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Arts
Classical Music
Beerthoven: Cloudy With a Chance of Ale
Full disclosure: My friend is playing at this. But this doesn’t “cloud” my judgment. When I tell you that the Amorsima Trio – a stringed threesome featuring violinist Mia Detwiler, cellist Kourtney Newton, and violist Michael Capone – always play interesting tunes that redefine what the string family can sound like, I’m now backed up by the classical music curators over at Beerthoven. At this edition of yeasty concertgoing, you’ll be able to enjoy Easy Tiger pastries and sips from Lazarus Brewing – including non-alcoholic ones – while listening to renditions of I Only Speak of the Sun (c. Jessica Meyers), “in soft echoes…a world awaits” (c. Jeffrey Mumford), and Kaija Saariaho’s Cloud Trio. – James ScottSept. 27-29 -
Arts
Theatre
Former Children and the Case of Big Ice Cream Soaked Socks
Produced by Torko Rover, a partnership between Tor Reynolds and Kelsey Oliver, this backyard presentation features several collaborators. Those include: Carrie Fussel, Jenny Larson, khattieQ, Angel Blanco, Sadie Langenkamp, and Shannon Stott. This “team of outstanding queer individuals” takes over a new tiny East Austin locale with help from your artistically astute friends over at the Museum of Human Achievement. Their purpose? To tell a tale that’s dark, features music and comedy, and also goes utterly off-track as most queer productions do. Because what’s queer-er than a musical gone rogue? – James ScottSept. 27-29Back Pocket Amphitheater -
Arts
Dance
BELLE / A Tale of Beauty & the Beast
Ballet Austin brings a new approach to this classic story, with gorgeous costuming, music, and choreography adding interesting layers to a tale as old as time.Sept. 27-29 -
Community
Events
Future Traditions Fest
No better time to explore the ingenuity of current experimental Latine artists than the closing of National Hispanic Heritage Month. Celebrating one’s culture extends to its future, which these artists represent in their multimedia work covering music, video, sound, and more. Friday presents an experimental video showcase, curated by Rio Grande Valley’s own filmmaker/archivist C. Diaz with soundscapes by vinyl DJ Pinche Juan. Saturday is filled by an artist talk from composer Cecilia Lopez (NYC), local producer/DJ Malika Boudissa’s Synth Salon, and performances by local, national, and international Latine performers. Close up the fest with a Sunday screening of Luzmila and the Birds, a doc covering Bolivian singer Luzmila Carpio’s voice and worldview. – James ScottSept. 27-29 -
Arts
Visual Arts
"Native America: In Translation"
One thing I’ve loved about newer theatre or museums is the space given for land acknowledgement – statements about the ancestral roots of the space being used. Space that was not always ours, but taken. The Blanton’s latest exhibit tackles that question, but pushes the boundaries. It’s not just about what Native America was, but what it can be. Curator and lauded artist Wendy Red Star has assembled nine other Native artists to create a rich exploration of what life in America is today. Shown through a variety of mediums, something is guaranteed to resonate with the audience. Whether it’s the photos, paintings, videos, or multimedia works is up to you. – Cat McCarreyAug. 4-Jan.5 -
Arts
Theatre
Luna
Who doesn’t like having friends? They’re great! So great, in fact, that Ramón Esquivel’s play for younger audiences is all about how to make friends. Luna follows Soledad, a daughter of migrant farm workers whose nomadic life makes stable friendships a difficult prospect. Though books, the stars, and her namesake – aka, the moon – keep her company, the play centers on Soledad’s meeting two peers who, much like her, are searching for connection. Bring the kids to this wonderful stage production directed by Mateo Hernandez, but be warned if you’ve got fidgeting young folks: This here play’s an hour without intermission. – James ScottThrough Nov. 16 -
Arts
Theatre
Arcadia
