Houston: Museums

CHALLENGE GALLERY , located next to the Amazing Body Pavilion's exit, dares visitors to perform at the top of their game, test their reflexes, master the wacky wire, flex their mental muscles and dance their hearts out. At each of the exhibit's six stations, visitors must use a specific muscle to complete the activity. Activities include Mindball, where the most relaxed player wins by pushing a ball toward their opponent using calm brain waves.

Another activity in the Challenge area is the Dance Challenge. Players have a chance to show off their best dance moves as they test their muscle memory by stepping on lighted panels and following along with the on-screen performer. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

McGovern 4D Theater -

Experience science in 4D at Houston’s first and only 4D theater, the McGovern 4D Theater. Enjoy a 3D feature in a fully digital, surround sound environment with special effects like rain, lightning, scents and more! The theater opened in September 2008 and features 4D films developed by the Museum's staff, as well as special engagement presentations. Graciously underwritten by the John P. McGovern Foundation.

Animation featuring Cartoon Network May 29 - September 6, 2010

Explore how art, math, science and technology come together in the exciting world of animation. In Animation's stimulating and fun environment, visitors will explore the process of animation from concept to finished product - from storyboarding, character design, and drawing techniques to movement, timing, filming, and sound. Larger-than-life graphics of popular Cartoon Network characters provide a colorful backdrop to the exhibit, which also explores the history of animation and features a screening room and a cartoon museum.

Animation was developed by the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry in collaboration with Cartoon Network.

Touch: The Science & Health of the Human Skin

Opens Fall 2010 Opens Fall 2010

Touch is being developed in partnership with the American Academy of Dermatology and will be a 3,000 sq. ft. traveling exhibit that highlights the physiology, function, pathology, and sociology of human skin in a series of fun, engaging and educational exhibits. Learn what “type” of skin you have and how it reacts to the environment around you, the pathology and treatment of skin cancer, the art and sociology of tattoos and adornment, and watch a cut heal in super fast time on a giant hand. *Exhibit dates subject to change

Experience the thrill of historic aviation in four legendary aircraft from the World War II era. The Lone Star Flight Museum is now offering bomber and trainer flight experiences in its B-17 Flying Fortress, B-25 Mitchell, T-6 Texan and PT-17 Stearman. 

Call for more information

– Moody Gardens recently announced the opening of Forgotten Gateway: Coming to America through Galveston Island .The exhibit chronicles the Port of Galveston’s largely forgotten history as a major gateway to American immigration from 1845 to 1924. Forgotten Gateway builds on a growing scholarly and public interest in the history of migration patterns to America and Galveston’s place as one of the nation’s top immigrant ports in that history.

“This exhibit is the first of its kind to explore Galveston’s legacy as a port of entry on a national scale,” said John Zendt, Moody Gardens general manager. “We are very excited to have it here on the island and bring to light the little-known yet rich era of Galveston’s history and just how important it was to the growth of Texas and the American Midwest.”

MOODY GARDENS® RAINFOREST PYRAMID® REOPENS APRIL 28 WITH NEW EXHIBIT JITTERBUG! 

– From a goliath bird eating tarantula to a hefty lubber grasshopper, Moody Gardens visitors will have a chance to meet a wide variety of unique spineless insects this summer. The Rainforest Pyramid will open for the summer season on April 28, featuring JitterBug! Spineless Wonders of the World.

The special exhibit will include both local and exotic bugs along with interesting facts about each critter. Inside the Rainforest Pyramid, visitors will see over 1,000 species of floras and faunas of the rainforests of Asia, Africa and the Americas as well as colorful macaws and fish. As a new feature, there will be tropical thunder several times a day with immersive sound effects and misty showers so real that guests may want to go on an adventure through the forest in raincoats.

Rainforest presentations will also take place every hour between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. daily discussing all aspects of the rainforest from plants, conservation efforts to insects and animals. 

 When: April 28 – Sept. 6, 2010 Where: Moody Gardens Rainforest Pyramid Admission: Adults $9.95, Children & Seniors $7.95 Information: moodygardens.org; 1-800-582-4673 Moody Gardens® is a public, non-profit, educational destination utilizing nature in the advancement of rehabilitation, conservation, recreation, and research.

