PAST EXHIBITIONS
February 13, 2010 - May 9, 2010
American Letterpress: The Art of the Hatch Show Print
 Like all art, the posters of Hatch Show Print in Nashville, Tennessee, are designed to stop us in our tracks, draw us in for a closer look, and make us pause for a moment of reflection. Pure artistry and masterful composition are what make Hatch posters part of the story of American art and culture. Snappy graphics, punchy titles, humor, and irony are what make them irresistible.
Hatch Show Print, founded in 1879, is still a working letterpress and design shop, creating posters today using the same letterpress methods as yesterday. The technology at this Nashville institutions has never changed, only the faces of the customers: from Elvis Presley to Elvis Costello, Buddy Guy to Bruce Springsteen, Etta James to Emmylou Harris, the Carter Family to Coldplay. While Hatch’s name is synonymous with the music business, its posters promoting football games, vaudeville shows, state fairs, stock car races, and picture shows reflect the breadth of American popular culture. American Letterpress: The Art of the Hatch Show Print illustrates the fascinating fusion of art with popular culture and music history. This visually compelling exhibition includes approximately 120 original posters (including authorized restrikes from vintage block and contemporary restrikes), 20 hard-carved wooden printing blocks, text panels and labels.
American Letterpress: the Art of Hatch Show Print, an exhibition created by Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) in collaboration with the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, is supported by America’s Jazz Heritage, A Partnership of the Wallace Foundation and the Smithsonian Institution.
Also on view:
Collection Selections: featuring work in a variety of media from the permanent collection of the museum and local collections.
New Works: Luke Savisky
AMOA’s New Works exhibition series introduces fresh contemporary art by innovative Austin artists.
November 21, 2009 - January 31, 2010
 David Bates Since 1982: From the Everyday to the Epic
Dallas-based artist David Bates (b. 1952) received recognition at an early age for his expressive narrative paintings. He has become known nationally for his large and colorful paintings and sculptures. His unique style of painting draws inspiration from the directness of folk art as well as from modern masters such as Vincent van Gogh, Paul Matisse, and Pablo Picasso. Many significant public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, The Phillips Collection, and the Yale University Art Gallery, hold Bates’ work.
The exhibition will feature early narrative works, landscapes of Grassy Lake, Arkansas and the Texas Gulf Coast, still lives featuring flora and fauna found in Texas, portraits, and his most recent Storm series, focused on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Organized by the Austin Museum of Art.
Also on view:
Collection Selections featuring work in a variety of media with a focus on a faces and colorful abstraction from the permanent collection of the museum and local collections.
New Works: Jade Walker
AMOA’s New Works exhibition series introduces fresh contemporary art by innovative Austin artists.
August 22 - November 8, 2009, Chuck Close, A Couple of Ways of Doing Something
 Recognized as the artist who has most radically transformed contemporary portraiture, Chuck Close is an internationally renowned American painter, printmaker and photographer who, since the 1960s, has explored countless approaches to his subject.
A Couple of Ways of Doing Something is a challenging exploration of diverse photographic techniques and processes that transcend any one medium. This exhibition focuses on his stunning daguerreotypes, crisp digital prints, rich photogravures, and monumental tapestries celebrating the depth and complexity of the human face.
The exhibition presents a selection of recent portraits of his circle of friends who have made appearances in his paintings over the years, including influential artists Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, Andres Serrano, Lorna Simpson, and Robert Wilson as well as Chuck Close himself, all enhanced by the evocative poetry of New York School poet Bob Holman. Organized by Aperture Foundation.
May 30 - August 8, 2009
 The Lining of Forgetting: Internal and External Memory in Art explores the ways we remember, both as individuals and collectively, and highlights how we mostly forget, rewrite and fabricate memory. The exhibition features sculpture, photography, work on paper, installation, video and computer-generated works by fourteen artists of international scope, including Edgar Arceneaux, Deborah Aschheim, Louis Bourgeois, Janice Caswell, John Coplans, Pablo Helguera, Emma Kay, Dinh Q. Lê, Scott Lyall, David Rokeby, Mungo Thomson, Cody Trepte, Kerry Tribe, and Rachel Whiteread.
An uneasy reliance on the silicon chip, spectacular advances in brain imaging and research, a massive population (the largest ever) entering their senior years, and a noted propensity for cultural amnesia have worked to increase society’s preoccupation with issues surrounding memory. The Lining of Forgetting focuses on the function of memory itself and the way that artists have examined its mutable nature. Issues explored include: the mediation of digital technology to record and store our past; our evolving perception of history in the age of the internet and globalization; and the way that individual memory works to support personal and collective identities. Organized by the Weatherspoon Art Museum, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
February 21- May 17, 2009
 Lordy Rodriguez: States of America
Take a road trip with Lordy Rodriguez, who re-mapped America. His decade-long project explores the addition of five new states that have saturated our geography--the Internet, Hollywood, Monopoly, Disney, and Territory. Which state do you truly live in?
Organized by the Austin Museum of Art and curated by Eva Buttacavoli, Director of Exhibitions and Education.
 Clifford Ross: Outside Realism
Challenging the fundamental foundations of photography, Clifford Ross uses modern technology to redefine the American landscape. Never before seen in Austin, Ross' epic photography exposes both the peaceful and the chaotic qualities that exist in nature. Organized by the Austin Museum of Art and curated by Andrea Mellard, Assistant Curator.
November 15, 2008 - February 8, 2009
Workers: Photographs by Sebastião Salgado
 Workers is a global epic that transcends mere photography to become an affirmation of the enduring spirit of working men and women. Salgado’s black and white photographs are an archaeological exploration of the activities that have defined work from the Stone Age through the Industrial Age, to the present. An elegy for the passing of traditional methods of labor and production during an era of globalization, Workers delivers a message of endurance and hope. More than those of any other living photographer, Salgado's images of the world's poor stand in tribute to the human condition.
Organized by Lélia Wanick Salgado/Amazonas Images.
The Texas Chair Project by Damian Priour
 The Texas Chair Project is an artistic exchange initiated by Texas artist Damian Priour. In 2007, Priour created and mailed 100 unique miniature glass and limestone chairs to fellow artists with the request that they return a chair in response. A celebration of material exploration, this exhibition is a presentation of this interchange. Texas artists Steve Brudniak, Melissa Miller, Jesus Moroles, Margo Sawyer, Bob Schneider, James Surls, The Art Guys, and Sydney Yeager, among others, created chairs in such diverse media as a beer can, buttons, cast bronze, plastic army men, sawdust, steel, uranium tubing, and U.S. currency. Organized by Damian Priour and Eva Buttacavoli, Director of Exhibitions and Education, Austin Museum of Art.
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October 3, 2007 - September 27, 2009
Laguna Gloria Grounded
 Laguna Gloria Grounded explores the lush twelve acre grounds overlooking Lake Austin at the Austin Museum of Art-Laguna Gloria. The picturesque formal gardens and wild places of this historical site served as the inspiration for the seventeen exhibited artworks. Ten featured Austin artists create art that expresses their personal connections with the landscape. Site-specific artworks, like Beverly Penn's cast bronze botanicals and Martha Gannon's constellation of photographs of Laguna Gloria's flora and fauna, examine the relationship between nature and culture. The modest exhibition celebrates the grounds and revitalized historic gardens of Laguna Gloria with two-dimensional and three-dimensional works installed inside the villa.
