Michael Agresta
By Michael Agresta:
Ancestors in a Strange New Land
In Houston, an exhibit of vibrant, playful Egúngún costumes speaks to Nigerian tradition and migration.
Visitors to “Ara Oru Kinkin (Masquerades Mythology),” the current show by the artist Akirash at Lawndale Center for the Arts in Houston, will find themselves confronted by a wealth of visual information and very little in the way of curatorial … Read More
A New Pray-the-Gay-Away Drama Suggests Conversion is Possible (Just Not the Kind You Think)
Poignant awards-season fare, Boy Erased makes the case against the Christian “cure” for homosexuality.
What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object? That, more or less, is the question asked by the new Joel Edgerton-directed film Boy Erased, which was featured at the Austin Film Festival and opens nationwide this weekend, just … Read More
A San Antonio Art Show Quietly Foregrounds Migrants’ Stories
More people are displaced than ever before — nearly 69 million. The scale of that crisis is hard to grasp, but visitors to One to Another will see it in a new light.
Ours is an era of mass displacement. At no other point in history have so many people around the world been forced to leave home. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) now counts 68.5 million forcibly displaced people … Read More
100 Ways to Draw a Line
The edge becomes the center at the Transborder Biennial 2018 in El Paso and Ciudad Juárez.
100 Ways to Draw a Line The edge becomes the center at the Transborder Biennial 2018 in El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. Nearly 80,000 people cross the border in the El Paso-Ciudad Juárez metro region every day, for reasons ranging … Read More
Cody Wilson, Austin’s Edgelord Prince
A new documentary and a 2016 memoir by the 3-D-printed-gun designer reveal a vision of Austin as a paranoid libertarian mecca.
A new documentary and a 2016 memoir by the 3D-printed-gun designer reveal a vision of Austin as a paranoid libertarian mecca. – by Michael Agresta @magresta March 12, 2018 In 2013, 25-year-old University of Texas law student Cody Wilson traveled … Read More
In ‘The Atomic Cafe,’ U.S. Cold War Propaganda Comes Out of the Bunkers for the Trump Era
Screening at SXSW on Saturday, the film's Cold War-era footage never feels distant — perhaps because both careless stewardship of the bomb and surreal official propaganda seem to be making a comeback.
When Jayne Loader was a child growing up in 1950s and ’60s Fort Worth, she lived across the street from E.O. “Soapy” Gillam, the “bomb shelter king of North Texas.” This was the height of the Cold War, when a … Read More
His Pet Monsters
Trenton Doyle Hancock uses '80s kid culture and an expansive fantasy world to explore identity, racial politics and growing up fundamentalist Christian.
His Pet Monsters Trenton Doyle Hancock uses ’80s kid culture and an expansive fantasy world to explore identity, racial politics and growing up fundamentalist Christian. – by Michael Agresta @magresta January 2, 2018 A visit to the Northside Houston studio … Read More
Houston Photo Exhibit Documents First Markers of Modern U.S.-Mexico Border
How strange, David Taylor’s camera seems to say, that this haphazard line has survived nearly 170 years as an international border, when so much else around it has changed.
Texans are accustomed to thinking of the U.S.-Mexico border as a fact of nature, defined by the course of the Rio Grande. It may make little sense to local communities, accustomed over untold generations to crossing and recrossing the river, … Read More
Wall Flowers
Border art projects bloom in the shadow of Trump's wall.
"When I’m building spaces, they’re really to invite people in, oftentimes people who are excluded or don’t have access to more traditional art spaces.” Read More