Moody Gardens will open a special new exhibit just in time for the summer vacation season. “Amazeing” Butterflies is scheduled to open Saturday, May 15 and will feature a maze and free-flying live butterflies. The exhibit is designed to teach visitors the life cycle, variety of species and survival challenges of the colorful insects.

“Butterflies have been at the top of the request list as something that our guests have wanted to see here at Moody Gardens,” said John Zendt, Moody Gardens CEO and president. “Along with the other unique attractions that Moody Gardens has to offer, we hope this will add value to the guest experience.”

Saturday, September 4, 2010, 7:30 – 10:30pm

Moody Gardens 1 Hope Blvd. Galveston, TX Galveston.com

Since their 1982 debut, Night Ranger has left an indelible mark on the music world. The band’s popularity has been fueled by an impressive string of instantly recognizable hit singles and signature album tracks, including “Sister Christian,” “(You Can Still) Rock In America,” “When You Close Your Eyes,” “Sentimental Street,” “Goodbye” and “Don’t Tell Me You Love Me.”

 Tickets are available at Ticketmaster.com, by phone at 800-745-3000, at all Ticketmaster retail locations and the Island Star Live Box Office located in the lobby of the Moody Gardens Hotel. General Admission $15 Reserved Seating $35 VIP Premium Seating $75 Ticket Phone (800)745-3000 Ticket Web Link www.ticketmaster.com

Epicurean Evening At Moody Gardens September 27th

The Galveston Restaurant Association and Galveston.com & Company "Great Taste of the Gulf" Epicurean Evening will take place on Monday, September 27th, from 6pm to 8:30pm at the Moody Gardens Convention Center and has been generously underwritten by Galveston.com & Company for the eighth consecutive year. Guests attending the event will have the opportunity to sample some of the Gulf Coast's finest cuisine and beverages from Galveston County's top restaurateurs, hoteliers and dedicated suppliers.

Tickets include admission to the event, sampling of entries and an array of promotional beverages, and can be purchased for $30 in advance or $35 at the door.

DECEMBER 12, 2010 Annual Christmas open house at Moody Mansion will be on Sunday, December 12, 2010, 11:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Light refreshments will be served.

This event is free and open to the public.

The Ocean Star Offshore Drilling Rig and Museum is located on Galveston Island, Texas, less than an hour from downtown Houston, the world's petroleum capital.

Visitors board the retired jackup drilling rig and view a video about the offshore industry. The museum features three floors of models and interactive displays illustrating the story of offshore oil and gas from seismic technology to exploration and production.

Scale models of production platforms, actual drill bits and remotely-operated vehicles (ROVs) as well as videos and exhibits explain drilling, geology, seismic, well servicing and production. Following a leisurely tour inside the museum, visitors can take the skywalk out onto the drill floor of the rig, or visit the exhibits on the pipe deck from the first floor of the museum.

Blast Off Theater

Visit the only place in the world where you can personally experience the thrill of launching into space like a real astronaut. It's not just a movie; it's the thrill of personally feeling the launch into space -- from the rocket boosters to the billowing exhaust. What have visitors said about their trips? "It's like IMAX in 10D!"

German Impressionist Landscape Painting: Liebermann—Corinth—Slevogt

On view September 12 - December 5, 2010 At the Audrey Jones Beck Building Impressionism is considered a fundamentally French artistic movement, but the international reputation of Paris as the world´s leading art center inevitably led to the dissemination of this style to other countries. Art students from all over Europe flocked to Paris to be trained at the Académie des Beaux-Arts or one of the many private studios. Despite the strained political relationship between Germany and France at the time, German interest in French artistic developments was particularly lively.

Dynasty and Divinity: Ife Art in Ancient Nigeria makes its U.S. premiere at the MFAH. The kingdom of Ife (pronounced EE-fay) flourished from the 12th to 15th centuries in what is now southwestern Nigeria.