Laguna Gloria Grounded is organized by the Austin Museum of Art.
October 3, 2006 - September 23, 2007
Austin Art Seen, circa 1961
 Austin Art Seen, circa 1961 reexamines the Modernist movement in Texas art, the art form that gained popularity during the time AMOA-Laguna Gloria (formerly Laguna Gloria Art Museum) was chartered. Modernism was slow to develop in Texas, which was firmly tied to a naturalistic painting style rooted in regionalism for the first half of the century. However, several of the seventeen local artists included in this exhibition brought Texas Modernism to national attention in the latter half of the century. Each of these featured artists exhibited widely during their careers, many times at Laguna Gloria, and all had connections with the growing art department of The University of Texas. Created roughly between 1946 and 1969, many of the works included in this exhibition were first exhibited at Laguna Gloria. Although these works look surprisingly fresh today, when first seen, these bold abstractions, full of intense color and expression, effectively challenged ideas of regional art as they experimented with new forms and ideas to portray the world around them.
Austin Art Seen, circa 1961 is organized by the Austin Museum of Art and curated by Carl R. McQueary.
October 12, 2005 - September 24, 2006
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At the Water's Edge
 Taking its cue from the lakeside location of AMOA-Laguna Gloria’s Driscoll Villa, At the Water’s Edge is an intimate exhibition of the work of sixteen contemporary Texas artists who explore the varied effects of water in representational and abstracted images. Whether working in oil, acrylic, watercolor, woodcut, pastel, or photography, each artist explores the ever-changing relationship between water, air, and land.
At the Water's Edge is organized by the Austin Museum of Art.
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October 6, 2004 - September 25, 2005
Gardens, Real and Imagined
Celebrating the recently restored historic grounds which surround the Driscoll Villa, Gardens, Real and Imagined presents twenty-five works in a variety of materials and methods by nine Austin-area artists who find inspiration in a full range of cultivated landscapes. A Texas farm, a wildflower field, a Japanese rock garden, a forest glade, a Chinese Feng Shui courtyard, and a meditative grotto are some of the types and traditions explored. Whether working in watercolor, woodcut, paint, fabric or plastic, these artists envision natural spaces that invite viewers in for a sensual experience of light, space, color, and texture—prompting us to imagine gardens of our own.
Gardens: Real and Imagined, organized by the Austin Museum of Art, is generously supported by Earl Broussard and TBG Partners, Corey and Patty Hoffpauir and The Garden Room, Peggy O'Shaughnessy, and The Friends of Laguna Gloria.
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| September 5, 2003 - September 26, 2004 |
The Texas Landscape Across Four Generations
With the reopening of the newly renovated Driscoll Villa, the Austin Museum of Art presents The Texas Landscape Across Four Generations, a selection of works drawn primarily from the Museum's permanent collection. This intimate exhibition of twelve works highlights the various ways eleven Texas artists have confronted the idea of landscape and nature over the last seventy-five years. The artists—John Alexander, Kate Breakey, Dianne Grammer, Peter Paul Hatgil, Grace Spaulding John, William Lester, Peter Mansbendel, Cesar Augusto Martinez, Mickey Mayfield, Lordy Rodriguez, and Julie Speed—represent many styles, approaches, and genres, from sunny impressionistic vistas and expressionistic renderings of scrubland to focused views of native flora, surreal fantasies, and abstracted maps. The artists’ choices of media include carved wood, oil paint, encaustic, hand-painted photographs, collage, pastel, and ink on paper, all of which allow for a broad range of experiences within this exhibition. The Texas Landscape Across Four Generations is the first in a series of yearlong exhibitions held in the Driscoll Villa that will celebrate nature, art, and history.
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At AMOA- Downtown
823 Congress Avenue (at 9th Street)
August 30 - November 2, 2009
MODERN ART. MODERN LIVES. THEN + NOW
A two-part exhibition organized by the Austin Museum of Art from AMOA’s permanent collection and local collections that explores how modern and contemporary artists merge art and life.
 Then: 19th and 20th Century Artists at the Turn of the Century
This unprecedented exhibition of works by Émile Bernard, Pierre Bonnard, Eugène Delacroix, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Vincent van Gogh, and Edouard Vuillard, among others, offers a unique opportunity to examine how modern art and modern lives intertwined.
Curated by James Housefield, Adjunct Curator.
 Now: Where Are We Going? Contemporary Artists Address Issues of the 21st Century
Featuring painting, sculpture, photography, printmaking, and video, this exhibition is an open-ended exploration that prompts viewers to consider how artists engage with the aesthetic and cultural issues of our time. Artists include Vija Celmins, Michael Ray Charles, Jenny Holzer, Chris Jordan, Barbara Kruger, Jonathan Marshall, David McGee, Julie Mehretu, Julie Speed, Carrie Mae Weems, and Kehinde Wiley, among others.
Curated by Dana Friis-Hansen, Executive Director and Chief Curator.
May 24 -August 17, 2008
Sol LeWitt x2
 LeWitt x 2 is a two-part exhibition that focuses both on the artworks of Sol LeWitt and on his personal collection of contemporary art. Sol LeWitt: Structure and Line documents the full arc of the artist’s career. Renowned for his contributions to minimalism and conceptual art, LeWitt’s pencil drawings, brilliantly colored gouaches, and “structures” made of wood, aluminum, and fiberglass have defined and pushed the limits of art-making for over forty years. Throughout his career critics have admired how his work synthesizes left and right brain creativity and provokes both intellectual and emotional responses. Selections from the LeWitt Collection showcases works by an exciting array of national and international artists including Alice Aycock, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Alighiero Boetti, Hanne Darboven, Gilbert & George, Hans Haake, Eva Hesse, On Kawara, Shirin Neshat, and Robert Ryman.
Organized by the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art.
Image Credit: Sol LeWitt, Form Derived from a Cubic Rectangle, 1991, gouache on paper, 22 x 29 inches. © The LeWitt Collection, Chester, CT
February 16 - May 11, 2008
New Art in Austin: 20 to Watch
 New Art in Austin: 20 to Watch introduces emerging and lesser-known artists from Central Texas whose work stretches the boundaries of contemporary art. The third in a triennial showcase, New Art in Austin: 20 to Watch spotlights emerging artists in our community. A statewide curatorial team will evaluate the work of local artists who have been watched by AMOA staff and Central Texas art professionals over the past three years. Through this exhibition the museum seeks to create a dialogue about contemporary art in Austin, attract attention to artists within our community, and share their work with other art centers in Texas. As a state-wide traveling exhibition accompanied by a full-color scholarly catalogue, the exhibition will bring cutting edge work in a variety of media to a broad audience.
Exhibition Artists: Yoon Cho, Meggie Chou, Ali Fitzgerald, Alyson Fox, Buster Graybill, Jules Buck Jones, Baseera Khan, Andrew Long, Kurt Mueller, Museum of Natural and Artificial Ephemerata, Jill Pangallo, Scott Proctor, Matthew Rodriguez, Shawn Smith, Xochi Solis, Sarah Sudhoff, Raymond Uhlir, Stephanie Wagner, Rebecca Ward, and Eric Zimmerman.
