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Local luminaries enliven the stage with holiday splendor and wintery exuberance in this Nutcracker digital film, featuring Ballet Austin’s 2019 stage production by Stephen Mills, now streaming on-demand and including a plethora of bonus material, cast and crew interviews, and behind-the-scenes featurettes. Note: You can get access with a tax-deductible donation to Ballet Austin and view the kinetic wonderment until the new year dawns.

You know that Little Vegan Coffee House That Could, right? Well, the coffeehouse that can, rather: Dear Diary, over there near 12th & Chicon, and not so little as to keep the joint from being filled with a fine diversity of local art – prints, originals, sketchbooks, maker supplies, etc. And now they're having a community get-together online, featuring their stable (what? that's the classic term!) of artists in a virtual meet-and-greet. Listen: "We'll start off with a structured Q&A, then open the discussion toward the end. We expect a lot of Chestnut neighborhood people to join, too, so this is a nice way to meet the folks you see every day." Bonus: The shop will be open for takeout and delivery during the event.

The Metamorphosis Dance company presents this annual and unique telling of the beloved holiday classic – coming to you virtually this year, via video of the ballet's performance at the Carver Museum.

This is a group show by relay, begun in July of 2020 as a method of socially distancing a community in the height of the pandemic: Artists took turns alone in the space, each adding to the exhibition. Now, as it nears its close, the exhibition resembles a community in which work converses and overlaps. With Adreon Henry, Vy Ngo, Dawn Okoro, Leon Alesi, Matt Steinke, Sev Coursen, Stella Alesi, and more.

Hey, you! Globally aware art connoisseur! Don't miss this show of bold visuals from some of the most famous European street artists – like Banksy, Striker, Zero, and Cee Pil – now sharing wall space with works by Austin's own Jason Eatherly, Dave Lowell, and that Impossible Winterbourne.

Lauren Briére’s art escorts the viewer on a visual journey into outer space, the fun of sports, walks in nature, and various adventures and shenanigans, as Art for the People showcases 200-plus sketches that are the artist's penciled beginnings to creating her whimsical "Robots in Rowboats."

This year – this relentlessly crazy-ass year – Ballet Austin brings their Nutcracker Gift Barre online to offer a great selection of holiday gifts, including nutcrackers, ornaments, tiaras, and T-shirts – with curbside pickup, delivery, or beyond-Austin shipping available. Note: 100% of proceeds will benefit Ballet Austin.

If anyone can make sense out of this dumpster fire of a year, it's probably the artists of Camiba. Valerie Fowler, Edward Lane McCartney, Kate Bradshaw, Lee Albert Hill, Orna Feinstein, Adreon Henry, Zoe Schulman, and more – these bright talents will provide much food for thought and images to conjure with as we slide into what we can only hope isn't the out-of-the-frying-pan-and-into-the-fire situation of 2021.

Inspired by the Mexican American Cultural Center's annual La Mujer celebration – and by the first feminist of the New World, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz – this online group exhibit is curated by April Garcia and features womxn-identifying and nongender-specific artists whose artwork is tied to activism, feminism, cultural. and gender identity storytelling, environmental protection, and socioeconomic parity.

This is a new solo show by Court Lurie, weaving together the artist's large contemporary abstract paintings, poetry, photography, drawings, and installation. New works are curated with older pieces, and poetry written decades ago intermingles with an interactive installation in a robust yet tender homage to the experience of liminality. (And as 2020 begins its palsied lurch into 2021, yeah, this is one hell of an experience of liminality.)

This is an extensive group exhibit focused on the experience of sharing holidays apart from loved ones, with artists addressing the importance of family, life and death, our connection to nature, and spirituality. Each of the artists has created new work (or chosen work from the past) that uniquely recognizes these concepts. And this is the Davis Gallery, so those artists include Chun Hui Pak, David Everett, Faustinus Deraet, David Leonard, Dana Younger, Fallon Bartos, and others, and we're giving it our highest recommendation.

Here's a fine way to sum a year in the printerly life: Flatbed presents a new exhibition of works from each of the 14 artists who worked at the press this year – along with the “Every Head Is a World, Every World Is a Head” portfolio of prints by Michael Ray Charles that was published shortly before Flatbed relocated in 2019. Featuring art by Melissa Miller, Adrian Armstrong, Suzi Davidoff, Lance Letscher, David Everett, Darden Smith, and more.

It's the culminating piece of Forklift's year-long residency at Downs Field in East Austin: Portraits of the Downs Field community by photographer Cindy Elizabeth, installed at the field for everyone to see. The project explores the importance of Downs Field to the continual flourishing of baseball in Texas, through the past, present, and future.

