Austin 360 Small Refusals is a perfect title. Short, elegant and evocative, it graces a new show at the University of Texas Visual Arts Center.
The exhibition is remarkable for several reasons. For one, it showcases just three student artists Ania Mininkova, Heather Canterbury and Magdalena Jarkowiec and serves as their MFA thesis project in studio art.
Perhaps because of the pandemic, the 2001 MFA class seems unusually small. COVID-19 certainly affects how the viewer understands the works of these very different yet related artists, even if some of the pieces were completed before March 2020.
Mininkova s art, mostly video and photography, deals to a certain extent with road trips into the American West. Without wall texts, the pieces are displayed in a separate gallery, a spare, deep, white room with two low, black, cushioned viewing benches positioned at the room s center. Despite the overwhelming whiteness of the room, yellow-green light filters into the space throu
Michael Barnes thinks the exchange should start with “The Trip to Bountiful.”
Although he isn’t a fan of horror movies, he agrees that “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” is among the most influential movies about the state.
To salute Texas Independence Week in 2019, my former American-Statesman colleague Dave Thomas and I put out a list of the 53 best books about Texas.
It contained some beloved classics, such as John Graves’ “Goodbye to a River,” and some thrilling newcomers, like Attica Locke’s “Bluebird, Bluebird and Monica Muñoz Martinez’s “The Injustice Never Leaves You.”
We encouraged readers to respond with their favorites. They did. On June 14, 2019, I published those provocative responses, including several from folks who wondered why we had left off James Michener’s doorstop novel, “Texas.”
Austin 360
A specific date has been announced for just one gig at the Moody Amphitheater, nevertheless the Waterloo Greenway, the nonprofit that is planning, building and operating a string of parks along Waller Creek, says that the radically reconfigured Waterloo Park will open to the public in August.
Glass Animals Dreamland Tour, produced with Greenway s partners Live Nation and C3 Presents, is headed to the 5,000-guest Moody Amphitheater at Waterloo Park on Sept. 12. Tickets go on sale at 10 a.m. May 6 at Ticketmaster.com. The partners promoting this series of events will offer 100 free tickets to all their concerts, made available through a lottery.
Austin 360
The sublime Oakwood Cemetery Chapel, designed by Charles Page in 1914 and rededicated after a major retooling in 2018, has been closed to the public since March 2020.
That has not stopped parks employees the Austin Parks and Recreation Department oversees the city s oldest cemetery, founded in 1839 and their collaborators from creating digital exhibits that tell essential stories and relate back to the graveyard and its past.
These story maps have dealt with a pioneer Black leader, the Rev. Jacob Fontaine; Austin s Tejano history and Mexican American burials; music and musicians interred at Oakwood; people who fought for Texas independence from Mexico; the Austin suffrage movement; and a broad look at grief, loss and love across cultures.
Stern tracked down sources and adroitly wove together 15 episodes of “Vanishing Postcards.”
“The great Charles Kuralt of CBS News once said you can find your way across the country by using burger joints the way that a navigator uses stars.”
Some of his stops, such as Austin’s Dry Creek Inn, once owned by the cranky, now deceased Sarah Ransom, are fairly well known to old-timers.
When the pandemic hit America, native Texan Evan Stern hit the road.
Based in New York City, Stern escaped the worst of the crisis there and returned to Texas, where he normally spent a chunk of time each year; his parents live in Houston. He needed a creative project, however, to get through the long months away from his usual jobs.