New Art in Austin: 20 to Watch has been organized by the Austin Museum of Art and co-curated by Diane Barber, Eva Buttacavoli, Bill FitzGibbons, and Dennis Kois. The exhibition, catalogue, and tour are presented by Wentwood Capital Advisors.
November 17, 2007 - February 3, 2008
Roy Lichtenstein Prints 1956-97
 Roy Lichtenstein Prints 1956-97 includes over seventy prints, spanning the career of one of the most important artists of the twentieth century—from the time of his first proto-Pop image to the print he was working on at the time of his death in 1997. Although best known for his comic-book images, Lichtenstein took on a wide range of subjects that included still life, portraiture, landscape, and modern art history.
Roy Lichtenstein Prints 1956-97 organized by the Museum of Art, Washington State University in consultation with the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation. The exhibition and related educational and outreach programs have been made possible by a grant from the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation. In Austin, support is provided by Bullock Community Partners.
August 25 - November 4, 2007
Extra-Ordinary: The Everyday Object in American Art
Selections from the Whitney Museum of American Art
 Extra-Ordinary: The Everyday Object in American Art illuminates unexpected facets of the familiar—the extraordinary within the ordinary. Thirty sculptures, paintings, prints, and photographs from the Whitney Museum of American Art, through content or medium, play with the traditional expectation of art as elevated beyond everyday life. Spanning more than forty years, these works present a record of the culture in which they were created, and often the implicit commentary of the artist. Exhibition artists include Alexander Calder, Vija Celmins, Tony Feher, Robert Gober, Marisol, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Jessica Stockholder, Andy Warhol, and many more.
EXTRA-ORDINARY: The Everyday Object in American Art is organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. At AMOA, Fidelity Investments is the Underwriting Sponsor. Additional support is provided by Carol and Adam Wagner.
Everyday Objects: Extra-Ordinary Austin Designs
 In response to Extra-Ordinary: The Everyday Object in American Art, AMOA presents a selection of everyday objects created by Austin-based designers.
The exhibition features those ingenious, yet ubiquitous, objects we use everyday that have been transformed to tickle the consumer's imagination. The discrete display will feature such objects as a Dell laptop from M3 Design; a dog bowl from WetNoz; and a water cooler from Design Edge -- all Austin-based, award winning, industrial design firms.
Presented as an occasional exploration in design, AMOA hopes this juxtaposition of the art object and the design object in everyday life will create a compelling dialogue for our lives today.
Everyday Objects: Extra-Ordinary Austin Designs is organized by the Austin Museum of Art and curated by Eva Buttacavoli, Director of Exhibitions and Education.
May 19 - August 12, 2007
The Target Collection of American Photography: A Century in Pictures
 A Century in Pictures presents a selection of photographs by American photographers from The Target Collection of American Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Significant photographs by seminal photographers whose works are now considered the basis of the American photographic tradition make up the collection. Key moments in that history are represented, such as Alfred Stieglitz’s The Steerage, 1907, selections from Robert Frank’s The Americans, 1955-56, and the second Apollo moon mission in 1969. The artists, who gave expression to the world around them from different perspectives, have also affected contemporary photographic practices. Approximately ninety works included by artists including Ansel Adams, Richard Avedon, Imogen Cunningham, Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Ed Ruscha, Paul Strand, James Van Der Zee, and Catherine Wagner.
The Target Collection of American Photography: A Century in Pictures has been organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Additional support is provided by Donald F. and Jill Bryar Wood.
24 Summers at Barton Springs Pool: Photographs by Will van Overbeek
 Austin photographer Will van Overbeek has been visiting Barton Springs Pool for twenty-four years, documenting the theatre of humanity that swarms to this local landmark. Commissioned by Rolling Stone magazine in 1983 to photograph the pool, the photographer became fascinated and turned the original assignment into an on-going project. Since that time, van Overbeek has continued to work with the curiosity of an anthropologist and the passion of an artist, capturing the lively and diverse social interactions that occur at the water’s edge on the hottest summer days.
Will van Overbeek graduated in 1978 from The University of Texas where he studied under legendary street photographer Garry Winogrand and was advised by documentary photographer Russell Lee. He occasionally “shoots from the hip,” all the better, he explains, “to catch real life without making a ripple of disturbance in the scene I’m observing.” From the thousands of photographs he has captured over the years, the artist has personally gleaned and printed a portfolio of thirty-seven vivid images as digital inkjet pigment prints for the exhibition and generously donated them to the Austin Museum of Art’s permanent collection.
24 Summers at Barton Springs Pool: Photographs by Will van Overbeek is organized by the Austin Museum of Art. In-kind support is provided by Precision Camera and Video.
February 10 - May 6, 2007
America Starts Here: Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler
 America Starts Here: Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler presents ten years of collaborative work by two artists who helped rethink the nature of public art and conceptual practice in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Ericson and Ziegler devised public art projects and site-specific installations that altered sites subtly, using poetic language and their idiosyncratic wit to illuminate mainstream American contexts and highlight individual community issues. America Starts Here offers new ways to think about a community’s relationship with public space, questioning how public space is defined, who owns it, and how it is used. The exhibition includes sculptures and installations, as well as models and video documents of site-specific works.
America Starts Here: Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler was jointly organized by the MIT List Visual Arts Center and the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College. This exhibition has been generously sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, a Federal agency, Peter Norton Family Foundation, The Judith Rothschild Foundation (given in recognition of Kate Ericson), and the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation. The Austin presentation is supported by Mr. and Mrs. I. H. Kempner, III.
The Paper Sculpture Show
 The Paper Sculpture Show brings the artist and visitor together by providing a hands-on art making experience. The visitor chooses paper projects designed by artists, assembles them into three-dimensional sculptures, and displays completed artworks in the galleries. The exhibition is composed of works by 29 international artists, including Janine Antoni, The Art Guys, Luca Buvoli, Seong Chun, Glenn Ligon, Cildo Meireles, Eve Sussman, Sarah Sze, Fred Tomaselli, and Chris Ware. Art historical movements such as Fluxus mail art and the Surrealist “Exquisite Corpse” game of collaborative drawing resonate with the exhibition. The Paper Sculpture Show invites visitors to reconsider the relationship between two-dimensional images and three-dimensional sculptural objects, mass production and the handmade, and originality as they become the artists in this interactive exhibition.
Exhibition Artists: Janine Antoni, The Art Guys, David Brody, Luca Buvoli, Francis Cape & Liza Phillips, Seong Chun, Minerva Cuevas, E.V. Day, Nicole Eisenman, Spencer Finch, Charles Goldman, Rachel Harrison, Stephen Hendee, Patrick Killoran, Glenn Ligon, Cildo Meireles, Helen Mirra, Aric Obrosey, Ester Partegs, Paul Ramirez Jonas, Akiko Sakaizumi, David Shrigley, Eve Sussman, Sarah Sze, Fred Tomaselli, Pablo Vargas-Lugo, Chris Ware, Olav Westphalen, and Allan Wexler.