Yeah, sometimes we just can't help but pimp – er, we mean promote – this arty bastion that's so up north it makes us think twice as we glance at our long-suffering Isuzu. But, listen, this is a show of reclaimed books that have been altered in extraordinary ways by Janice Anderson and John Sager – via collage, via paint, via outright sculpting of the materials. Anderson is new to us, but we saw a few of Sager's bibliophilic alterations over a decade ago and we're still talking about their beauty even now. Recommended, and definitely worth the trip. (Bonus: Check out the excellent Lark & Owl bookstore while you're there, too.)

There, across 14 front yards on Bellvue Avenue: A sign of hope! Signs of hope, actually – the pro-Biden/Harris (or, as the artist puts it, Joe/Kamala) artworks of Austin's David Hefner. It's an excellent opportunity for a lift-up-your-spirits drive-by or walking tour: good stuff, visually, even beyond its message. Also a good excuse – go ahead, do it – to check out that Hefner's website, peruse some of the other works he's done.

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.

Meghann Riepenhoff makes her images with an antiquated photographic printing process – no camera, no lens – and thinks of her work as a collaboration with the ocean, the landscape, and precipitation, her dynamic cyanotypes taking on varying shades of blue to give the impression of water in motion, and much of her work is large enough to feel immersive, almost overwhelming.

Payton McGowen's first solo exhibition with the gallery features nine new acrylic on canvas paintings that explore the idea of returning to nature.

This is a collaborative exhibition by Adrian Aguilera and Betelhem Makonnen, conceived in the wake and continuing aftermath of the Black Lives Matter uprisings that were reignited in May 2020. "Over a series of masked and socially distanced exchanges, mostly in the natural spaces outside both their studios, Aguilera and Makonnen tried to give form to the overwhelming personal and collective emotions of rage, disappointment, exhaustion, and bruised hope that they experienced in the last six months. Cultivating their continuous curiosity about the relationship between symbols and collective identity, transnationality and diaspora perspectives, as well as history's inextricable hold on the present, Aguilera and Makonnen introduce new multimedia work in conversation with existing work to reflect on this (re)current moment in our country." Recommended: Make an appointment for viewing; check out the gallery's front window for a preview.

An exhibition of new collage works by Austin's own Lance Letscher might be just the thing we need to ground us in these tumultuous times. Or, contrarily, to lift us above the unnerving political fray. That whole thing about art "comforting the afflicted," right? Many of us are trending rather afflicted of late, and the artist's painstaking paper creations will, we insist, mitigate that visually, through graphic reinvention of previous forms, offering a reassuring sense of patterns and meaning to our eyes.

Northern-Southern presents an outdoor exhibit of work by Sterling Allen, the entire show arrayed across the exterior grounds of an easily missed, unleased building on West Anderson Lane. Constructed both in his studio and on site, each artwork exists in conjunction with the surrounding environment, slipping between obvious and invisible. Subscribers will be emailed links to a map to the site and information about the works, and they can explore the enhanced grounds themselves.

On August 18, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, giving women the right to vote. On August 6, 2020, the Elisabet Ney Museum debuted this new show for which women photographers nationwide were invited to share photos that comment on the Centennial of the Ratification of the 19th Amendment. The most eloquent images were chosen and are included in this online exhibition.

In the early 20th century, Western artists began exploring abstract, nonrepresentational forms for the first time. Several decades later, abstraction's practitioners experimented with new materials and techniques: Dripping, pouring, staining, and even slinging paint became common, as did the use of non-traditional media such as acrylic and industrial paints. Artists also ditched the flat, rectangular format to create sculptural texture and dimensionality. Now, can you guess whose corporate collection is particularly strong in such paintings of the 1960s and '70s? If you guessed "The Blanton Museum of Art," then you'll especially want to get an eyeful of this major new show, subtitled "Pushing the Boundaries of Painting in the Americas," organized by the venue's own Carter E. Foster.

Here's a two-person show, with California-based Julia Lucey and Colorado's Julie Maren. Both artists take inspiration from nature, Maren working directly with natural materials like burr acorn shells and mica to create organically shaped wall installations, Lucey creating meticulous etching collages that depict local flora and fauna.

That Welsh rabble-rouser, painter extraordinaire, and punk rock pioneer Jon Langford sinks his teeth into the world with new paintings and prints. See what grisly graphic brilliance he's bitten off – via the Yard Dog website or by making an appointment for an in-person visit.