Industry Night

Tomorrow night kicks off the first ever Industry Night at DiverseWorks!

Dear Art Community and for those people who love all things arty. This night is just for you. We are inviting artists from all disciplines and those who work in the arts to stop by and enjoy a tasty drink at our happy hour from 6-8pm. Bring your business card and receive exclusive drink specials for one night only (or at least until our next Happy Hour on May 17). Plus, if you are a DiverseWorks member you can enjoy those perks too!

The idea behind Industry Night...
The idea came about as a way to show our appreciation for the arts community in Houston. We live in a spectacular city full of arts and culture and what better way to give back then to host a happy hour just for you! Our hope is that it will be a chance for artists/ art groups to meet one another, an opportunity to plant the seeds for potential collaborations, and a chance to catch up with old friends.

The Extras...
Plus, our good friend Graham Gaskill will be DJing, Oh My! Pocket Pies! Food Truck will be here and Saint Arnold Brewing Company & Whole Foods are supplying the drinks!

Thanks to CultureMap and KUHF (88.7FM) for their support.

-Shawna

Thomas Kinkade: A Primer

It is estimated that one in twenty American homes contains a product adorned with an image by Thomas Kinkade. If that’s true then Kinkade, the self-professed Painter of Light, is onto something. No matter what you think about the work, there are LOTS and LOTS of people who gravitate towards Kinkade’s highly romanticized, gauzy depictions of serene landscapes, country churches, quaint cottages, and NASCAR tracks and they've collectively spent more than 4 billion dollars scooping up Kinkade merchandise over the past two decades. It’s often said that taste in art is subjective. But this isn’t really about art. It’s about commerce. Kinkade operates completely outside of the arts ecology--eschewing galleries for franchised storefronts in malls, replacing retrospective exhibitions with programs on QVC and the Home Shopping Network. Such is the nature of Kinkade’s thoroughly modern marriage of creation and consumption.

DiverseWorks takes a look at this phenomenon with the help of Houston-based artist Patricia Hernandez. Parody of Light, which runs from January 14-February 26^th in the main gallery, dissects Kinkade’s corporate empire using humor and wit with a heaping helping of irreverence thrown in. Mimicking the display techniques used in Kinkade's "Signature Galleries" and recreating the suburban home environment of an imagined Kinkade collector, Hernandez sheds light on the strategies, methods and savvy use of marketing and mechanization that have propelled Kinkade to billionaire status and earned him the mantle of "America's most collected living artist."

-Diane Barber

2010-2011 TIF Grantees

DiverseWorks would like to congratulate all the awardees of the Round 3 Idea Fund. Let's hear it for:

2011 The Idea Fund Grantees and their Projects:

ArtScouts Houston (Elaine Bradford, Emily Link, Dennis Nance, C.H. JoAnn Park) – Nohegan East: An art-making weekend retreat with a focus on community. (Houston-Pearland)

Boozefox (Drew Liverman, Jules Buck Jones, Michael Phalan, Scott Eastwood) – Battleship Earth: A large sculpture/watercraft resembling an iceberg, which will be “driven” around Lady Bird Lake over the course of one or more days. (Austin)

Nathaniel Donnett – What’s The New News?: A project that will challenge, respond to, and juxtapose, the way we read the news and how rap and poetry interprets it, the differences in generations when seeking information regarding issues and current events specifically in Houston’s Third Ward. (Houston)

David Feil, Amye McCarther – Andrus Studios Archive: An artist-volunteer run archive of a collection of audio reels from Andrus Studios, an independent, progressive and artist-directed recording studio owned and operated in Houston by Walt Andrus from 1964 to 1971. (Houston)

Christine Foerster – Fish.taco.ponic: A fully functioning aquaponic greenhouse to be built, maintained, narrated and exhibited in collaboration with students and community members of Segundo Barrio, El Paso. (El Paso)

GENDER book creators(Boston Bostian; Mel Reiff Hill; Jay Mays) – the GENDER book(let): A colorful, highly-illustrated resource, short in length and with detailed real-life experiences, the GENDER book serves as a starter manual that presents the beautiful diversity of gender. (Houston)

Leila Grothe, Cynthia Mulcahy – Square Dance: A Community Project: This project proposes art as social practice in the form of an outdoor seasonal community dance at the new Trinity River Audubon Center in Dallas. (Dallas)

Buster Graybill – The Progeny of Tush Hog: This project will document the offspring of Tush Hogs, a hybrid species of Minimalist sculptures and deer feeders discovered near Marfa, TX, as they continually adapt and migrate towards the urban centers of San Antonio and Houston. (Converse, TX)

Andy Rihn – Texas’ Longest Hammer Choir: To make a slow rolling short film of an event consisting of 500 people hitting hammers together across abandoned railroad tracks, filmed from a custom-made railroad cart that houses the soundtrack musicians, propulsionists and film makers. (Austin)

The Rio Grande Collective (Mattie Matthaei, Eileen Torpey, Bett Williams) – The River is the Road Festival: Our project is a street festival and a site specific video art installation in the historic Sacred Heart Chapel currently under restoration by the Texas Historic Commission. (Marfa – Ruidosa, TX)

A MUST READ....