There was a time, not so long ago, when science was seen as entertainment. No, not Ancient Greece when philosophers would turn experiments into public spectacle, or the Victorian era when lectures on new theories would fill auditoriums. It was the 1990s, when everyone owned a copy of A Brief History of Time on their nightstand, quarks were cool, and Tom Stoppard could write a play about chaos theory and the heat death of the universe, and it would be universally regarded as one of the greatest works of 20th century drama. Eros and Thanatos push and pull in this poetic tale of love and research. – Richard WhittakerThrough Oct. 6 -
Arts
Visual Arts
Art & Parks Tour
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. -
Arts
Visual Arts
“Chronicles: A Retrospective”
Owner, director, and master printer of Flatbed Press, Katherine Brimberry wears many hats. On top of all these hats is her artist hat, which you’ll be hard “pressed” to ignore once you’ve enjoyed her newest exhibit of prints and mixed media works. “Chronicles: A Retrospective” shows off Brimberry’s cornerstone status in Texas printmaking, with gorgeous landscapes and intriguing visuals abounding. From her own artist statement: “When I place found objects into visual relationships with landscape details,: I intend to create an enigma. The viewer, who without the benefit of the history of the objects, is presented this mystery and can find and assign meaning. My underlying intention is creating images that spark epiphany about time and space, life and death, past and future.” Check out the show’s opening on Sat., Aug. 24, and see a retrospective of Brimberry’s collaborative pieces over at St. Edward’s Fine Arts Gallery on Aug. 30. – James ScottOpens Aug. 23; runs through Oct. 6 -
Arts
Visual Arts
“Enclaves”
Imagine a world where humans didn’t exist. No, not like Pixar classic Wall-E, but instead a society in which human life is completely absent. Now you’ve got the idea behind ICOSA’s new exhibition by Matt Rebholz and Jenn Wilson Shepherd, which conjures a flourishing and vibrant world of flora and non-human fauna. Rebholz uses film stills as a jumping-off point for his works, while Shepherd uses a post-humanist lens to create animal-first imagery. Imagine the possibilities. – Amaya AustinThrough Oct. 26 -
Arts
Visual Arts
“Hiba Ali: Lullabies for the stars in our eyes”
This new exhibit soothes the body and soul with interactive sculptural installations. Run your fingers through sand and gaze into metallic pools evoking the Swahili-Indian Ocean. Watch videos, sense sonic vibrations, and meditate in VR. Pakistani artist Hiba Ali uses the phrase “digital somatics” to describe how her works lead people on a body-processing journey using digital art. Now more than ever, it’s time to immerse yourself in Ali’s lullaby. – Eden ShamyThursdays-Sundays. Through Nov. 17 -
Arts
Visual Arts
“My Eyes Are Starving for Beauty”
Utilizing collected materials – recycled clay, lumber, thrift store blankies – queer Texan Anthony Sonnenberg’s new show uses not only installed art pieces but performance. Makes sense, given that the queerness Sonnenberg explores here holds space in both stillness and movement. Consider his acknowledged muses, Divine and André Leon Talley, both of whom were striking in still images and awe-inspiring in motion. The event copy extrapolates: “These, and other creatives like them, stood out for their ability to defy traditional beauty standards, becoming fashion icons for their completely unique, uncompromising style, and their outsized impacts on the worlds of fashion, film, music, and pop culture.” Enjoy the opening reception festivities on Aug. 23, or check in any Saturday through Oct. 5. – James ScottOpens Aug. 24; runs through Oct. 5 -
Arts
Visual Arts
“Texas Artists/Texas Music”
Art and music? Name a more iconic duo. For this exhibit, a dozen local artists created pieces inspired by a song, musician, or style of music associated with the Lone Star State. Influences could range from Selena to Willie to Beyoncé, from Houston rap to Tejano to blues. Come see what inspired participating artists Amitai Plasse, Billy Ray Mangham, Carl Block, Denise Elliott Jones, Greg Barton, Jess Wade, Jamie Lea Wade, Karen Woodward, Liz Potter, B Shawn Cox, Sylvia Troconis, and TVHeadATX. – Kat McNevinsThrough Oct. 26 -
Arts
Visual Arts
“Zugzwang”