The Paper Sculpture Show is organized by Cabinet magazine, Independent Curators International (iCI), and Sculpture Center. It is curated by Mary Ceruti, Matt Freedman, and Sina Najafi, and accompanied by The Paper Sculpture Book, which contains the entire exhibition in an unassembled, take-home form. The traveling exhibition is organized and circulated by Independent Curators International. The exhibition and its accompanying publication are made possible, in part, by support from the Peter Norton Family Foundation.
November 18, 2006 - January 28, 2007
Radical NY!
 Radical NY! is a two-part exhibition about distinct generations of New York artists who challenged the definitions of art and re-envisioned the artist’s role in society. The first chapter focuses on the Abstract Expressionist era, with seventeen gestural abstract paintings and works on paper from the 1940s-60s by artists including Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, and Jackson Pollock. The Downtown Show:The New York Art Scene, 1974-1984 surveys the vibrant period when a new, postmodern attitude towards artistic production surfaced in Lower Manhattan. Communities of artists, musicians, performers, filmmakers, and writers in Soho, Tribeca, and the East Village produced work that was experimental and collaborative, utopian and raw, antic and angry. Featured artists who shaped the scene include Jean-Michel Basquiat, Nan Goldin, Keith Haring, Richard Hell, Barbara Kruger, Christian Marclay, and Cindy Sherman. Over three hundred paintings, sculptures, graffiti, videos, and photographs, as well as journals, manuscripts, and ephemera — all exhibited in a funky salon style — create a colorful picture of a radically new and boundary-breaking approach to art and life. New York is more than just a location, it’s an attitude — and, that attitude forever changed the face of American art and culture.
Radical NY! is co-organized by the Grey Art Gallery at New York University and the Austin Museum of Art and is generously supported by Michael A. Chesser in memory of Virgil Young.
The exhibition The Downtown Show: The New York Art Scene, 1974-1984, curated by Carlo McCormick in consultation with Lynn Gumpert and Marvin J. Taylor, and is made possible in part by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, Philip Aarons and Shelley Fox Aarons, M.D., the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, the New York University Humanities Council, Ronald and Frayda Feldman, the Buhl Foundation, MRB Foundation, Frank and Mary Ann Arisman, Frederieke S. Taylor, NYU’s Graduate School of Arts and Science, Larry Warsh, and the Abby Weed Grey Trust.
The exhibition Abstract Expressionism: 1940s-1960s is organized by the Grey Art Gallery at New York University and the Austin Museum of Art and is curated by James Housefield.
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August 19 - November 6, 2006
Mary Lee Bendolph, Gee's Bend Quilts, and Beyond
Mary Lee Bendolph, Gee’s Bend Quilts, and Beyond celebrates the resonance of the strikingly innovative, abstract quilts by a group of African American women from Gee’s Bend, Alabama. This focused exhibition is the first to highlight one of Gee’s Bend’s most original artists, Mary Lee Bendolph, her predecessors and progeny, and the artistic dialogue they share with artists beyond their quilting community. Twelve dramatically designed, richly colored quilts created by Mary Lee Bendolph, Louisiana P. Bendolph, Aolar Mosely, and Essie B. Pettway, are presented alongside complex and evocative found object sculptures by Alabama artists Thornton Dial and Lonnie Holley, who have both been influenced by the quilts and the quiltmakers. Several fine art prints by two of the quiltmakers and documentary films about the artists provide a further context for their creative exchange. A full-color, scholarly catalogue co-published by the Austin Museum of Art and Tinwood Alliance, Atlanta, accompanies the exhibition.
Mary Lee Bendolph, Gee’s Bend Quilts, and Beyond is co-organized by the Austin Museum of Art and Tinwood Alliance, Atlanta. The exhibition catalogue and public programs are sponsored by Anderson-Rogers Foundation, Inc.
Lu Ann Barrow’s “Soul-Journers”: Friends, Family and the Fabric of Daily Life
 Lu Ann Barrow’s “Soul-Journers”: Friends, Family and the Fabric of Daily Life is the first museum exhibition of this Austin artist’s work. Barrow developed her narrative folkloric style during her undergraduate art studies at The University of Texas at Austin from 1952 through 1956. Her paintings are inspired by a rich imagination and humor, her Texas roots, as well as her worldwide travels. Her stylized compositions are filled with storytelling, celebration, and laughter. Whether the private jubilation of someone singing along to the gospel hour on the radio, or a festive barn dance, or a spontaneous party, Barrow’s universal themes touch the spirits of a wide audience with humor and simple truths. Her figurative compositions recall the modern style of Henri Matisse and Henri Rousseau. A full-color, scholarly catalogue, co-published by the Austin Museum of Art, Longview Museum and Arts Center, and Valley House Gallery and Sculpture Garden, Dallas, accompanies the exhibition.
Lu Ann Barrow’s “Soul-Journers” is curated by James Housefield and co-organized by the Austin Museum of Art and the Valley House Gallery and Sculpture Garden, Dallas. The exhibition and catalogue are co-sponsored by Mary Margaret & Ray Farabee, Carole & Charles Sikes, with additional support from The Friends of Lu Ann Barrow.
William Kentridge: Weighing...and Wanting
South African artist William Kentridge traces a personal route across the fraught legacy of apartheid through an innovative use of charcoal drawing, stop-animation, and film. The installation of Weighing . . . and Wanting (1997) consists of fourteen charcoal, pastel, and gouache drawings and a film that the artist created by erasing and making additions to the drawings, then filming the unscripted transformations throughout the process. The result is a monochromatic and visually arresting work informed by Kentridge’s experience of growing up the son of a prominent white anti-apartheid lawyer during a pivotal period in the country’s history. Using his exquisite renderings, Kentridge layers allegory, memory, and the raw emotions of his characters to depict the charged relationship between oppressor and the oppressed and the legacy of apartheid. A full-color, scholarly catalogue accompanies the exhibition.
William Kentridge: Weighing . . . and Wanting is organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.
May 13 - August 6, 2006
Over + Over: Passion for Process
 The artists’ materials are ordinary, their patience and results extraordinary. As the digitized image becomes the ubiquitous means of communication, and the keyboard supplants the hand, a number of artists draw inspiration instead from the tenets of the Arts and Crafts movement of a hundred years ago. Informed by Process Art of the 1970s, these artists use hobby and craft skills, including meticulous hand-beading, sewing, silhouette cutting, collaging, and collecting. Their two- and three-dimensional contemporary works negotiate a path between organic and geometric form, between the pixilated and the painterly. Although there have been other investigations of extreme craft, this is the first exhibition to focus on the work of artists whose subject matter is obsession.
Exhibition artists: Chakaia Booker, Juliann Cydylo, Tom Friedman, Tom Fruin, Victoria Haven, Lisa Hoke, Nina Katchadourian, Liza Lou, Jennifer Maestre, Elizabeth Simonson, Devorah Sperber, Fred Tomaselli, and Rachel Perry Welty.
Organized by Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and curated by Ginger Gregg Duggan and Judith Hoos Fox.
Again + Again: Cycles in Video and Light
 Again + Again: Cyles in Video and Light presents eight video and light projects that engage repetition in diverse, sometimes obsessive, sometimes reflective ways. The works push our perception of the limits of stillness and movement. Some are modestly-sized, intimate portraits and still lifes that connect to painting traditions, while others are on the scale of murals, or even bathe the viewer in vibrating, hypnotic light patterns. This exhibition offers an introduction to important media works from the Austin Museum of Art and six private Austin collections, while providing a provocative pairing for the concurrent mixed-media exhibition Over + Over: Passion for Process.
