Golden World: The Portable Universe of Indigenous Colombia

Houston’s varied and expansive collection of museums offer both locals and visitors the opportunity to experience art, history and science year-round. But beyond the permanent offerings of these institutions, temporary exhibitions offer patrons unique experiences—for a limited time only. Check out just some of the limited engagement exhibitions coming to Houston museums this fall. 

In her first solo exhibition, artist Diane Severin Nguyen builds off the short film If Revolution is a Sickness to create a variety of works ranging from photographs and a new video installation to a public art commission in the form of billboards across Houston. The original film set in Warsaw, Poland follows the character of an orphaned Vietnamese child who becomes part of a South Korean pop dance group. According to Contemporary Arts Museum Houston: “Nguyen’s work reckons with the process of finding shared symbols and naming oneself from within another’s regime, while also positioning youth culture as a critical and crucial site of revolutionary power.” October 28 through February 26. learn more

Sites of Memory is an exhibition featuring newly commissioned and recent works by San Antonio-based artist Jenelle Esparza and Houston-based artist Verónica Gaona. In this innovative exhibition at DiverseWorks, the two come together to explore the impermanent nature of land and its residual energy through the use of objects, land-based materials, and living and historical research. This exhibition builds on conversations between the artists as they explore the impacts of migration, familial legacy, transnationality, migratory labor, and ideas related to rest. Sites of Memory is the next iteration of  Overlapping Territories, an ongoing project about interconnected relationships to land, curated by Ashley DeHoyos. September 24 through November 5. learn more

German-Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon created a large body of painted works in the early 1940s while in hiding from the Nazis. Holocaust Museum Houston is now showing Life? Or Theater? an exhibition featuring more than 200 of Salomon’s gouaches (similar to watercolors) on paper. The pieces tell the “slightly fictionalized and theatrically imagined” story of Salomon’s family, from a complicated family life growing up in Berlin to the artist’s exile in France. Salomon was deported to Auschwitz alongside her new husband in 1943 where she was killed shortly after arrival. Through December 4. learn more

Master German artists Gerd and Patrick Dreher are famous for their miniature carvings of animals from ruby, sapphire, topaz and other precious stones. Previous generations of the Dreher family cut stones for Carl Faberge and today the same techniques are used at the company headquarters in Idar-Oberstein. In Drehar Masterworks currently on exhibit at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, some of the most sought-after pieces produced by the Drehers are assembled in a dazzling special exhibition. Through May 2023. learn more

What about our backgrounds influence our creative expression? That’s an essential question explored in Lo que me queda de tu amor (What’s Left of Your Love for Me) opening September 17 at Lawndale Art Center. The exhibition considers how artists from different backgrounds carry and pass on personal, familial, cultural, and communal histories from one generation to another. Mainstream American culture traditionally values and presents these stories differently from the community members themselves. Curated by Francis Almendárez and Mary Montenegro, the exhibition highlights how artists use, contest, and rework traditional notions of an archive. September 17 through December 10. learn more

Now on view at the Menil Collection, Samuel Fosso: African Spirits features the artist’s 14, large-scale gelatin silver photographs—all self-portraits imagining the artist as prominent Black figures. The series completed in 2008 shows Fosso as celebrated individuals including Martin Luther King Jr., Muhammad Ali, Patrice Lumumba, Malcolm X and others. Each image recreates a key, recognizable photo of that individual—from King’s police mugshot after his 1956 arrest to the iconic image of Ali on the cover of Esquire. African Spirits is being showcased in conjunction with the 2022 FotoFest Biennial and African Cosmologies Redux. Through January 2023. learn more

More than 140 works from Jewish communities around the world are currently on display at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Beauty and Ritual, Judaica from the Jewish Museum, New York is the first in a series of presentations at MFAH from the renowned collection of the New York institution. The exhibition explores the artistic, ritualistic and cultural significance of the works derived from communities ranging from Central Asia to North Africa and Western Europe. Three thematic galleries offer insight through art into how communities have transformed over time: “The Art of the Synagogue: Adorning the Torah,” “A Day of Rest: The Radiance of the Sabbath,” and “Beyond the Synagogue and the Home: The Light of the Hanukkah Menorah.” Through September 18. learn more

Indigenous art often offers insight into complex and distinctive cultures. In Golden World: The Portable Universe of Indigenous Colombia, we get a glimpse of ancient Colombian culture through roughly 400 works created before the arrival of the Europeans. Pieces range from intricately cast gold pendants and hammered gold masks to ceramic effigies of fantastical creates and rare textiles. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston exhibition also includes landscape recreations, archaeological sites, and collaborations that add context to the objects themselves. November 6 through April 2023. learn more

A new exhibit at Space Center Houston is bringing NASA’s much anticipated Artemis mission to life for visitors. The recently opened Artemis exhibit is actually a permanent installation for the center, telling the story of the landmark program that will return humans to the Moon for the first time in more than 50 years. Artemis, which will put the first woman and person of color on the lunar surface, aims to be a bridge to human missions to Mars. The highly interactive exhibit allows visitors to touch the layers of a moonwalking suit, design mission patches, create their own lunar habitat and more. Ongoing. learn more

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