Lamar University art professor and artist Prince Varughese Thomas will give a talk about the Art Museum of Southeast Texas’s winter exhibitions, Emily Peacock: Pure Comedy and David McGee: Black Paintings, as part of the Taste of the Arts Lecture Series, Feb. 12, at 11:30 a.m.
The talk, which is free and open to the public, will be held in the galleries with a Dutch treat lunch to follow in the Two Magnolias café.
Thomas received his B.A. in Psychology from the University of Texas at Arlington, and his M.F.A. from the University of Houston. He is currently a professor at Lamar University and is a multidisciplinary artist. He is an Art Prize 7 award recipient in time-based media and is a Texas Biennial Artist. His work has been included in over 200 solo and group exhibitions at museums, galleries and alternative spaces nationally and internationally, including his most recent exhibition held at AMSET, the Legacy of Narcissus. He is currently represented by Hooks-Epstein Galleries in Houston, Texas.
“Emily Peacock: Pure Comedy” transforms the artist’s personal journeys through loss, motherhood and family tragedy into photographs, film and sculpture depicting objects and images that exist in a space between the familiar and the absurd. Born in Port Arthur, Peacock is currently a professor at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville and lives in Houston. By fantastically documenting her own transition into motherhood, Peacock allows others to open up about their own experiences without fear or shame, in an attempt to de-stigmatize these.
“David McGee: Black Paintings” is an exhibition where the ongoing “Urban Dread” series serves as a visual and symbolic focal point to reconsider paintings spanning 26 years of the artist’s career. McGee, who was born in Lockhart, Louisiana, and currently resides in Houston, addresses “urban dread” as a conflict between inner cities and suburban angst, depicting abstracted images of ropes, cuffs, crosses, targets, police vehicle coloration, hoods, land separation, hospitals and weapons. These and other paintings present McGee’s most powerful exhibition to date, challenging viewers to consider the neighborhoods they live in and pass through, and how color affects each emotion, memory and human interaction.
For more information, visit www.amset.org, or call 409-832-3432.
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The Beaumont Art League will present The Land of Hopes and Dreams: A Visual Look at America, opening 7 to 9 p.m., Feb. 8. Admission is free.
BAL is located at 2675 Gulf St. in Beaumont.
For information, call 409-347-6166, or visit their Facebook page.
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The Menil Collection will present Photography and the Surreal Imagination, Feb. 5 to June 14.
This exhibition presents the wide reach of the surreal imagination in modern and contemporary photography. Anchored in historical Surrealism, it explores photography’s central tension between documentation and invention, a generative force for artists connected to that movement. These artists produced images that teeter between truth and suggestion, reality and its invented double.
Drawn from the Menil’s holdings and Houston collections, the exhibition demonstrates how this vision of photography continues to hold sway and how artists have used the camera to reshape, question and disturb the way we see the world.
The presentation begins with an examination of the transformation of the everyday through the lens in a tradition that recasts the world as an enigmatic theater, from Eugène Atget’s shots of Old Paris to Allison Janae Hamilton’s haunted folklore of the American South. Photographs in the exhibition also foreground the exploration of the body, including Hans Bellmer’s images of deconstructed dolls and Cindy Sherman’s cinematographic self-staging, among other depictions of costumed, distorted, fragmented figures. Lastly, the show considers the manipulation of the image. It highlights artists from Man Ray to Lorna Simpson, all of whom turned the photographic surface into a collision of pictorial fragments that questions the nature of representation.
Photography and the Surreal Imagination is curated by Natalie Dupêcher, assistant curator of modern art, and will coincide with the FotoFest Biennial 2020.
The Menil Collection is located at 1533 Sul Ross St. in Houston.
For more information, visit www.menil.org.
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The Menil Drawing Institute will present Think of Them as Spaces: Brice Marden’s Drawings, Feb. 21 to June 14.
The exhibition is an exploration of the artist’s draftsmanship and the catalytic role the medium plays within his practice. In a 1979 written statement, Marden asked that his drawings be thought of “as spaces.” This comment suggests, for him, drawing is a medium that not only exists in more than two dimensions, but also is capable of reflecting the spirit and experience of a particular place. As seen throughout his work, Marden’s expansive vision explores how landscape, architecture and objects found in nature shape one’s way of understanding the world.
This exhibition presents six series of drawings that span nearly the entirety of Marden’s ongoing career, highlighting the processes of invention and permutation that occur as he works and thinks on paper. One series — composed of 12 works with dense layers of pigmentation — revisits geographies and methods crucial to his early work, namely the architectural forms of ancient Greece and the heavily worked and opaque surfaces made of wax and graphite that first brought him to prominence. Additionally, the presentation maps how the artist’s two watershed series, The Seasons and Cold Mountain, have reverberated within his practice and have evolved over decades. Drawing as a means of study, a quality that runs throughout his oeuvre, is particularly apparent in his examinations of proportion and ratio as well as in works taken from sketchbooks that Marden completed while traveling.
The Menil Drawing Institute is located at 1412 W. Main St. in Houston.
For information, visit www.menil.org.