Exhibition artists: Burt Barr, Jim Campbell, Barna Kantor, Euan Macdonald, Christian Marclay, Nam June Paik, Dane Picard, Jason Salavon, and Jennifer Steinkamp.
Organized by the Austin Museum of Art and curated by the Dr. and Mrs. Ernest C. Butler Executive Director and Chief Curator Dana Friis-Hansen.
January 28 - April 30, 2006
Christo and Jeanne-Claude: The Würth Museum Collection
 This exhibition highlights the careers of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the husband and wife artist team who have created some of the most compelling public art of the past forty-four years. Together they challenge perceptions of art with their grand, temporary environmental projects. Often using fabric, the artists have transformed various settings throughout the world, revealing the urban and rural architecture of their chosen sites. The Gates, their most recent work of art, consisted of billowing saffron fabric panels suspended from 7,503 gates running for twenty-three miles throughout New York’s Central Park. Drawing from the collection of the Würth Museum in Künzelsau, Germany, this exhibition is comprised of seventy-five works, including preparatory drawings, collages, and photographs of their many projects, as well as early wrapped objects and a scale model of the Wrapped Reichstag. Other projects represented include Running Fence, Surrounded Islands, The Pont Neuf Wrapped, and The Umbrellas, Japan USA.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude: The Würth Museum Collection is lent by the Museum Würth, Künzelsau, Germany. The tour is organized by the Trust for Museum Exhibitions, Washington, D.C. Presented in Austin by Bank of America and Maxwell, Locke & Ritter LLP. Support is also provided by Jane and Michael Scott, Saleem and Carmen Tawil, and the Friends of Christo and Jeanne-Claude.
November 12, 2005 - January 15, 2006
Remember When Storytelling Mattered? Tom Lea and Dr. Seuss
The Austin Museum of Art presents retrospectives of two artists of independent spirit who used words and images to reflect upon the changes that shaped America in the twentieth century.
Light from the Sky: A Tom Lea Retrospective, 1907-2001
An illustrator, author, and painter, Tom Lea depicted in images and words the beauty of the American Southwest. This Texas native began his career as a muralist during the Great Depression and went on to illustrate J. Frank Dobie’s book The Longhorns. By World War II his Life magazine illustrations documented the raw emotion of war in a new way. Following the war, Lea wrote and illustrated six books, including The King Ranch and The Wonderful Country. In the early 1970s, he returned to painting until his death. Light from the Sky: A Tom Lea Retrospective, 1907-2001 includes work representing all aspects of his remarkable career and is highlighted by original illustrations from his bestselling novel The Brave Bulls, on loan from the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas.
Light from the Sky: A Tom Lea Retrospective, 1907-2001 is a program of ExhibitsUSA, a national division of Mid-America Arts Alliance, with Texas Commission on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.
The Art of Dr. Seuss
Theodor Seuss Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, began his career in the 1920s as an editorial cartoonist. With his unique artistic vision, he went on to create deft illustrations, modeled sculpture, oil paintings, advertisements, World War II political cartoons, and forty-four children’s books filled with inventive characters and clever humor. Throughout his career, Geisel single-handedly forged a new genre of art somewhere between the Surrealist movement and the inspired nonsense of a child’s doodles. The Art of Dr. Seuss celebrates the life of this American icon and chronicles almost seven decades of work that is uniquely “Seussian.” Additionally, the exhibition includes a selection of illustrations from The Lorax, lent by the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum at the University of Texas.
The Art of Dr. Seuss is organized by The Chase Group, Northbrook, Illinois, and Art on 5th, Austin, Texas.
August 20 - October 30, 2005
New Art in Austin: 22 to Watch
 New Art in Austin: 22 to Watch, the second in a series of triennial exhibitions, introduces twenty-two of Austin's hottest emerging artists whose work stretches the boundaries of contemporary art. The exhibition includes artists working in such media as film, painting, embroidery, printmaking, sculpture, interactive electronics, drawing, and color photography, as well as installation art incorporating such diverse materials as Post-it® notes, comic books, felt, wood, vinyl lettering, metal, cardboard, postcards, and Astroturf. Organized by the Austin Museum of Art, the exhibition was co-curated by Eva Buttacavoli, Joan Davidow, Dana Friis-Hansen, James Housefield, and Clint Willour, and is accompanied by a full-color catalogue with an introduction by Dana Friis-Hansen and essays by James Housefield.
Exhibition Artists:
Sterling Allen, Candace M. Briceño, Ledia Carroll, Jerry Chamkis, Hunter Cross, Jeffrey Dell, Peat Duggins, Jonathan Faber, Alia Hasan-Khan, Hana Hillerova, Heather Johnson, Young-Min Kang, Barna Kantor, Shaune Kolber, Samantha Krukowski, Michael Osborne, Zack Booth Simpson, Jason Singleton, Karen Skloss, Sodalitas, Daniel Tackett, and Trent Tate
New Art in Austin: 22 to Watch is organized by the Austin Museum of Art and made possible by Chris Mattsson and John McHale and Texas Commission on the Arts. The exhibition catalogue is generously supported by the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation and the Still Water Foundation. The symposium is generously supported by the Still Water Foundation.
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May 28 - August 7, 2005
Annie Leibovitz: American Music
 Annie Leibovitz began her career photographing the vibrant music scene of the 1960s. Now recognized as one of the premier portrait photographers in the world, she often still focuses her lens on musicians. American Music provided Leibovitz with the opportunity to represent icons and other influential performers of America’s traditional and popular music. Over the last decade, Leibovitz captured many of her subjects in their homes, cars, and churches, creating revealing and intimate portraits of over seventy American music legends.
American Music was accompanied by iPod listening stations with recordings of the musicians featured in the exhibition selected by Waterloo Records and Video, as well as an audio tour of the exhibition narrated by Annie Leibovitz.
Organized by Experience Music Project, Seattle, and all works are courtesy of the photographer. Charles Mary Kubricht: Scanning the Grand Canyon
 Painter Charles Mary Kubricht distills experiences of time and nature into monumental visions of one of the earth's most spectacular environments. While rafting through the Grand Canyon she captured the changing light and geology of the journey by using her digital camera as an "electronic sketchbook." Back in the studio she transformed the images into thirteen large-scale paintings, each constructed of a grid of forty-nine small painted panels. Balancing representation with abstraction, these richly patterned colored fields carry the viewer down the river, through a day, and past epochs of geologic time.
Organized by the Galveston Arts Center. Color/Pattern/Grid:
Selections from the Austin Museum of Art & Austin Collections
 Color/Pattern/Grid highlighted the richness and diversity of modern and contemporary art in Austin collections. Drawing from the permanent collection of the Austin Museum of Art and from seventeen exceptional Austin collections, this exhibition investigated the wide range of creative responses that both modern and contemporary artists have had to the ideas of color, pattern, and grid. With emphasis on these three concepts, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artists shifted the direction of the visual arts away from its former constraints and towards new freedoms. This exhibition explored how these modern investigations have been transformed continuously over the past century, and how recent artists, especially, have found fertile ground in the artistic potential of color, pattern, and grid. Seventy artists from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and North America are represented, through a variety of media that embraced the exhibition's title in myriad ways. The artists included Polly Apfelbaum, Michael Ray Charles, Chuck Close, Christo, Jenny Holzer, Gabel Karsten, Henri Matisse, Joan Mitchell, Pablo Picasso, Margo Sawyer, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Rosemarie Trockel, and Steve Wiman.
