Art Review
Houstonian Howard Sherman’s bright, chaotic work in a show called Bloodthirsty Animal on Two Legs at Pan American Art Projects is, like the weather outside, ravaging.

Clayton Hurt and Alvaro Perez show their studio scrap assemblages in the project room at 500x through October 4. Below, the artists weigh in on their work.

A trio of artists, each representing a different country, display works at the UNT Art Gallery that communicate in uncannily similar tones a familiarity with felt loss and the identity of loneliness.

After a disappointing run in Houston, the Russian horse troupe Artania pitched their tents and stables on a forgotten patch of dirt on Industrial Boulevard. Within two weeks the show was bankrupt, the performers scattered, and the tents abandoned.

Seeing “No Zoning: Artists Engage Houston” at the Contemporary Arts Museum, I think about the tremendous difference it makes when a city understands the role its own artistic community plays in cultural vitality.

Polycephelus, Kitten Deity, and Serpentine Geese are barnyard animals that, in a less tolerant time, might have been secreted out the back door of Hummel one stormy night and sold to the carnival sideshow. Now they are something not to be shunned but embraced.

Andrea Mellard, Curatorial Associate at the Austin Museum of Art, decided our work fit the show’s theme, Anxiety – work that “marks the current zeitgeist as we collectively hold our breath.” The only problem with Going to Heaven is that I don’t feel at all anxious about going to heaven.

Artist and Renegade Bus contributor James Michael Starr’s sculptures are sometimes large and unwieldy, making them tough to delivery to shows – especially out-of-town. This is the first in a series of dispatches from Starr as he takes his work to shows in Austin and Houston. The show in Austin is fittingly titled “Anxiety.”

Art Review
Similarities emerge in Viewfinder: New Images by Texas Artists, at the Dallas Contemporary, and Launch, a MFA student show at CADD Art Lab. These pictures work like portraiture, in which photography has its deepest roots, telling the story of an age (like every other) at odds with its disparate identities.

Do we talk about the aesthetic material qualities of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain or the revolutionary ways in which it commented on contemporary art and our interpretation of it?