Around & About

If you come across any interesting exhibitions, museums or other places on your travels, share them with us. Call 409-838-5393, or contact us through ourwebsite at www.artstudio.org. Be sure to include the location and dates of the subject, as well as any costs.

The ART MUSEUM OF SOUTHEAST TEXAS opens its exhibition season with OBSESSIVE WORLDS,agroup exhibition of work in a variety of media by 15 contemporary artists on view through Jan. 8.

“Obsessive Worlds” comprises nearly 50 works by artists whose art embodies and embraces obsessiveness in one form or another. This obsessive aesthetic is aproduct of a repetitive, excessive, laborious, and meticulous use of a particular material, idea and/or process.

Austin-based artist, Lauren Levy, exemplifies this obsessive aesthetic in her intimate, distinctive and highly emotive sculptures created with hundreds of shiny buttons strung on wire forms.

“We are pleased to present this pivotal exhibition to the Southeast Texas community,” said AMSET Curator of Exhibitions and Collections Sarah Hamilton. “‘Obsessive Worlds’ engages museum goers with the work of these extraordinary artists — many of whom are highly-notable in the Texas Contemporary art scene —to contemplate the notion of an obsessive aesthetic or visual quality.”

The 15 artists whose work will be featured include: Charlotte Smith, Shawn Smith, Ellen Frances Tuchman, Paul Booker, Marco Maggi, Gabriel de la Mora, Jonathan Whitfill, Susie Rosmarin, H.J. Bott, Beili Liu, Elisa D’Arrigo, Vincent Falsetta, Mary McCleary, Lauren Levy and John Adelman. These artists fall into what is considered an obsessive world which will be united in one exhibition at AMSET to explore their shared and individual forms of obsessive creativity.

For more information, visit www.amset.org or call 409-832-3432. ______________

Fossils are all around us. That’s the message paleontologist Kirk Johnson and artist Ray Troll share in the traveling exhibit CRUISIN’ THE FOSSIL FREEWAY at the MUSEUM OF THE GULF COAST.

Fossils have long been a subject of fascination and are used by paleontologists to help answer questions about early life on Earth. But how much can the fossil record tell us about prehistoric creatures, extinction, and geologic time?

“Cruisin’ the Fossil Freeway” features color prints and large-scale murals of Troll’s whimsical, fossilinspired artwork, which were created for a book of the same title, published by Troll and Johnson in 2007.

“The exhibit combines stunning and humorous visuals with stories from the book to record the ‘epoch tale’ of the duo’s 5,000-mile road trip through the American West as they sought to explore the fossil record,” according to a release.

In celebration of Texas Archeology Awareness Month, “Cruisin’ the Fossil Freeway” will open to the public with a free Family Fun Day on Oct. 1, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. The day will feature hands-on activities and crafts for all ages inspired by the temporary exhibition as well as the museum’s permanent exhibits on paleontology and archeology. Family Fun Day will also feature film presentations in the Houston Museum of Natural Science’s Discovery Dome Theater and a visit by children’s book illustrator Bill Megenhardt, featuring his latest books “The Great Dinosaur Race” and “The Fun Dinosaur Day at the Beach.”

The exhibition will remain on view in the Museum of the Gulf Coast’s Dunn Gallery through Dec. 30.

The museum is located at 700 Procter Street in Port Arthur.

For information, call 409-982-7000, or visit www.museumofthegulfcoast.org. ______________

In the early 20th Century, Surrealists were enchanted by “outsider art,” as the work of those with little to no contact with the mainstream art world has come to be known. They believed artists with no formal art training or those who drew in altered mental states could more successfully access the subconscious, achieving a greater clarity and authenticity of expression. In 1949, artist Jean Dubuffet invented the term Art Brut, to define this aspect of art making, and went on to champion creators who “draw everything (subject, choice of material, expressive means, rhythms, spellings, etc.) from their own inner selves and not from the commonBillTraylor, FIGURES, ANIMALS, GUNS (EXCITING EVENTS) ca.1939–1942, Crayon on cardboard TheMenilCollection,Houston

places of classical or currently fashionable art.”

Showcasing a unique and rarely exhibited facet of the MENIL COLLECTION’s works on paper, SEEING STARS highlights drawings by artists that can be called visionary, folk, naïve or self-taught.

Defying traditional and academic methods of representation and mark making, the works share formal and stylistic tendencies such as repetitive and laborintensive processes, experiments with chance, automatism, and psychoanalysis, and the construction of imaginary landscapes, creatures, and machines. The exhibition’s title, taken from the vision-altering concept of “seeing stars,” refers to a physiological anomaly in which the stimulation of the retina by the brain creates the illusion of points of light, colors or shapes. Like the works on view, the phenomenon suggests that creative vision is perhaps most interesting when the eyes are shut and inspiration comes from within.

The exhibition features a selection of Charles A. A. Dellschau’s watercolors and collages of fantastic flying machines, discovered in a Houston junk shop, and two drawings by surrealist artist and author Unica Zürn. Her compulsive line drawings, many completed while she was institutionalized, have been described as “sitting on the brink of sanity.” The show also includes work collected by John and Dominique de Menil from the Prison Museum in Huntsville, Texas; a doublesided scroll by Henry Darger depicting a magical universe he called the “realm of the unreal”; and work by Bill Traylor, Joseph Elmer Yoakum, and I. E. Reiquer.

The Menil is located at 1515 Sul Ross in Houston.

For more information, visit www.menil.org.