Developed by artist Ata Mojlish, who comes to Austin by way of Bangladesh, this show at the garage-based gallery centers on the German word “zugzwang.” Translation: an obligation to move regardless of unfortunate outcome. It is often used, as GLHF states in the show copy, to describe a chess player forced to “make a move that will worsen their position.” Such is the inspiration point for “Zugzwang,” whose pieces composed from “desynchronized text, images, audio and interactive motion elements” attempt to recreate the sensation of continuing onward despite assured misfortune. We’re all operating from that point a little these days, anyways. – James ScottFridays-Sundays. Through Nov. 2 -
Arts
Comedy
Cap City Comedy Club
That's right: Cap City Comedy Club, the longtime cornerstone of Austin's comedy scene for nearly four decades is at a new venue in the Domain. And here's Valerie Lopez with a closer look at what's in store for the scene via the venue. Click for details! -
Arts
Visual Arts
Carl Cheng: “Nature Never Loses”
The California-based artist, known for combining visual art and industrial design, uses media including photography, sculpture, simple machines, and more to explore both the art world and corporate culture and other themes during this exhibition’s six-decade span. While tackling often serious subject matter, Cheng’s work retains a sense of playfulness on display at the Jones Center. Get a first look of the collection at the public opening reception Friday at 6pm. – James RenovitchSept. 6 - Dec. 8 -
Arts
Visual Arts
Echoes of Home: Relational Memories and Urban Futures
Ever topical, Ivester Contemporary’s September Project Space show centers around memory and home – concepts apt for the seasonal change to cooler weather. This exhibit, “Echoes of Home: Relational Memories and Urban Futures” by Occupy Vacancy, a public art initiative based in St. Louis, is its first ever within a gallery context. Usually the artists, Brianna McIntyre and André Fuqua, transform vacant lots into neighborhood-specific installations “that contemplate St. Louis’s vernacular architecture, settlement history, and blight within the city’s Northside,” reads the exhibition text. “Echoes of Home” similarly uses architectural elements and aspects of the urban landscape, but within a gallery context, inviting Austinites to reflect on our own complicated and rapidly changing urban landscape. – Lina FisherThrough Oct. 12 -
Arts
Visual Arts
Epiphany
“I live to have my mind turned inside out.” So says curator and artist in her own right Alyssa Taylor Wendt. She’s gathered a slew of art to do just that – wrinkle your brain, shed new light, and yes, maybe even lead to your own epiphanies. The collection pushes borders, featuring work that spins through the eyes and mind like those magic-eye books for kids. Every piece takes a slight skew on familiar topics. It might be a new take on a pattern. Or an unexpected use of color. Or a sculpture with a detail that just pops. Somehow, somewhere, something will reveal itself. It’s just a matter of whether you’re looking closely enough. – Cat McCarreyFridays-Sundays. Through Oct. 26The Culvert Gallery, 5419 Glissman Rd. -
Arts
Theatre
Into the Woods
Many have tried to reveal the darkness behind our most beloved fairy tales, but few did it better than Stephen Sondheim. The first act plays straight, as familiar faces like Jack and his Beanstalk, Cinderella, and Little Red Riding Hood seek new lives. The second act shows the truth behind the old adage: Be careful what you wish for. It’s an incredible depth of story, accompanied by the always-interesting musical turns of a Sondheim score. Things fall apart, they’re rebuilt, and everyone’s changed in the end. Enjoy your travel into these wild woods while learning that fairy-tale life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. – Cat McCarreyThrough Sept. 29 -
Arts
Visual Arts
Julia Lucey: “Trying to Fit In”
A fox peers through purple foliage. Coyotes wear bright flowers as camouflage. A bear wanders among California tiger lilies spotted by vibrant green dots. These are a few of the creatures who inhabit Julia Lucey’s painted worlds – all of them wildlife in increasingly unfamiliar spaces. Lucey utilizes traditional aquatint etchings to communicate the man-made strangeness being visited upon our natural world, with the effect mirroring “a visual tableau much like the European tapestries of the 17th Century,” as the event copy states. But these works are more than beautiful: They ask the viewer to contemplate their own place in the paving over of other animals’ habitats. – James ScottSept. 7-29 -
