Nancy Littlejohn Fine Art - Houston, Texas

Samuel Jablon sits down with Erik Sommer to talk about his background in poetry, Joan Mitchell, feeling optimistically doomed, and taking his work to the next level.

In this year like no other year, it’s often been hard to look on the bright side. But as 2020 winds to a close, many of us are feeling hopeful about the year ahead—with a vaccine and a new president on the horizon, and perhaps the chance to see art regularly in person again.

While there is much to mourn, there is also much to be grateful for in the year that’s almost past. So we asked 23 artists, curators, dealers, and other leading figures in the art world to reflect on what they’re feeling grateful for this Thanksgiving.

Houston artist JooYoung Choi has almost lost track of how many zany characters she is living with during the pandemic. They crowd her home and studio, mostly kept in boxes. Invariably, some hog the furniture and fill her head night and day. Choi has made soft-sculpture creatures of felt, fleece and furry stuff for years now, including puppets that appear alongside her in animated music videos, fill her installations and inspire paintings – all of it based on an alternative fantasy world called the Cosmic Womb.

Like neon itself, Peña’s paintings have an otherworldly quality. Beyond his unsettling imagery, Peña’s technique is intriguing and confounding in equal parts. In his paintings, subtle, airbrush-like gradients play against turbid, painterly strokes. The textures and treatment simultaneously suggest layers and flatness, vibrance and opacity. Peña loves to paint, and his luminous surfaces showcase his ample skill. But really, the neon visuals are a subterfuge. His perplexing light effects draw viewers in long enough, in the artist’s words, to “sit with the imagery of what the work is really about.” And for Peña that means the anxiety of being alive, a decidedly less-glowing motif. 

We’re all in need of a distraction from the news cycle, and over at the Artnet Gallery Network, we’ve been channeling our anxieties into discovering new works by incredible contemporary artists from around the world. This month, we’ve tapped into everything from electrically colorful portraits on view in Berlin, to meditative abstract woven works in Brooklyn. If discovering new artists calms your nerves, here are five artists you may enjoy this November.

San Antonio, a majority Hispanic city, has the fourth-largest Latino population in the United States. From chefs and political stars to entertainers, athletes and personalities bigger than the North Star Mall boots, here’s a look at 25 influential Latinos in San Antonio, in no particular order.

An exhibition of artworks that incorporate the daylit logic of scientific and technological concepts or processes into their creation, while probing the shadowed and paradoxical possibilities of the unknown, incomprehensibly small or large, and combinatory. This exhibition aims to illuminate our complex connection to life, death, space-time, and the pliability of knowledge.

Explore our culture’s complicated relationship with food through visual arts in “A la carte,” presented by the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts from Sept. 8-Dec. 12. “A la carte: A Visual Exploration of Our Relationship with Food” features more than 30 nationally and internationally renowned contemporary artists, whose works utilize food to explore relevant contemporary social and cultural issues.

Q&A with Nancy Littlejohn, Founder and Owner, Nancy Littlejohn Fine Art.

ENRIQUE MARTÍNEZ CELAYA, an internationally celebrated artist, author, professor, scientist, and publisher, is a contemporary Renaissance man. When poet David St. John first introduced me to his work, I was immediately seduced by the artist’s hallucinatory dialogue between disciplines.

Join celebrated Texas artist and designer Cruz and Olivia Ortiz as they team up with artist Kysa Johnson, Artists 4 Democracy and Swing Left to help get out the vote in this incredibly important election. Cruz and Olivia will share images of their work and discuss how art, design, and activism can all work in tandem to create change

Summer may look quieter than usual at Houston’s art galleries, but the scene is buzzing along in a different mode.