CAMH shows howto fill empty space in a pandemic
Local artists win big with short-term residency program
You might think of it as the city’s coolest sound stage and rehearsal studio, for the time being. When the pandemic forced the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston to shut its doors in March, executive director Hesse McGraw and his board took the opportunity to renovate. Now the renovation — the museum’s first major redo in nearly 50 years — is done, but CAMH will not host its next show until January.
McGraw and team want to redefine the 72-year-old institution, given the number of other small, non-collecting museums that have excellent exhibitions, including Lawndale, the Station, the Moody Center and the Blaffer Museum of Art. (That’s a good problem for Houston to have.) And now the
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s new Kinder Building, whose top floor is filled with top-flight contemporary works, is open across Montrose Boulevard.
One solution is broader, more inclusive community programming. That was already apparent in the downstairs Zilkha Gallery, with the expansive, pandemic-interrupted show “Slowed and Throwed,” about the influence of Houston music legend DJ Screw. This fall, the empty upstairs Brown Foundation Gallery has been the home of CAMH LAB, a new short-term, pandemic-friendly residency program that offers local artists earlystage financial, production and spatial support to create works.
Each resident’s process becomes public through a limited audience performance, a livestream, exterior project or some other kind of presentation appropriate to the artist’s practice.
The space has been evolving every few weeks. Hip-hop artist Tobe Nwigwe and his large collective were there first. They transformed the gallery into an ethereal mint-green environment last month, installing a Mercedes-Benz and a round performance stage with risers to cap off a series of new music videos, some of which debuted at the 2020 Hip Hop Awards. “Wildlings,” the latest, dropped Nov. 15. (The large cast all wears futuristic light-mint-green costumes. Nwigwe even wears a mouthful of green grillz.)
Through social media, Nwigwe surprised his fans with a hashtag challenge to gain extremely limited access to the space and to attend an exclusive premiere of the video and an intimate Q&A session a few weeks ago. About 30
guests each half hour got to view the installation “Mintxibition.”
Hope Stone Dance Company then took over the gallery as a rehearsal space as it shifts focus from inperson to virtual performances, also preparing for an eventual live show.
Singer-songwriter Frewuhn (Franchelle Lucas) has been there in the past week for an intensive, six-day residency that ends Nov. 22. She is organizing a series of SoundLab performance installations and experiments with collaborators, cultural producers
and thinkers considering the notion of protest.
Artist and anthropologist Marion Hall takes over the space Nov. 30Dec. 3 with “Community Amnesia Therapy.” Hall and his collaborators will mount a series of healing experiences that are or
chestrated and delivered through the multisensory use of film, music, art installations, salon dinner parties and yoga.
When CAMH reopens to the public Jan. 21, the Brown Foundation Gallery will return to more conventional business with
“Wild Life,” a show of paintings by the late Elizabeth Murray and sculpture by New York’s Jessi Reaves. Many Houston artists are in the mix of “Slowed and Throwed, which also reopens then.