Recent arts coverage:
- Evolutionary biology. Aesthetic determinism. Live action role playing. The Rude Mechs are making a new play again
- Suburban battlefield: Women fight invisible foe in Amie Siegel’s ‘Black Moon’
- In eerie paintings by Ana Fernandez, a house isn’t just a house
More arts coverage | Follow this blog on Twitter @artsinaustin | Read recent arts reviews
Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2009 > June > 16
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Recent arts coverage:
The (new) art of drawing: Today’s artists re-consider the art of making their mark’ | Austin Critics’ Table Awards 2008-2009 | Tina Marsh, 1954-2009, Austin jazz innovator |Follow @artsinaustin on Twitter
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment Categories: Alert
Talking ‘Texas Treasures’
Culled from the collections of the Blanton Museum of Art, the Austin Museum of Art and UT’s Ransom Center, ‘Texas Treasures’ assembles masterworks of early Texas art that have been rarely are seen by the public.
Organized by the Center for the Advancement and Study of Early Texas Art ‘Texas Treaures’ reveals the breadth of Texas art from the origins of classical portraiture and impressionist landscape painting in the 19th-century to the American Scene painting of the Depression era to the many interpretations of modernism at the mid-twentieth century.
Thursday join Annette DiMeo Carlozzi, Blanton Museum’s curator of american and contemporary art and director of curatorial affairs, for her take on ‘Texas Treasures.’
7 p.m. Thursday
Umlauf Sculpture Garden & Museum
605 Robert E. Lee Road
Free
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment Categories: Visual arts
Review: ‘Big Range Dance Festival’
The Big Range Festival ended its two-week Austin stint with a grab bag of modern dance. Saturday’s program at Ballet Austin’s Austin Ventures studio was uneven. Big Range mixes local dance pieces with groups from other cities.
One of the more exciting offerings on Saturday’s program came from Brooklyn. “Supplant,” choreographed by Jamal Jackson, blended West African and modern dance in a collage of fury and fire. Dancers Tiffani Harris, Meredith Moore, Asha Rhodes and Jackson brought intensity and speed to their performances. When they all fell to the floor with a resounding echo at work’s end the audience let out a collective breath and immediately applauded.
The program’s other out-of-town group, Dallas-based Muscle Memory Dance Theatre, had a similar drive to their dancing, although choreographer Lesley Snelson-Figueroa’s creation had a relatively simplistic structure to it. Two groups of women faced off, using portable green picket fences as movable dividing lines. The movement of the fences got rather clunky and repetitive, but the dancing held the piece together well.
Simple choices worked well elsewhere. Local choreographer Sharon Marroquin danced with ease and grace in a parable-esque story of a fisherman who loves to fish, and then learns from his fish.
Festival producer Ellen Bartel’s Spank Dance continued in the quirky vein Bartel seems to be making her signature. With video by Eliot Haynes and a punk-lite score by Adam Sultan, five dancers cavorted about wearing then discarding baroque wigs and skirts. While the tone of the piece felt defiant and suggested a possible political critique, the various elements never quite added up . The program also included Cheryl Chaddick’s earnest “The Watchful Sleeping Heart” and “Cycle I,” an excerpt from Andrea Ariel’s ongoing Gyre project, which premieres its next installment in August.
Clare Croft is an American-Statesman freelance arts critic.
