Evening under the Petals at Blanton Museum
July 07, 2023 I’ve been wanting to see the Petals at Austin’s Blanton Museum of Art ever since the flower-shaped shade structures were officially unveiled in May. For one thing, I’m a big fan of shade in Texas. For another, I love public art. The Petals are a grove of ...
Ima Hogg’s Bayou Bend garden is preserved in time
June 05, 2023 Back in April, work took me to Houston. While there, I stepped back in time with a visit to Bayou Bend, the formal estate garden of Houston socialite, art collector, and philanthropist Ima Hogg. The daughter of a Texas governor with terrible baby-naming skills, Ima shouldered the ...
Juliet Whitsett reimagines native plants and animals and co-curates Really Small Museum ATX
March 20, 2023 Browsing the well-curated garden shop at Barton Springs Nursery recently, I stopped to admire a dozen framed graphic prints of cacti, butterflies, snakes, salamanders, and other Texas flora and fauna. The artist behind these joyful works is Austinite Juliet Whitsett, and they are part of her “Threatened ...
Facing history with courage at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice
December 13, 2022 During our November road trip from Asheville to Austin, we stopped in Montgomery, Alabama, to visit the remarkable National Memorial for Peace and Justice. The open-air pavilion dedicated to 4,000+ Black victims of lynching wraps a hilltop overlooking downtown Montgomery, near where Jefferson Davis, president of the ...
Sampling Santa Fe’s colorful art and architecture
September 22, 2022 Santa Fe tops my list as one of the most beautiful cities in America. I love the warm adobe walls that blend with the earth and glow against a bright blue sky; an abundance of public art that speaks to nature and Indigenous culture found all around ...
Kicking off Madison Fling: People, badgers, barns, and a bountiful rooftop garden
July 04, 2022 Farm country scenery at the Flower Factory near Madison In late June I joined approximately 50 garden bloggers, Instagrammers, podcasters, and YouTubers in picturesque Madison, Wisconsin, for the 13th annual Garden Bloggers Fling. After a COVID hiatus of two years, and a heroic display of patience, stamina, ...
Peacocks and giants: Visiting Mayfield Park and Laguna Gloria
April 27, 2022 In early April I visited Mayfield Park for the Trowel & Error gardening talks. Of course if you visit Mayfield Park you’re going to see peacocks. Mayfield Park Two dozen of these beautiful birds — peacocks and peahens — roam the grounds. Unafraid if a little wary, ...
The Joy of Nature: David Hockney exhibit at Houston Museum of Fine Arts
June 02, 2021 “How can you be bored with nature? Landscape is infinite, isn’t it?” reads a quote by British landscape artist David Hockney at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and I couldn’t agree more. Influenced by Vincent Van Gogh’s use of color and focus on agricultural landscapes, Hockney ...
Mexico City: Folk art skeletons, devils, and more at Museo de Arte Popular
April 03, 2020 Skeletons may be macabre to American eyes, but they’re a popular motif in Mexican folk art, as we saw at the Museo de Arte Popular (Museum of Folk Art) in Mexico City. Housed in an Art Deco building in the historic center, the museum is perfectly sized ...
Mexico City: Day trip to Teotihuacán pyramids
April 01, 2020 One pleasure of travel is the opportunity to marvel over monuments built by earlier civilizations: Stonehenge, Roman arenas and bridges, castles — and, most recently for us, Mesoamerican pyramids at Teotihuacán, about an hour’s drive northeast of Mexico City. We hired an Uber driver to take us ...
Mexico City: Frida Kahlo’s Blue House and garden
March 23, 2020 Bird of paradise flower at Frida Kahlo’s Blue House Before the scope of the coronavirus crisis had crystallized, my husband, daughter, foreign exchange-student daughter, and I made an early spring-break trip to Mexico City. Had we known how fast the situation would escalate at home, I don’t ...
De-light-ful spring break art day
March 13, 2019 Home for spring break, my daughter and I made an art day of it yesterday here in Austin, first visiting the Lance Letscher exhibit at Stephen L. Clark Gallery. Outside I snapped an artful shot of my own: a Texas mountain laurel’s dangling, grape-soda-scented flowers and my ...
Houston, capital of Southern-cool art?
August 24, 2018 Detail of Dixie Friend Gay’s mosaic Wild Wonderland in Houston’s Midtown Park Speeding away from the sleepy South Carolina town I grew up in, I rolled into megatropolis Houston at the nadir of the mid-1980s oil crash. Local shops were shuttered, regional banks were going out of ...
Paris parks, pigeons, and masterpieces
June 28, 2018 After Venice earlier this June, we spent 5 nights in Paris, a city I hadn’t seen in 29 years. It is as beautiful and vibrant as I remembered. My husband took these twilight images from the top of the Arc de Triomphe, looking out over the city ...
The romance of Venice
June 24, 2018 You can hardly believe a city like this really exists, its gelato-hued, wedding-cake buildings perched at the edge of watery streets… …boats zipping past instead of cars… …the ancient house facades and narrow alleys suffused with a romantic decay. Speaking of gelato On June 3rd we flew ...
Chihuly in the Forest and American art at Crystal Bridges Museum
November 05, 2017 While in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, last weekend, my husband and I drove to nearby Bentonville to see the remarkable collection of American art at Crystal Bridges Museum. The museum is surrounded by pleasant walking trails, and an exhibit of Chihuly glass sculptures, Chihuly in the Forest, was ...
