Austin: Museums

5x7: Art Splurge and Exhibition Voted Most Fun Fund-Raiser by The Austin Chronicle Critics’ Choice Awards!

Benefit Party (ticketed event): Saturday, May 17 7:30 – 10 pm Sale begins at 9 pm The Jones Center, 700 Congress Avenue, Austin The exhibition and sale continue through June 1,2008

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 works. 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. This modest exhibition celebrates the grounds and revitalized historic gardens of Laguna Gloria with two-dimensional and three-dimensional works installed inside the Villa.

At AMOA- Downtown 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.

May 24 -August 17, 2008

Sol LeWitt x2

Sol LeWitt: Structure and Line Sol LeWitt is one of the most influential figures in the history of twentieth-century art. Working in New York City in the early 1960s, LeWitt was among the many young artists who challenged the prevailing art of the time by emphasizing that the idea behind the work of art was more important than the execution. This thinking is evident in the 41 works included in Sol LeWitt: Structure and Line. Created by LeWitt between 1965 and 2006, these works include detailed ink and pencil drawings, brilliantly colored goauches, and “structures” made of wood, aluminum, and fiberglass.

Many of these works demonstrate the meticulous execution of an idea. LeWitt’s focus on the artistic concept was also instrumental in his development of wall drawings: large-scale works of art that are completed directly on the walls of galleries and other public spaces. For many years, LeWitt executed these works himself, using written instructions that he had drafted. In recent decades, a team of assistants have painstakingly applied the bands of color and meticulous lines for the works.

How do artists respond to calamity?

 In New Orleans, many resident artists and a number of those observing from outside have been moved by the need for community relief, healing, and support and have directed their work to address these immediate social and spiritual concerns. Whether through the commissioning of new cultural experiences that provide public forums for discussion and reflection, the inauguration of creativity workshops to provide encouragement for young people, or simply the creation of works that attempt to define and document the experience of catastrophe, artists can be a valiant force in the recovery of community-wide health and the forging of a future vision.

This group exhibition, the result of a year's research by curator Annette DiMeo Carlozzi, a former resident of the city, will feature film and video, drawings, photographs, and mixed media works .

At The University of Texas at Austin are many respected artists of national and international reputation, who successfully create their own bodies of work while teaching and supervising the work of the next generation of artists.

The Blanton's popular faculty exhibition resumes in the new museum on a triennial basis. This year's guest curator James Elaine, curator of the Hammer Projects series at the Hammer Museum of Art at UCLA, selects a diverse cross-section of styles and mediums from among the faculty's broad range of artistic production. 

Prints are the most frequently experienced but least understood works of art. In the history of art, and most exhibitions, the medium is usually presented in terms of its great masters, from Albrecht Dürer through Jasper Johns, or explained solely in terms of technique.

Instead, this exhibition explores the medium as a uniquely rich and largely collective system of expression--a "language"--with distinctive principles, persistent tendencies, and special processes that are shared across time and space.

 Planned to coincide with the annual meeting of the Print Council of America--the first ever in the state of Texas--the exhibition will feature around 100 of the collection's finest and most distinctive prints.

Argentine artist Fabián Bercic will provide a contemporary reinterpretation of the traditional Zen Garden in his site-specific installation for Workspace.

 As a critique of consumerism and the commercialization of culture, Bercic transforms the usually sacred rock garden, replacing its natural and organic elements with synthetic, day-go, plastic materials. The work, in this contemporary context, reflects the artist’s interest in product design, medieval manuscript illustrations and his own imagination, asking how one can create a meaningful Zen Garden with the materials of a late-capitalist society. The artist’s process of repetitively and painstakingly assembling his materials recaptures the traditional function and purpose of the Garden, in that the artist achieves the loss of self through these Zen actions. Conversely, it serves as a comment on disposable, industrial production. A seating area will be incorporated into the work, allowing viewers an area from which to contemplate the complex dichotomies of the Garden.

