Results tagged “mfah”

ALL WEEKEND
• Rock the Republic — Not technically in Houston but wharves. Looks to be a good time. Featuring bands including The Black and White Years, Hollywood Black, Smile Smile and many more. Add to that a poetry slam and other performance art. In Bryan. Tickets are $10 for one day or $25 for all weekend.
• Festa Italiana — Can you imagine the food at this event? Makes us want to ride our Vespa's to St. Thomas, but we also want to drink as much limoncello as possible so maybe that's a bad idea. Festival open till 11 p.m. tonight and Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday. Admission is $6, at the University of St. Thomas in the Montrose.
• Crypticon, a convention for all things horror-related, at Reliant Stadium. Advanced tickets are $20 for adults, $10 for kids for a single day, or $55 for the weekend.

ALL WEEKEND
• Vespas and vintage motorcycles will descend on Houston for the resurrected Rockers Vs Mods weekend. Live music all weekend, hipsters showing off their rides, and more. In case you're wondering what that buzzing sound is.

If you've ever contemplated a piece by Damien Hirst and found yourself saying "I don't get it", then the Museum of Fine Arts has just the workshop for you. This week and next the MFAH will host How to Look at Contemporary Art, a workshop aimed at those of us who have really tried to understand the likes of Hirst and Marcel Duchamp but just can't seem to make the connections. The first session tonight focuses on tips and tools to engage and interpret contemporary art. Next week's session will provide some historical context for interpreting contemporary art.

• Dock Dogs. Televised on the Outdoor Channel, DockDogs competition consists of dogs jumping into water from a designated dock with the largest or highest leap earning that canine a victory. Dogs and owners travel to Houston to compete, and the competition will be open to local dogs too. At Jones Lawn in Discovery Green. See schedule here
• PRIDE, events throughout the weekend, culminating in the Houston Pride Parade at 8:45 p.m. Saturday, along Westheimer at Montrose.
• Extremely Shorts 12 at Aurora Picture Show, Saturday at 7 p.m. and Sunday at 5 p.m. Aurora's most popular event, featuring dozens of films under five minutes and the annual Aurora Picture Show birthday picnic. Tickets $6-$12 for non-members, free for members on Saturday and $10 for members Sunday. At Molly Gochman's Studio, 2442 Bartlett St.

• 2:30 P.M. - Central City Co-Op and the Green Market at Discovery Green present Market to Menu: Cooking Local with Chef Ryan Pera. The Executive Chef from one of Houston's greenest restaurants, The Grove, will hold a cooking class featuring food from Green Market vendors.

If you've driven past the Museum of Fine Arts this week, you probably noticed the multi-colored stripes being applied to the crosswalks surrounding the museum campus. No, it's not an embattled graffiti artist taking a stand, but a commissioned street art piece by Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez. Cruz-Diez is renowned for his kinetic and optical art, in which he uses the composition of colored lines to create the illusion of movement and the occasional dizzy spell. The crosswalks are being adorned bit by bit this week in time for the Latin American Experience Gala and Auction at the MFAH this Saturday and the opening of North Looks South: Building the Latin American Art Collection. The MFAH has several of Cruz-Diez's pieces in their permanent collection, and Houston is the first American city to install one of his crosswalk pieces. If you don't have the cash to attend the gala, you can check out the exhibit for free this Sunday. We just love Target Free First Sundays, don't you?

Last week Houston mayoral candidates participated in a forum at the Museum of Fine Arts to discuss their plans for promoting and improving the arts in Houston. The candidates spent just over an hour addressing questions ranging from the role of government in the arts, city funding, and the ways city infrastructure can impact the arts. While an hour may not seem like enough time to address such a complex issue as the arts in Houston, the candidates were able to provide broad overviews of their plans. We put together a summary of the discussion after the jump.

Last week whilst doing our daily perusing of the MFAH calendar of events, we noticed the site recently underwent a facelift. Well, to be fair, only the homepage did. The rest of the site is still an overly busy collection of links, exhibits and sections.

::Mayoral Forum on the Arts::

Tonight is the kickoff of the Latin Wave Film Festival, the MFAH's yearly celebration of the newest and best filmmakers to come from Latin America.