May 28 - August 7, 2005
Annie Leibovitz: American Music and Charles Mary Kubricht: Scanning the Grand Canyon are presented in Austin by HealthTronics, Inc. Additional support is provided by The Penn Investment Group, Hotel San José, Jill and Dennis McDaniel, Marion Barthelme and Jeff Fort, LCRA Employees' United Charities, Tim and Lynn Crowley, and Mr. and Mrs. Robert McKnight.
In-kind donations are generously provided by the SBC Family of Companies, Waterloo Records and Video, enDesign, and Cingular Wireless. Radio sponsorship provided by 107.1 KGSR, Radio Austin.
March 5 - May 15, 2005
Organized by the Austin Museum of Art and co-curated by Dana Friis-Hansen and James Housefield. This exhibition is made possible through the generous support of Bettye and Bill Nowlin. Andy Goldsworthy: Mountain and Coast Autumn Into Winter
 Working alone, British sculptor Andy Goldsworthy collaborates with nature, creating sculptures that are both in and of a particular place. After spending time in a selected natural site, he collects materials from that landscape (leaves, stones, twigs, snow, mud), and creates a temporary sculptural arrangement (a line of colored leaves, a meandering wall of stone, a tower of snowballs, a circle of woven bamboo) then leaves the forces of nature to finish them—or finish them off. Before they disappear, or as they dissipate, he documents them in stunning color photographs. This exhibition revealed the full innovative range of this noted artist through 34 large-scale photographs that document a spectacular body of work created in the mountains and along the seacoast of Japan during the autumn and winter of 1987, as well as four sculptural works — two delicate leaf sculptures, a nine-foot line of colored river stones, and a monumental installation of sticks.
December 11, 2004 - February 20, 2005
Courtesy of the Haines Gallery, San Francisco, California, and the Artist. Ghost Stories: The Disembodied Spirit
 Ghost Stories: The Disembodied Spirit was a unique multimedia exploration of art and culture in the late-nineteenth century and the late-twentieth century about the depiction of ghosts and the otherworldly. Connecting the work of a wide range of contemporary artists with that of an earlier generation, the exhibition examined how artists have used the innovations of their time to investigate and exploit cultural phenomena, such as the paranormal, current interest in cyberspace and virtual reality, as well as Spiritualism of the late-nineteenth century.
The exhibition included over eighty works of photography, video, and mixed-media installations by artists such as Diane Arbus, Joseph Beuys, Julia Margaret Cameron, Jim Campbell, Gregory Crewdson, Ann Hamilton, Clarence John Laughlin, Sally Mann, Bruce Nauman, Tony Oursler, and James Van Der Zee, among others.
Organized by Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine. Jun Nguyen-Hatshushiba: Memorial Project Vietnam Two Videos
 Japanese/Vietnamese artist Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba (Jyun Nú-win Ha-tsú-she-buh) creates graceful and otherworldly underwater films. This exhibition featured two films that explore current events and cultural traditions of Vietnam and are remarkable for their underwater setting, saturated color, choreographed movements, and hypnotic soundtracks.
Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba was raised in Japan and educated in Texas, Illinois, and Maryland. The artist now lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. His work has been included in the Yokohama Triennial and the Kwangiu, Venice, Sydney, and Sao Paolo Biennials.
Funded by The Rockefeller Foundation and LEF Foundation. Happy New Year-Memorial Project Vietnam II iss produced by the MATRIX program at UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, California, with assistance from The New Museum, New York. Lance Letscher: Books and Parts of Books, 1996-2004
 Austin artist Lance Letscher makes complicated collages spliced from found literary or printed material, such as lost letters retrieved from flea markets; the covers, spines, and pages of books; and handwritten manuscripts, ledgers, lists, and recipes. He masterfully merges these diverse materials into an amazing array of representational images, including plant studies and landscapes, as well as abstract patterns and geometric shapes.
September 10 - November 28, 2004
September 10 - November 28, 2004
June 5 - August 29, 2004
Letscher began his professional career as a sculptor in the late 1980s, after he earned his bachelor’s and master’s of fine arts degrees from The University of Texas at Austin. Since that time, his work has been exhibited in galleries in Houston, Austin, Dallas, New York, and Munich. He is represented in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Austin Museum of Art. This traveling exhibition features over 50 of Lance Letscher’s collages.
Organized by the Galveston Arts Center. The Austin presentation was made possible through the generous support of Austin City Lofts.Manny Farber: About Face
 This forty-year survey of the work of Manny Farber, known both as a painter and film critic (published in New Republic and The Nation) will delight the eye and stimulate the imagination. This exhibition, featuring approximately 40 works, highlighted the connections between Farber's distinctive way of looking at movies and unique writing style with the visual composition, details, and colors in his paintings.
June 5 - August 29, 2004
Farber began his career in the late 1960s as an Abstract Expressionist. However, by the late 1970s he shifted his focus to narrative painting, incorporating themes from his own life. In the 1980s he began developing still-life paintings like a movie—shot by shot—arranging his lush compositions of flowers, art books, hardware, and notations, choosing specific color palettes and combining multiple perspectives.
Organized by The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Jim Hodges
 Jim Hodges transforms ordinary objects into poetic spectacles of color and light. Born in Spokane, Washington in 1957 and based in New York, Jim Hodges is a key figure in the generation of artists who emerged in the 1990s to challenge accepted notions of art making in relation to high and low culture. By paying particular attention to craftsmanship, Hodges makes use of non-art materials and the labor-intensive skills of weaving and sewing to create art as a labor of love. Trained as a painter but disillusioned with that medium, Hodges now assembles familiar household items such as fabrics, mirrors, glass, light bulbs, and paper to build both delicate and intimate handcrafted sculptures and powerful, larger installations. Hodges' creations are meditations on time, memory, and transcendence. The exhibition Jim Hodges draws together approximately twenty works in a wide array of media from the last ten years to focus on his use of light as subject, medium, and metaphor.
Organized by Weatherspoon Art Museum, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College. Tré Arenz: Sameness
 In the whimsical, poignant, and thought provoking, one-room installation entitled, Sameness, Tré Arenz celebrates the domestic and the everyday. Trained as a ceramist at the California College of the Arts at Oakland and at the University of Texas in Austin, Arenz took clay beyond the functional and the decorative to the sculptural. With a nod to the ancient Chinese and European use of blue and white glazes, she often used this palate but made it her own in what became her signature striped pattern.
Nationally recognized and widely exhibited in over 100 solo and group exhibitions, Arenz called Austin home until her untimely death in May 2003.
