Rubber Repertory’s Rubber Repstaurant (Courtesy of Rubber Repertory)
Below, besides for 1 product, is a tenner of excellent visible artistry from among what amazed me this calendar year. I am preserving that one particular (culinary and performative) item for very last. And, since there’s no true hierarchy to this record and That Darn Virus™ isn’t really the only factor that will get to fuck with your sense of what is proper, I am starting with quantity two.
2) PHILLIP NIEMEYER Niemeyer turned his Northern-Southern gallery into “Baton,” an installation that transforms itself across months as a person artist soon after yet another requires in excess of, wreaking an improvisational tag-crew match of creativeness. But he also concurrently ran the “Still left in Leaves” and “No Outlet” outside displays, and chronicled the weekly debuts of new functions by Laura Lit and Drew Liverman on the net, and, yeah – you go, boy.
3) Major MEDIUM For boosting their net existence with even additional artist profiles and convocations and how-to vocation-enablings for continuing to fill their physical internet site with neighborhood visual expertise for managing the multi-galleried Canopy room for accomplishing all they can to provide the community and wrangling up a virtual Austin Studio Tour to deliver their once-a-year EAST and WEST online.
4) HEIDI PITRE For staying commissioned (in Mississippi) to build a public mural of her Voter Registration portray that celebrates women’s suffrage, and, back in Austin, turning that powerful graphic into enamel pins to assistance unfold the gospel of democracy.
5) JON WINDHAM For creating, as lockdown palliative, the textual content-and-watercolor Mab – an illustrated just take on Mercutio’s fairy paean from Romeo & Juliet – that shifted his typical get the job done into a a lot more individual, feminist evocation of amazing artwork, carnal want, and literary scholarship.
6) DAVE MCCLINTON He’s a previous Chronicle designer, but that’s not why he had a clearly show at Floor Ground Theatre as COVID-19 invaded, now has a display at Ivester Modern day, and is this year’s Artist Beer Collaborator with Thirsty Earth. A combo of fierce graphics, subject make any difference that is as provocative as it is vital, and relentless sector, is why.
7) CHAD REA This is yet another designer extending daring sensibility to own works, rendering arch commentary on recent events through inventive gambits that strike like, oh, let’s say Banksy x Warhol, leaving modern-day follies in smoldering ruins.
8) DIMENSION SCULPTURE Back garden Colin and Moya McIntyre’s recently upgraded open-air-between-the-woods sculpture backyard on Springdale has been a welcoming, artwork-crammed respite to Austinites of all ages, from all locations, in these constrained times.
9) “LIKES Demand” As the electronic realm and what we get in touch with IRL progressively overlap – as our engineering steadily developments toward conflation with magic – the wwwitch Melanie Clemmons’ show at Women & Their Get the job done served as a dwelling file of what that seems to be like in a mythmaking standpoint.
10) LANDMARKS Self-guided, smartphone-abetted excursions of public art from UT’s application that supplies significantly of the aesthetic majesty along our city’s streets and between our structures? Great in any calendar year, but fantastic for 2020.
1) RUBBER REPSTAURANT In January, Rubber Repertory offered five iterations of an unintentionally prescient dinner-for-one, all socially distanced and with a great deal postal conversation, that served a food of anything at all a particular person required to eat. The event’s eerie resonance with Our Pandemic Condition only deepens its indelible memory.