If you’re looking for a crash course in Austin’s music, art, and culture scene, I suggest writing a biweekly column on the subject – it sure worked for me. In between sets at five-band shows and in the lobbies of museums and galleries, I’ve been jotting down notes, learning from the city and the creative […]
Arts
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The Top 10 Shows of (Mostly) 2025
1) Ground Floor Theatre’s Falsettos Technically a 2024 show, but it happened right after last year’s Top 10s issue, and it sure deserves a spot at the top. This show earned the unique honor of making me fall in love with musicals again. I thought I’d moved on, but this score, this talent, this sheer […]
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A Tale of Two Tunas
Howdy y’all. I’m Cat McCarrey, and I’m a Tuna virgin. My lack of experience with the fictional “third smallest town in Texas” could be generational or regional. Either way, the four-play sagas of that tiny town, written in the Eighties and Nineties by Jaston Williams, Joe Sears, and Ed Howard, were complete unknowns until my […]
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Meet Your Makers
At this point, most of the Chronicle readership is probably on board with understanding the evils of mass consumerism – the myriad environmental and social ills that come with corporatized convenience. When it’s two weeks away from Christmas, though, and you still haven’t gotten your mom a gift, those moral ideals may begin to slip […]
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AV Beamon’s Mind-Mend Connection
Austin Beamon’s journey to becoming an in-demand tailor before the age of 30 began like any other Austin teenager’s: “I guess I was, yeah, a little unsure, a little lost, up in the air. I liked music, clothes, normal stuff like that, and was trying to figure out just what to do with it,” he […]
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For Julia Lenoir, Starting Over Is the Trick
Julia Lenoir has lived many lives. In 2022, she was working in hospice and tattooing herself casually, learning to draw botanical designs by tracing: “I started doing everything in dots, because I couldn’t pull lines on my machine. I would sit with my tracing paper over the image, and I would just dot, dot, dot, […]
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Emma Hollingsworth’s Labor of Love (Emphasis on Love)
Much ink has been spilled about the difference between art and craft. In the 1970s, feminist artists reclaimed what had been thought of as women’s work – and thus devalued – elevating it to the level of fine art. In 2025, it seems craft is everywhere in the art world – but often a detached, […]
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In the Elements With Ceramicist Arielle Shaves
Ceramics is one of the few art forms that involves all of the elements: earthen clay, water to shape it, fire to set it, and air to dry it. That’s what Arielle Shaves likes about it: “It brings back some childlike feeling of messing with Play-Doh, mud, playing with the earth. It doesn’t matter what […]
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For an Herbal Cigarette Maker, “Heritage Brands” Are the Aesthetic Inspiration
Smoking kills! And yet, the kids keep doing it – the World Health Organization now warns that nine times more children than adults are vaping, fueling a “new wave of nicotine addiction.” Teens may be teetotaling, but they definitely haven’t given up nicotine. Back in the early 2010s, Emily Schexnayder, born to two smokers, was […]
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Vanessa Gonzalez’s New Hour Is Real Austin Comedy
Austin’s comedy scene is different from when Vanessa Gonzalez did her first tight five at Fallout Theater. At the time, Gonzalez had been sticking to sketch and improv because, as she puts it, “stand-up was the most intimidating one to get the guts to do.” Thankfully, her friend Lisa Friedrich saw the comic’s potential and […]
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Austin Theatre Gets Possessed by Queer Christmas Cheer With The E(Xmas)ist
Bringing good tidings of gay joy, The E(Xmas)ist makes its regional debut at Austin’s CRASHBOX theatre this weekend and next (Dec. 11-13 & 18-20). This campy Christmas parody from playwright Vince Kelley puts a candy cane twist on one of the most influential horror movies of all time, The Exorcist. Featuring all the film’s iconic […]
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Sob Through the Holidays With Parade
Ground Floor Theatre’s annual Christmas counter-programming kicks off December with an impeccable downer. The show may be called Parade, but the only thing marching before you is a cavalcade of horrors. It presents the true story of Leo Frank (Jacob Rosenbaum), a Jewish man falsely accused of murdering 13 year-old Mary Phagan (Brooklynn Nickel) in […]