Presented at the Austin Museum of Art in conjunction with a major exhibition Tré Arenz: One of Us, A Retrospective on view at Women & Their Work from February 21 through March 27, 2004 Terry Allen: Dugout
 Drawing upon his childhood memories of West Texas, visual artist, composer, and performance artist Terry Allen creates magical multi-layered works that connect the past with the present and the real with the imagined. Dugout, his installation series, loosely based on the lives of his parents—a baseball player and a ragtime piano player—was accompanied with drawings, poetry and prose, a set of songs, and a live theatrical performance. Six stages, or multi-media tableaux—built from re-constituted furniture and building parts, taxidermied animals, baseball memorabilia, musical miscellany, and glowing neon texts—formed the core of the exhibition. A soundtrack and a suite of drawings and texts provided the theatrical thread, which ran through this epic effort that used the simple twists and turns of two lives to become part of the story of humanity.
The Austin presentation is made possible through generous support from The Berman Family Foundation.
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February 2 - May 23, 2004
February 2 - May 23, 2004
November 22, 2003 - February 1, 2004
August 24 - November 9, 2003
Andy Warhol
 Andy Warhol—the quintessential Pop Artist—transformed the way we look at everyday life, from the common Campbell Soup can and Coca-Cola bottle to extraordinary movie stars and major historical figures such as Jackie Kennedy and Chairman Mao. One of the best-known American artists, Warhol (1921-1987) is nonetheless one of the least understood. The Austin Museum of Art worked directly with The Andy Warhol Museum to organize this special exhibition, the first of its kind in central Texas. A survey of Warhol's bold and colorful prints and paintings, as well as extensive education and outreach programs for school groups, families, and adults, will explore the man behind the myths, focusing on Warhol's redefinition of the modern artist and the subjects he chooses.
Organized by The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, one of the four Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh. The exhibition was presented by Dell. Major underwriting support provided by Altria Group, Inc., with additional support from Frost Bank, North American Title Company, and St. Thomas Boutique. Promotional sponsorship provided by Time Warner Cable and News 8 Austin.
May 17 - August 10, 2003
Embracing the Present: The UBS Art Collection
 Embracing the Present: The UBS Art Collection featured paintings, sculpture, and photographs from some of the most prominent American and European artists of the last four decades, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Chuck Close, Andreas Gursky, Gerhard Richter, Edward Ruscha, David Salle, Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson, Kiki Smith, Cy Twombly, and Andy Warhol.
The UBS Art Collection, one of the foremost collections of contemporary art in the United States, was started more than 30 years ago with the conviction that good contemporary art reflects contemporary trends in society, and truly outstanding works might even suggest the future. Selections chosen for this exhibition included approximately 50 major works that illuminate the evolution of artists' concerns in the last quarter of the twentieth century, from Pop Art, abstraction and neo-expressionism, to the new internationalism of photography.
Organized by the Portland Art Museum and is made possible by UBS.
February 15 - May 4, 2003
Alex Katz: Small Paintings
 This exhibition presented approximately seventy-five works dating from the mid-1950s to the present, a retrospective of Katz’s small paintings. Best known for his monumental paintings, the artist has also produced an impressive body of smaller-scale work over the past 50 years. This is the first American museum exhibition to examine these more intimate paintings, the portraits and landscapes that are the foundation of Katz’s art. They employ unmodulated colors and flat shapes along with rough, rapid brushwork to capture the essential visual facts of their subjects. The small paintings reveal not only how the artist works, but also what interests him.
Jointly organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Addison Gallery of Art, Andover, Massachusettes; and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri.
February 15 - May 4, 2003
Robert Frank Photographs:
Selections from the Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
 Arguably the most important photographer of the second half of the twentieth century, Frank has expressed a personal viewpoint of his surroundings and, through that, a larger picture of the world for almost sixty years. The exhibition of approximately fifty photographs surveyed Frank’s career from his early photographs of Europe in the late 1940s, through his searing views of America’s “car culture” in the mid-1950s, to the late Polaroids of himself, his family and homes in New York and Nova Scotia.
Organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The presentation in Austin was made possible through the generous support of the Rosemary Haggar Vaughan Family Foundation, John M. Scanlan, and Gail and Rodney Susholtz.
November 23, 2002 - February 2, 2003
At the Edge of Paradise: A Sculptural Dialogue Between Jill Bedgood and Beverly Penn
 This exhibition featured groundbreaking bodies of work by Jill Bedgood and Beverly Penn, two mid-career, Austin-based artists noted for powerful allusions and the use of unusual materials. In October 2000, Bedgood and Penn received a joint fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation Study Center to travel to Bellagio, located on Lake Como in northern Italy, in order to study Italian art, architecture, and gardens, and to explore the possibilities for collaboration. The resulting exhibition consisted of two independent bodies of work that converge into one unconventional exhibition that synthesizes a contemporary look at Italian culture, Renaissance and Baroque art, Roman Mythology, philosophy, architecture, and landscape design.
Organized by the Austin Museum of Art and the Irving Arts Center. This exhibition was made possible through the generous support of the Texas Commission for the Arts, Rockefeller Foundation's Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy, and a Southwest Texas State University Faculty Research Grant.
Pertaining to Painting
 In contrast to much of the art of our time, which relies on technology and new media, this exhibition explored the work of nine emerging artists whose work, although diverse and highly individual, has a common interest in the conventional visual language of painting. The artists featured are Michael Morremans, Mark Bradford, Inka Essenhigh, Hilary Harnischfeger, Udomsak Krisanamis, Nader, Thomas Nozkowski, Neo Rauch, and Sigrid Sandstrom. Using the technically straightforward vocabulary of painting and its ability to represent and signify information, states of being and emotional responses, they create work that compels the viewer to intimately consider a dense layering of suspended belief, intellectual content and contemporary references. These artists value painting for the intrinsic power of its persuasive ability to capture, comment and reflect on everyday life.
Organized by the Contemporary Art Museum of Houston. This exhibition is made possible by the generous support of Philip Morris Companies, Inc. and the contributors to the Contemporary Arts Perspectives Fund.
August 31 - November 10, 2002
Keith Carter: Poet of the Ordinary
 This legendary Texas photographer is known for finding the enigmatic and magical in ordinary settings and situations. By looking carefully and closely at people, animals, and objects encountered on his travels, Carter reveals the poetry and metaphor of daily existence. This mid-career survey of his work presented sixty-five photographs from three series: Holding Venus, a meditation on astronomy, navigation, and myth; Ezekiel's Horse, inspired by Leonardo da Vinci's belief that the horse is nature's most perfect design; and Carter's newest series Boneyard, taken in an airplane graveyard. The artist's work often employs a split focus technique that blurs parts of the image, imbuing the photographs with an elegant fluidity and enhancing their mystery.
Organized by George Eastman House Rochester, New York. Funded by the City of Austin under the auspices of the Austin Arts Commission , the Austin Museum of Art Guild, and the Austin Art Museum Members.
People, Places, Things: Selections from the Permanent Collection
 This exhibition presented a glimpse into the Museum's growing collection, focusing on acquisitions from the past five years. The selected works were generally taken from invitations or press releases, sometimes in modified form.
Organized by the Austin Art Museum.
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Mickey Mayfield: A Memorial Exhibition
This exhibition celebrated the spirit and talent of an Austin artist who began his career in The Art School and found constant inspiration from the landscape of Laguna Gloria.
Organized by the Austin Art Museum.
