Home Events Arts Visual Arts

This sweet opportunity comes to us from the Downtown Austin Alliance, the Pease Park Conservancy, and Ride Bikes Austin – so we know it's a damned good thing indeed. Take the self-guided Art & Parks Tour to explore the best of what Downtown Austin art and parks have to offer through this selection of curated murals, artworks, and green spaces. You can sign up anytime, so click that URL and get ready to learn the most vibrantly visual parts of your city soon – live and in person.

Use your smartphone to access self-guided tours of the outdoor public art sited by UT's award-winning Landmarks program any time you feel like it. BONUS: There's also a free, docent-led tour starting at Marc Quinn's "Spiral of the Galaxy" (1501 Red River) on Sun., Jan. 8, 11am.

Traveling in Mexico, you frequently encounter changarritos – portable food carts or tienditas run by hardworking entrepreneurs. The carts usually operate outside of any formal regulation and, in that way, mirror the resilience and creativity of Mexican culture. In 2005, artist Máximo González appropriated the concept of the changarrito as a way for artists to take their work directly to the people. The idea came to Austin’s venerable Mexic-Arte Museum in 2012, with dozens of artists displaying art and interacting with the public outside the Downtown gallery. The concept is back and will run through August. – Brant Bingamon

Works by the annual Tito’s Prize Winner for Visual Arts – yes, that’s the Tito’s Handmade Vodka Tito, tyvm – are presented, as ever, by the community-forward creatives at Big Medium, and this year’s honoree is Trinidadian artist Rodell Warner. Come explore the new Big Medium space on South Congress, its gallery recently refurbished after a fire and freshly bright with Warner’s provocative digital interventions that fictionalize the Caribbean’s fraught past and interrogate that region’s historical photographic archive. – Wayne Alan Brenner

Art conservation can be a contradiction: to destroy to preserve. Thus it is with the HRC and its efforts to restore the Clarkson Stanfield album, one of the most remarkable volumes in the history of art photography. More correctly known as “100 Calotypes by D. O. Hill, R.S.A., and R. Adamson,” the collection of over 100 salted paper prints was collated by the photographers for landscape artist Stanfield and depicts the lords, laborers, clergy, and scientists of 19th-century Scotland and the landscapes in which they lived. Currently undergoing repairs, the center staff are using its deconstructed state to display 39 plates, along with more works from Hill and Adamson, as separate works since the first time they were bound. – Richard Whittaker

As a glasses-wearer, my vision unobstructed by assistive frames reveals a world of shapes – formless, edgeless, but colorful wonders nonetheless. Take a glance at Jen Garrido’s work, and you’ll feel as though your glasses have fallen away, too. The artist’s process, as she puts it, is “a delicate balance of choice and process.” She gravitates toward shapes that “tangle, overlap, sit, lean and lay” as a vessel for personal narratives and internal dialogues. While first looks may reveal only color and texture, Garrido’s paintings invite projection – so project your meanings any Tuesday-Sunday before the show’s April 28 end date. – James Scott

This local treasure of a venue, run by those Contemporary Austin folks who also bring us the Jones Center shows Downtown, is all about the outdoors – which is perfect for these trickily navigated times of ours, n'est-ce pas? Recommended: Stop by and breathe in the air, enjoy the lawns and gardens and the many examples of world-class sculpture arrayed across the property, and (as Frankie used to say) r-e-l-a-x.

A piece of Dallas artist Molly Sydnor lives in Austin this spring thanks to “After the Rain Part I,” a Big Medium pop-up exhibition of bright textiles. Like a touchable rainbow, the multicolor weavings run ceiling-to-floor in a tiny room of the arts organization’s South Congress Avenue gallery space. The claustrophobic container may “evoke anxiety,” the artist notes, but for Sydnor, the act of weaving is a meditative process. Catch the display from 7 to 9pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays, or weekends from 11am to 4pm. – Carys Anderson

Enter the fascinating world of illusions in this new venue that boasts a stunning array of intriguing visual, sensory, and educational experiences among new, unexplored optical wonderments.

Flowers are an integral part of the lives of the Broq-Pa peoples of the Indian subcontinent, a constant adornment for both men and women. The interplay of human and floral forms has fascinated artist Ziesook You and become the prevailing theme of her work onward from 2016. Since relocating to Austin two years ago, the internationally acclaimed artist has given a local twist to that body of work with this new collection featuring single mothers, seniors, and people with multicultural backgrounds as living vases for local flora. – Richard Whittaker

This place, ah, it's one of our favorite places in the entire city; and of course they're properly corona-closed. But check 'em out online right now – it's a rich, wonder-filled website – to whet your appetite for when things get back to … uh … are we still calling it "normal," these days?