Arts
Visual Arts
Laguna Gloria
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.Thu.-Fri., 9am-noon; Sat.-Sun., 9am-3pm -
Arts
Visual Arts
Landmarks: Self-Guided Walking Tour
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. -
Arts
Visual Arts
Long Live Surrealism! 1924-Today
Ceci n’est pas une exposition d’art: 100 years since its inception, and Surrealism is still getting under our skin with its dream illogic and witty non sequiturs. Featured artists include Hans Bellmer, Leonora Carrington, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Wifredo Lam, Man Ray, and Dorothea Tanning.Sept. 7-Jan. 12 -
Arts
Visual Arts
Museum of Illusions
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.$20-24.11010 Domain #100 -
Arts
Visual Arts
Nicole Awai’s “In the thick of it”
Trinidad-born artist Nicole Awai’s work centers around “the ooze.” What is the ooze, you ask? Both material and metaphorical, it encompasses the viscous media Awai uses, like synthetic polymers, and evokes the blurred boundaries of cultural, historical, and personal identity that she references in her work. “Awai’s practice ‘overflows’ traditional boundaries as it often interweaves elements from her Caribbean heritage with broader themes of globalization and diaspora,” writes Phillip A. Townsend, curator of UT’s Art Galleries at Black Studies. Awai’s work has referenced history ranging from Civil War monuments at UT-Austin and Grand Army Plaza in New York to Trinidadian folklore about the La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles, all while “foregrounding the transformative potential of the ooze,” writes Townsend. – Lina FisherThrough Dec. 7Art Galleries at Black Studies, 201 East 21st St., Jester A232 -
Arts
Visual Arts
Resonant Landscapes: Sci-Fi Narratives and Historical Echoes by Aryel René Jackson
The best science fiction takes on current fears and hopes and imagines them differently. There’s always some recognizable thread that ties it to our own experience. Aryel René Jackson has mastered that with their art, tackling current social and racial narratives to create a visual future that might just happen. Using videos, and work created for past films, the Ivester presents Jackson’s world – a world ripe with colors and textures, forms that could be humans, situations that could occur in a more evolved society. Slightly spacey, slightly familiar, this exhibit is a feast for the eyes and the soul. It’s impossible to leave without reflecting on where we could be better. – Cat McCarreySept. 7- Oct. 12 -
Arts
Visual Arts
Stephanie Strange + Joseph Janson
You imagine a line and it’s probably straight the way a manufactured ruler is. Yet nature shows lines curved in all manner of ways. Born in 1980 within a 120-year-old house, the Wally Workman Gallery presents two artists whose work engages the myriad manner of lines. In his sculptural work, Joseph Janson utilizes bailing wire to make pieces that “ebb and flow like marks on a page to create recognizable forms: people, animals, and objects such as tables and lamps,” according to the gallery’s description. Stephanie Strange’s graphite drawings are more concerned with making seeable the invisible: communication. “In her work,” the gallery says, “she seeks to express the beauty of how energy is a communication running through all existence.” Both artists use curving lines, but attend this show’s opening reception on Saturday, Aug. 3, to see how they do so in their own materials. – James ScottFridays-Sundays. Through Oct. 1 -
Arts
Comedy
The Hideout
The diverse lineup of hilarious, always surprising improv shows continues, with Pgraph and Maestro and the Big Bash and more, for the most unexpected delights of in-person entertainment.$10 and up. -
Arts
Visual Arts
The Museum of Fine Arts, Austin
Art by Charles Walter, Benjamin Bayne, and other international, national, and local artists.Sundays, 3-5pm. Donations accepted.1638 E. Second #326 -
Arts
Visual Arts
Visualizing the Environment: Ansel Adams and His Legacy
Time to upgrade from your Ansel Adams wall calendar and instead appreciate the legendary landscape photographer’s black & white pictures of the American West where they belong – on a gallery wall.Aug. 31-Feb. 2
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