Six older books help set the stage for understanding that Texas take on modernism.
Urban planning takes a backseat to discussions of architecture in most of these Texas books.
A tiny minority of our state’s residents are old enough to recall the era that predated the modern Texas city.
Before towers, freeways and, especially, air conditioning.
Before top-rated universities, hospitals, museums and libraries.
Before up-to-date restaurants, parks, theaters, festivals and concert halls.
And well before all the digital technologies that make these modern things and others hang together these days.
It was not until 1950 that the U.S. Census recorded more Texans living in urban areas than in the rural ones, 30 years after America as a whole turned that demographic corner. (Pause to think about that.) So all that urban modernity that we take for granted today came rushing at Texans with great speed, mostly during the past 75 years.
Austin 360
For the second year in a row, Rodeo Austin has been forced to cancel its March public events because of the coronavirus crisis.
The multi-week Austin fandango that traces its roots back 80 years has, since the early 1980s, taken place mostly at the Travis County Expo Center in East Austin.
Yet parts of that center, including the main arena, are currently in use as staging points for distributing essential COVID-19 supplies.
Because of that, Rodeo Austin will present only privately attended youth events, such as the Junior Livestock Show, Ag Mechanics Competition, Ultimate Scramble and Youth Auction.
That means that the ProRodeo, carnival, fair and BBQ Austin will be postponed, although it s possible they could be rescheduled later in 2021, according to rodeo leaders.
The enormous shell rests silently in an oak-studded plaza.
You can’t miss it. In fact, Marc Quinn’s “Spiral of the Galaxy” is likely the most easily spotted work of art on the verges of the University of Texas campus, second only to Ellsworth Kelly’s “Austin,” the building-as-art at the Blanton Museum of Art. That’s because most of the school’s legacy art, as well as newer works planted by UT’s nationally acclaimed Landmarks public art program, are found deeper inside the urban campus.
In part because the bronze surfaces of the shell readily catch the light during the day and night, passersby in cars automatically glance in its direction. On a fine day absent a pandemic “Spiral of the Galaxy” can be seen surrounded by people lingering at more than a dozen tables and ledges in the plaza outside Dell Medical School’s trim and shiny Health Learning Building, opposite the Dell Seton Medical Center on Red River Street.
Austin 360
The Blanton Museum of Art has revealed a dramatic plan to transform the grounds around its three buildings on the University of Texas campus at Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and North Congress Avenue.
What looks in renderings like a garden of 15 gigantic, perforated flowers was designed by the award-winning firm Snøhetta, whose New York-based leaders are Texans and is also based in Oslo, Norway.
As part of the projected $35 million project, Cuban American abstract painter Carmen Herrera will add a signature mural to what is becoming a grand southern gateway to the campus that directly faces the state Capitol and the major Capitol Complex expansion now underway along Congress.
Trailblazing women have written the history of Austin art.
Start with sculptor Elisabet Ney, whose 19th-century studio in Hyde Park became the city’s first art gallery and today shines as a small museum dedicated to her life and works. Follow that with the ongoing work of her admirers among the members of early 20th-century advocacy groups, such as Austin Art League and Texas Fine Arts Association (an ancestor to the Contemporary Austin), populated almost entirely by women.
It is true that the postwar generation of artists and teachers who dominated the new fine arts program at the University of Texas were, for the most part, men. Yet they were followed by the visionary founders of Women & Their Work, which since 1977 has promoted the careers of hundreds of artists as part of a program that is recognized and admired across the country.