The exhibition features superb examples of copper, terra cotta, and stone Ife sculpture—cited by London’s Guardian as masterpieces that rank with the Terra-cotta Army, the Parthenon, and the mask of Tutankhamen as ¨Dtreasures of the human spirit¡¬—drawn entirely from the magnificent collections of the National Commission for Museums and Monuments in Nigeria. Dynasty and Divinity: Ife Art in Ancient Nigeria is co-organized by the Museum for African Art, New York, and Fundación Marcelino Botín, Santander, Spain, in collaboration with the National Commission for Museums and Monuments, Nigeria. MFAH curator Frances Marzio will oversee the Houston presentation of the show, which was most recently on view at the British Museum.

Opening October 2010 Artist Cai Guo-Qiang (at left, in a portrait by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders) will create a permanent, site-specific installation for the museum’s new Arts of China galleries, which open in October 2010.

The project -- a monumental landscape mural to be created in a Houston warehouse just prior to installation and rendered by igniting a gunpowder drawing over multiple panels -- will line the walls of the Ting Tsung and Wei Fong Chao Arts of China gallery and provide a contemporary context for the Chinese ceramics, bronzes, sculpture, and paintings dating from the 13th century B.C. to the 21st century. The mural will be the largest and most ambitious permanent project of Guo-Qiang’s to date, and is the first in a series of contemporary commissions for the museum's five Arts of Asia galleries. MFAH Asian art curator Christine Starkman will oversee the installation.

Cosmopolitan Routes: Houston Collects Latin American Art October 24, 2010–February 6, 2011 Cosmopolitan Routes: Houston Collects Latin American Art is the first in a series of exhibitions celebrating the 10th anniversary of the establishment of the MFAH Latin American art department and the International Center for the Arts of the Americas (ICAA) in 2001.

The exhibition is a tribute to the collectors: the Founding Members and Latin Maecenas who have supported the museum’s Latin American art initiative and its collecting activities since the department’s inception. Cosmopolitan Routes: Houston Collects Latin American Art will comprise more than 90 works on loan from private collections in Houston and Latin America, including paintings, works on paper, photography, sculpture, video projections, installations, and assemblage.

Carlos Cruz-Diez: Color into Space February 6–July 4, 2011 The first large-scale retrospective of this Venezuelan-born artist, Carlos Cruz-Diez: Color into Space will feature more than 150 works, ranging from paintings, silk-screen prints, and unconventional color structures to room-size chromatic environments, architectural maquettes, and videos. For over 50 years Cruz-Diez, who turns 87 in August 2010, has intensively and obsessively experimented with the origins and optics of color in a remarkable range of media, and he has involved his entire family in the enterprise, with guild-style studios in Paris, Panama, and Caracas.

The exhibition will introduce international audiences to Cruz-Diez’s extensive productivity and will place his theoretical and artistic contributions to 20th-century Modernism in a broader context than they have traditionally been seen. Color into Space is organized by Mari Carmen Ramírez, Wortham Curator of 3 Latin American Art and Director, International Center for the Arts of the Americas (ICAA), at the MFAH.

This exhibition presents a selection of 30 works on paper connected with Alfred Jacob Miller’s most revered body of work—his images of the West based on the 1837 journey from the Kansas City, Missouri, area to Wyoming’s Wind River Mountains with Scottish adventurer-aristocrat Captain William Drummond Stewart and the American Fur Company.

The exhibition places these compelling works within the broader scope of Miller’s life (1810–1874) and career, his role as an important early American practitioner in watercolor, and his place in the context of early 19th-century American art. Romancing the West opens at Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in September 2010 before traveling to the MFAH. A presentation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art follows, in summer 2011. Emily Ballew Neff, MFAH curator of American painting and sculpture, will oversee the installation in Houston.

Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the National Gallery of Art will present a selection of 50 paintings from the National Gallery of Art’s premier holdings while the galleries that house its 19th-century French collection are closed for repair, renovation, and restoration.

 The National Gallery’s Impressionist and Post-Impressionist collection ranks among the finest of any museum in the world and features some of the greatest artists active in France between the 1860s and the early 20th century, including Cézanne, Degas, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Van Gogh. In Houston, the exhibition is coordinated by Helga Aurisch, MFAH curator of European art..