Month: May 2016

Travelling recently to Houston for a family event, I had the opportunity to consider the differences between the Houston art scene and that with which I am more familiar, Dallas/Fort Worth. Unlike the art districts in Dallas and Fort Worth, the museums and galleries of Houston are a bit more scattered. When you are in one of the venues in Houston, you are not aware that you are in an arts area. It takes more work to take in all of them; considerable sweating occurs in getting from one to the next.

Continue reading “Leaving the Cocoon: Art Road Trips in Texas in May”

This spring’s Meadows at the Winspear event included a performance by the Meadows Dance Ensemble and Meadows Symphony Orchestra of Martha Graham’s Appalachian Spring, one of the best known choreographic works of Graham’s repertoire, which premiered in 1944. For the production of this dance, Graham enlisted the collaboration of Aaron Copland, who won a Pulitzer Prize for the music, and the sculptor, Isamu Noguchi, who designed the spare set suggestive of prairie construction. Noguchi’s and Copland’s individual contributions to the ballet were both influenced by Shaker design. The rocking chair, featured prominently downstage in the dance was, according to Noguchi, “a Shaker rocking chair, a seat which is also a sculpture or a sculpture which may be a sat on.”[1] Clearly, the artist thought of these sets as an extension of sculpture in space. He reveals that he conceived of large spaces “as relationships to a whole.”[2]

Continue reading “Martha Graham and Isamu Noguchi: A multi-decade collaboration”