explores something as large as the landscape of an asteroid, or as tiny as the crevices of magnified pollen, or the spaces between seeds in a pomegranate. Stacey Neff says about her work, "My inspiration ignites at Conscilience, the fusion of art and science. In the words of J.E. Hoke, 'Science may create a vehicle to take you anywhere you want to go, but only myth will give you a reason for going.'"

Art League Houston is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition Of Winter to Spring by Suzanne Manns, May 3 - June 13, 2008 in Art League Houston's School Gallery. This exhibition of work emphasizes her individualized and extremely personalized relationship with nature. The opening reception for Of Winter to Spring is May 3, 2008 6-8 PM, with a talk by the artist at 6:30 and music by DJ DelSur.

For a number of years, Suzanne Manns' work has been directly influenced by her garden and the landscape directly surrounding her home. Her Houston Heights bungalow is surrounded by a densely layered and compact urban English garden. Within her prints, Manns balances images from her garden, focusing on shifts of scale, and meditating on the fragile, yet enduring nature of life. Recording bits and fragments from this environ of which she is so intimately familiar, Manns creates highly individualized imagery, filtered through her own physical and psychological perceptions. Rather than being simple portraits of nature, the resulting works become a diary of intimate experience.

Art League Houston is pleased to partner with FOTOFEST 2008 and its Twelfth International Biennial of Photography and Photo-Related Art in presenting three separate exhibitions of works by Chinese-based artists, Sun Guojuan, Chen Lingyang and Liu Lijie, March 8 – April 19, 2008. The opening reception for Sun Guojuan: Sweetness Forever, Chen Lingyang: Twelve Flower Months and Liu Lijie: Another Episode will be at Art League Houston on Saturday, March 8, 2008, 6:00 – 8:00 p.m.

These conceptual, mixed-media works are presented as part of Current Perspectives 1999-2008, a series of 11 one-person presentations by leading contemporary Chinese artists. Current Perspective exhibitions feature predominantly color, large-scale, staged, constructed, and digitally produced works by Chinese mainland-based artists, which address issues of religion, ethnicity, gender, urban transformation, identity, globalization, and the inter-relationship of contemporary art to classical Chinese art and history.

Art League Houston is pleased to announce "Pysanky...", an exhibition of paintings and decorated eggs by Nestor Topchy on view at Art League Houston, February 11 through February 23, 2008.  An artist talk with Mr. Topchy will take place on Tuesday, February 19 at 6 p.m.  Nestor will also teach a Pysanky Ukrainian Egg Decorating Class at the Art League School, Thursdays 1 - 4 p.m., April 3-  May 8, 2008.  Nestor Topchy's paintings, which are his own unique take on classical works by artists such as Botticelli and Giotto, combine two ancient traditions -- the Novgorod Russian or Byzantine tradition of icon writing, and Pysanky, also known as Ukrainian decorated eggs...more

Art League Houston is proud to host an exhibition of the Gold Key winners in the art category of the Scholastic Art & Writing Competition. The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards are the largest, longest-running and most prestigious recognition program of their kind in the United States. The Awards were established in 1923 by M. R. Robinson to encourage, foster and reward creativity in our nation’s classrooms. During its 83 year history, some of nation’s most celebrated writers and artists, including Richard Avedon, Truman Capote, Robert Indiana, Bernard Malamud, Joyce Maynard, Joyce Carol Oates, Phillip Pearlstein, Sylvia Plath, Robert Redford and Andy Warhol, have been recognized in this competition.

The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards of Harris County seeks to recognize and encourage young artists and writers in public, private and home schools.

2007

Eric Michael Jones' digital photographs are inspired by stories - both fairytales and contemporary fiction, such as the work of the Brothers Grimm and Raymond Carter, among others. Some influences in his work are clearly recognizable, while others are not, with the stories used simply as launching points for image making. As in fairy tales, a reoccurring sub-theme runs through the work - an ominously foreboding landscape (the horrible woods, the threatening sea), a place where children go willingly or otherwise, to work out their greatest fears and anxieties. more

Wayne Gilbert "Blind Philosophy" featured on The Engines of Our Ingenuity, click here to listen.

Blind Philosophy is a one-night exhibition of over 33 works Gilbert has created using human ashes over the past 7 years. A catalogue, with essays by Gus Kopriva, Catherine Anspon, and Susan Albert accompanies the exhibition. 

The human ashes that Gilbert uses in his paintings are either unclaimed cremated remains obtained at funeral homes, or those willed to him by others. more