::Behind the Scenes with Fashion Designer Valentino at the MFA::

Houstonist is kind of a book nerd. That's pretty obvious, right? But we're also really into design.That's why we were excited to hear about the MFAH's current exhibition of lithographed book jackets, Wrapped in Color. The exhibit includes lithographic book jackets from a period spanning almost 100 years, predating the popularity of paperbacks.

Imagine the rainforests of ancient MeosAmerica, the high, dry early Mayan pyramids and sounds of wildlife.

Late last week the Museum of Fine Arts Houston posted a message on their homepage in memory of eminent Black historian John Hope Franklin, who died Wednesday at the age of 94.

::Movies Houstonians Love::

Spring has finally sprung, bringing with it lots of stuff to do this weekend. Best of all, most of it is free!

The Fifth Annual Houston Jewish Film Festival continues this evening with Blood Lines, a documentary released last year in Australia. The film centers around two women — one the relative of a Nazi war criminal and the other a daughter of Holocaust survivors — who meet regularly to discuss and try to reconcile their families' histories. The film will be preceded by a short movie based on the life of Franz Stangl, the German commandant at Treblinka, and the Jewish prisoner who cooks his meals. The program starts at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $9. The Houston Jewish Film Festival is a collaborative effort between the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Jewish Community Center of Houston, which aims to expose the community to current documentary, feature and short films with meaningful Jewish or Israeli content, as well as Israeli-made movies with contemporary themes. Bloodlines
Admission: $9
Date and Time: 7:30 p.m. tonight
Location: Jewish Community Center of Houston, 5601 South Braeswood

Yeehaw, cowpokes! With the rodeo in town, this weekend looks to be a busy one. Here's what your amigos at Houstonist are up to.

  So there we were, heading south on Montrose on Thursday afternoon, ready to take advantage of the super warm weather with a run in Hermann Park. Suddenly, we spied a shower of debris blowing across the road in front of us. At first it looked like paper, white and airy, but as we got closer we realized it was giant clumps of soap bubbles, blowing forth from the Mecom Fountain (yep, that's its name). The clumps were so large some of them looked like sudsy tumbleweeds. Our first reaction was to squee with glee. Our second reaction was "What an asshole!" since that's an awfully big mess to make someone else clean up. Still, Houstonist -- along with a handful of other people, including one man with a child -- romped through the soap while it lasted. We snapped a few quick camera-phone pics before continuing on to our jog. The whole affair felt so quirky and unusual that it reminded us of the iconic scene below, from Fellini's :

In spire of the dreary economic weather and a 24 percent decline in endowments to the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the institute is continuing with expansions and is also continuing to acquire pieces for the permanent collection, thanks in part to advanced planning by the board of trustees, according to an annual letter sent to members and donors to the MFAH by museum director Peter Marzio.

Houstonist loves the series at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. Of course we enjoy the wonderful classics of cinema that have been picked for the series, but we also love the chance to hear local heroes expound on their personal tastes when it comes to film. Previous presenters have included Project Runway Season One winner Chloe Dao, Barbara Bush and Bun B.

Spring fever in affect yet? Houstonist has some ideas for free and cheap events to cool you down.

Graphic design has taken the spotlight in the past few years thanks to a number of high-profile events. Most notably was the Obama campaign, a tour de force of branding both visually and personally. Obama's O logo was said by some to look like a slab of bacon and a donut, and is also rumored to be the inspiration behind Pepsi's recent makeover.

Here is something Houstonist would to attend. Bayou Bend, the Memorial Park-area former home of Houston arts patroness Ima Hogg, will be the setting for Adult History Camp, a four-week series dedicated to learnin' to live 18th-century style.

Need entertainment on the cheap? Here's what Houstonist is doing this weekend:

Here is what Houstonist is doing this weekend:

Hogaku: New Sounds of Japan

Day 5 post-Ike, and here's hoping you are all hanging in there, barring any stir crazy tendencies to strangle whoever turned on the lights on billboards before your abode. We hear ya.

Houstonist loves to check out movies in the Brown Auditorium of the Museum of Fine Arts because it makes us feel oh-so-artsy, and tonight’s showing of the remastered Diva, directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix, is certain to leave our culture tanks full.

We first wrote about Glass Candy last November. If you went to the show, you probably burned a hole in the sole of your shoes when what should have been a show turned into a synth-fueled dance party.