James A. Michener assembled one of the finest collections of Japanese woodblock prints in the country. The distinguished writer began his collection in the 1950’s and published The Floating World in 1954, one of the first book-length studies of Japanese prints published in English.

Much like his longstanding connection to the Blanton Museum, and his donation of 2oth century masterworks to the collection, Michener found the Honolulu Academy an ally in the study and advancement of another of his interests, Japanese prints. In 1988 and 1991, he donated his extensive collection to the Academy. Featuring some of the most beloved and familiar ukiyo-e (images of the floating world) prints, this exhibition of 50 works bring this quintessential Japanese tradition into the twentieth-century, with examples by leading Ukiyo-e artists Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858), and Kawase Hasui (1883-1957).

The Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum features Austin's only IMAX Theatre. This 400-seat, state-of-the-art theatre uses innovative IMAX technology to create the ultimate film experience. Unlike many IMAX theatres, ours is equipped with an IMAX projector that has both 2-D and 3-D capabilities.

 The Theatre can also show special films on a movie-quality 35mm projector. The IMAX Theatre is a fully accessible facility. With its own separate entrance, the Theatre is able to operate independently of the Museum and remains open in the evenings, with extended hours on weekends. The IMAX Theatre Lobby is a distinctive, dramatic space with a carpet pattern that incorporates native Texas flora in the design. Both the Lobby and the Theatre can be rented for special events. Click HERE for a listing of showtimes at the IMAX Theatre. There is no late seating in the IMAX Theatre. Please arrive at least 20 minutes before your scheduled show time.

Walk into a replica of the U.S. Senate Chamber for an unrehearsed, unpredictable     encounter with an actor (michael stuart) who looks, dresses, and talks like lyndon johnson as he was in the 1950s. in the lbj library's new exhibit, bills, bills, bills:  lyndon johnson as senate majority leader, visitors can talk to the senate majority leader about important legislation of the era, including the creation of nasa, the interstate highway bill, labor reform, social security reform, and statehood for alaska and hawaii.  under johnson's leadership, the first civil rights bill since reconstruction was passed into law.      

Johnson redefined the role of majority leader from merely a "go between" into the most powerful position in the senate. visitors may even get a taste of the "johnson treatment," lbj's unique, and highly effective, style of "persuasion."       

the exhibit covers lbj's entire senate career from his election in 1948 to his election to the vice-presidency in 1961 and will chronicle his rapid rise to power from an 87-vote margin of victory in 1948 - in which he was given the nickname "landslide lyndon" - to his selection as majority leader in 1955. 

there will be interactive touch screen computers detailing the major bills passed in the 1950s with explanations of how these laws impacted modern america.
a highlight: home movies narrated by lady bird johnson.

Erle Stanley Gardner's Study Leeds Gallery *Fourth Floor* Flawn Academic Center

By appointment only; phone 232-7688. This replica of mystery writer Erle Stanley Gardner's study at his ranch home in Temecula, California, displays original memorabilia and artifacts from his career. Gardner was the creator of Perry Mason.

Scholars At Work: Books Based on the Center's Collections

 Hallway *Third Floor* Harry Ransom Center Monday-Friday, 8-5

The Gutenberg Bible is the first substantial book printed from movable type on a printing press. It was printed in Johann Gutenberg's shop in Mainz, Germany between 1450 and 1455. The Ransom Center holds one of five complete copies in the United States.

The First Photograph

 Harry Ransom Center Lobby   Gallery Hours (also Monday 10:00-5:00)

One of the finest pieces of the Ransom Center's Photography Collection is the first photograph which Frenchman Joseph Nicéphore Niépce produced in 1826. The 8" x 6.5" heliograph depicts a view just outside the workroom window of Niépce's estate in Gras in east central France. The image, on a pewter plate sensitized with bitumen of Judea, took a full eight hours of exposure to produce. Niépce's image forms part of the Gernsheim Collection -- an internationally-renowned photography archive encompassing the history of the medium -- which was acquired by the Ransom Center in 1964.