So I'm constantly on the lookout for blogs that excite me, bloggers who love art, and bloggers who blog consistently. Well, my most recent discovery is Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then. Donna K, a movie star, or what I like to think of as the star of the film, Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then, has been blogging about filmmaker Brent Green and her adventures over the last year as they have taken the film and exhibition around the country. It's been entertaining to read about their last 2 weeks in Houston. It's a must read!

If you haven't seen the film, Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then, you can catch Brent Green and Donna K along with Drew Henkels, Brendan Canty and John Michael Swartz, performing tonight and tomorrow night as part of Cinema Arts Festival Houston at Frenetic Theater. It's your only chance to catch the film with a live soundtrack.

If you miss the performance, you can still catch the film at DiverseWorks. It will be running in it's entirety in the exhibition through Dec. 18.

Shawna

PILOT (FX) at DiverseWorks

Greetings DiverseWorks, all the way from Nigeria!

GONZO247 dropping in once again.

Super excited to show the 2nd installation of Grandalism featuring PILOT(FX). Adam Socie aka "Pilot" grew up in Pasadena, Texas just south of Houston. He started painting at the age of fifteen. Now at the age of thirty he is a member of the world famous FX crew, one of the top graffiti crews in the world...

"I no longer paint because I can, I paint because I can't stop." - Pilot

Come out to DiverseWorks, Friday night 6-9pm, to catch the unveiling of PILOT's sophisticated spray-paint based artwork! Watch the video for more entertainment.

GRANDALISM Featuring PILOT(FX) from GONZO247 on Vimeo.

http://www.aerosolwarfare.com

Three times a charm: I survived TIF deadline

It's over yet it has begun.

After spending the past two months answering the same question for the 100th time and frantically sending out e-mails, I have survived another Idea Fund deadline which was for our 3rd round!

Fortunately for all the applicants, your work is done since the deadline was Friday, October 15. But my job is just starting, and hopefully with some help, we will be able to process the more than 250 proposals in time for the panel date of December 1.

Applicants will be notified about their status (if you got a grant or you didn't) by the second week of December. (Oh the number of late nights will be lengthy.)

So here's to hoping TIF makes your holiday wishes come true!

--Tracey

Rowers Wanted

You know how you have all the intentions of doing something, and then life gets in the way? I guess sometimes that it works out for the better.

I had been meaning to blog about the Universes residency here at DiverseWorks. Speak about how the show Ameriville was going to bring down the house – politically, artistically, and with the insightful energy of the company. Add in ideas about how Universes was going to be working with students from area high schools and Meta-Four Houston, the teen spoken-word crew that represents H-Town at Brave New Voices. Highlight that DW was awarded a Community Fund grant from National Performance Network that would allow for some of the Universes crew to work with students at MECA. (We’ll soon post video and pics from those events, so you, too, can see how awesome they were.)


After last night’s show and Q & A session, I have much more to say, or maybe be a bit smarter about what I should say.

Diane and I saw an excerpted version of Ameriville at the NPN Annual Meeting in Knoxville, and realized that it would be a great companion/extension to the Before (During) After exhibition that looks at how Katrina and other disasters have affected artists and their creative process. When Diane saw the show in New Orleans, and saw how the audience reacted and took it all in, it was clear that Ameriville needed to be part of the whole B(D)A and Under-Standing Water experience.

Let’s be clear. This is not a show about Katrina. This is not a show about New Orleans. Mildred talked about how, as the mouth of the Mississippi, New Orleans is the repository for all of America. The show takes on that metaphor and speaks about “America” in the past five or so years – the fear mongering, the panic, the lack of clarity and justice. This show uses Post-Katrina New Orleans as a lens to address ideas – post-September 11 culture; health care; environmental conservation; homelessness and a host of other issues – to examine what has happened to community in 21st century America.

What has always been important about Universes – at least to me, is that the actual show is only half of the experience. The real art is the conversations that are catalyzed by the performance, so that the ideas don’t just exist on stage, but happen in the post-show Q&A, in cars & bars afterwards, and in the minds of people much later. Ameriville does what good theater always does – makes audiences think, feel and get energized about life and what is happening around us.

When asked what the company was hoping to accomplish, they talked about “wanting to bring the unity back into community,” and encouraging people to be part of the solution they want to see. In the words of the show, “Everybody Row.”

I hope people come to see the show tonight and tomorrow at 7:30 to join the ride. Buy tickets here.