June 8 - August 18, 2002
The Circus in 20th Century American Art: Images from the World Between
 The circus, once described as "a world between," is a subject that for many artists is filled with metaphoric possibility, formal experimentation, and exotic allure. Much more than popular entertainment, the circus is a dazzling alternative to everyday life, both a spectacle of man's tragic failings, as seen in the often bittersweet performances of clowns, and a vision of his rich potential, symbolized by the daring and skill of aerialists. This important exhibition of approximately ninety works incorporated painting, sculpture, prints, photographs, and video by twentieth-century American artists whose work reflects a sustained or significant interest in the circus.
Organized by the Austin Museum of Art, Texas Fine Arts Association and the American Federation of Arts.
April 6 - May 26, 2002
22 to Watch: New Art in Austin
 This exhibit provided a snapshot introduction to some of the most interesting emerging and lesser-known artists living within a fifty-mile radius of the Texas capital. Working in such diverse media as painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, photography, installation, and film, these artists represent the extraordinary breadth and quality of artistic activity in Austin today.
Organized by the Austin Museum of Art. This exhibition was made possible by the generous support of Gluckman Mayner Architects, Pam and Mike Reese, Austin Fairchild Art Foundation, Mary and William Mitchell and Tom Sikes.
January 19 - March 24, 2002
Visualizing the Blues: Images of the American South 1862 - 1999
 More than 100 photographs, among them Margaret Bourke-White, Henri Cartier-Bresson, William Eggleston, Walker Evans, as well as emerging artists including Huger Foote and Ashley T. Mitchell who have chronicled the enduring elements of Southern culture.
Organized by the Austin Museum of Art, Texas Fine Art Association and the Dixon Gallery and Gardens. This exhibition was made possible by the generous support of the Austin Arts Commission, Austin Museum of Arts Guild, American Airlines, The Four Seasons Hotel, The Blues Foundation, Northwest Airlines, 107.1 KGSR and The Austin Chronicle.
October 13 - December 30, 2001
The Road to Aztlan: Art from a Mythic Homeland
 This exhibition explored art created over the course of nearly 2,500 years about Aztlan, the legendary place of origin of the Aztec people. While its exact physical location is unknown, Aztlan has exerted a profound influence on the peoples of both Mexico and the American Southwest from long before the establishment of an international border. This exhibition is the first to comprehensively examine the cultural exchange among the peoples of these two regions and reveals the shared features of their art, architecture, religious beliefs, and ceremonies. Presenting approximately 250 works of art - including archaeological artifacts. As well as colonial and contemporary expressions - this exhibition illustrated how the legend of Aztlan has flourished well beyond its pre-Columbian beginnings.
Organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art with the cooperation of the Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes/Instituto Nacional de Antrologia e Historia, Mexico. Co-presented by Austin Museum of Art and the Texas Fine Art Association. This exhibition was made possible by the generous support of AT&T, Ethnic Arts Council of Los Angeles, Bettye and William Nowlin, Chris Mattsson and John McGale.
July 21 - September 16, 2001
Telematic Connections: The Virtual Embrace
 This exhibition presented work by 25 artists who explore the interaction between telecommunications and computers, and how this increasingly intimate and complex relationship has transformed the ways in which humans relate to machines, to nature, and to each other. "Telematics" is a term that was coined in the early 1970s to describe the then newly emerging phenomenon of electronic communications networks, whose most widespread manifestation today is the Internet. The exhibition examined artists' increasing involvement with this technology, bringing together installations and online sites within a historical context, to give viewers a visceral sense of the potential and pitfalls of our contemporary telematic culture.
This exhibition was produced by the Independent Curators International, New York and co-presented by the Walker Art Center. This exhibition was made possible by the generous support of the Austin Arts Commission, Austin Museum of Arts Guild, American Airlines, The Four Seasons Hotel, The Blues Foundation, Northwest Airlines, 107.1 KGSR and The Austin Chronicle. The exhibition, tourm website, and accompanying publication are made possible, in part, by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.
Parazette + Price: Material morph
 Recent biomorphic sculptures by the veteran Los Angeles ceramic artist Ken Price are paired with the vibrant canvases of Aaron Parazette, a Houston-based abstract painter whose work is attracting increasing national attention. Although these artists work in different materials and are separated by a generation, they share a fascination with the power of color, the tactile exploration of surfaces, and the use of layering which simultaneously reveals and conceals.
Organized by the Austin Museum of Art. This exhibition was made possible by the generous support of Chris Mattsson, John McHale, Linda and Peter Zweig.
May 12 - July 8, 2001
Images of the Spirit: Photographs by Graciela Iturbide
This exhibition was the first major U.S retrospective of one of the most important photographers working in Mexico today. Graciela Iturbide combines history, portraiture, and a penetrating lyricism in photographs that seek out the underlying Indian reality in contemporary Mexico. This exhibition spanned Iturbide's career, including her early development under mentor Manual Alvarez Bravo and later seminal studies of Mexican religious and cultural traditions. Iturbide creates what she calls a "mythic space", where the iconography of rituals expresses the aspirations and fears of people profoundly immersed in history.
Organized by the Alfred Stieglitz Center of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The presentation of this exhibition in Austin is sponsored by NoraLee and Job Sedmak, the SBC Foundation, and Goldman, Sachs & co. This project is also supported by a grant from the Texas Commission on the Arts.
Salomόn Huerta: Paintings
This is the first solo museum exhibition of work by this Los Angeles-based artist, one of a growing number of young Californian artists who have rediscovered figurative painting as a tool for exploring contemporary questions about race, identity, and class. With a characteristically precise and realistic style, Huerta's 'portraits' challenge pictorial practices and confront preconceived beliefs about identity by presenting full-length or compact head shots of the backs of his subjects, thus concealing the individual's distinguishing features. Recently, Huerta has begun a new series of small, exquisite paintings of the exteriors of houses that he photographs while driving through Southern California neighborhoods.
Organized by the Austin Museum of Art.
February 17 - April 29, 2001
Edward Ruscha: Editions 1959 - 1999
An influential voice in post war American Painting, Edward Ruscha has also been one of contemporary art's most significant graphic artists, creating a body of editioned work that is uniquely American in both subject and sensibility. This exhibition was the first comprehensive museum presentation of Ruscha's prints, photographs, and artist's books since the 1970's and highlighted his unique combinations of language, image and idea. Although Ruscha is often grouped with Pop and Conceptual artists working in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, his creative output is more appropriately placed in a category bridging the two. His wryly clever work is infused with a fascination with lettering, typography, and archetypal imagery culled from the collective nostalgia of America's love affair with film and fiction.
Organized by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Funded by Lannan Foundation, Dayton's Frango Fund, the Eli Broad Family Foundation, Goldman Sachs & Co., Douglas S Cramer Foundation. This exhibition was also sponsored by Vinson & Elkins, L.L.P, Betty Otter-Nickerson & Glen Nickerson.
Personal Playgrounds: The 20th Annual Family Exhibition
This exhibition was the twentieth in the Austin Museum of Art's series for young people and their families. Presenting six artists whose three-dimensional work is marked by a sense of play, this exhibition proved that art can be fun and serious at the same time. It focused on how the childhood processes of collecting, experimenting, and storytelling are vital to making it art.
Organized by the Austin Museum of Art.
AMOA-Laguna Gloria
3809 West 35th Street
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