museum

Family Fun: Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture features exhibits for engagement, exploration

By Alice G. Collins 3 months ago

Step inside the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture on a hot day, and the first thing you might notice is how cool it is.

To protect its collections and any traveling exhibits, the temperature in the museum never goes above 72 degrees or below 68, said exhibitions manager Brooke Shelman Wagner. It almost feels chilly on a hot summer day.

And, once visitors go downstairs, they’ll find exhibits that can keep families engaged and exploring.

“What We Make: Nature as Inspiration” is a maker space inside a gallery where people can see pieces from the MAC’s collection and make their own pieces in response.

It’s an idea that Shelman Wagner has had brewing for years and the first of four annual exhibits that will feature maker spaces. The goal, Shelman Wagner said, “is to remind people that we’re all makers.”

Inside the exhibit, there are four areas with works

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Houston Cinema Arts Society and Museum Of African American Culture Celebrate Juneteenth And Black Music Month

By Alice G. Collins 3 months ago

Houston Cinema Arts Society and Houston Museum of African American Culture partner on screenings at Moonstruck Drive-In in celebration of both Juneteenth and Black Music Month. Miss Juneteenth will play on Saturday, June 19th at 8:30pm with $30 tickets per car and Summer of Soul will play on Wednesday, June 23rd at 8:30pm with free advanced registration.

On Saturday, June 19th at 8:30pm, HCAS and HMAAC will present A Juneteenth Celebration: Miss Juneteenth and Doretha’s Blues at Moonstruck Drive-In. The program will consist of the Texas-shot film Miss Juneteenth by Channing Godfrey Peoples, previously screened at HCAS’s Beyond Film Program with Sundance Film Festival, and will be preceded by the Houston premiere of the director’s new short film, Doretha’s Blues. Doors open at 7:00pm, and at 7:30pm audience members will get to listen to a custom Juneteenth Mixtape by DJ Red of Screwed Up Records and Tapes celebrating the legacy

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Toledo Museum of Art to open ‘Birds in Art and Culture’ exhibit

By Alice G. Collins 5 months ago

The Toledo Museum of Art will present “Rare and Wondrous: Birds in Art and Culture 1620-1820” from April 24 to July 25. 

The exhibition, curated by TMA’s Head of Interpretive Projects and Managing Editor Paula Reich, will showcase the Museum’s recent acquisition of the important six-volume series “Ornithologie,” written by Mathurin-Jacques Brisson, illustrated by François-Nicolas Martinet and published in 1760.

“Rare and Wondrous” will also feature paintings, prints and decorative arts from TMA’s collection, as well as select loans of significant prints and illustrated books from the Yale Center for British Art, the University of Michigan Museums Library and Special Collections, and the Bowling Green State University Libraries Center for Archival Collections.

This is the fifth in a series of bird-themed exhibitions that are timed to coincide with the Biggest Week in American Birding Festival that traditionally takes place in the Toledo area each spring.

This particular exhibit was originally

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Crocker Art Museum celebrates Saar family’s powerful work challenging race and gender stereotypes

By Alice G. Collins 5 months ago
The “Legends From Los Angeles” exhibition is in what is essentially a hallway at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento. Photo: Letha Ch’ien

Museums all over the country may have been scrambling to demonstrate their diversity bona fides, but “Legends From Los Angeles” at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento is not an exhibition of tokenism.

Featuring 23 works by legendary Black artist Betye Saar and her two daughters, Lezley and Alison, the exhibit is steeped in African American culture with witty nods to European art history. Despite its location in what is essentially a hallway, “Legends” is the kind of show you think about four days later sipping a cup of coffee over the kitchen sink.

“I turned my back on the ocean defacing the ocean,” a paper collage and photograph by Lezley Saar. Photo: Agust Agustsson, Walter Maciel Gallery

Following the Crocker’s reopening on Thursday, April 8, at

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