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 ...
Out and about in Houston: Public art and an artful home
August 11, 2016 Houston doesn’t always get a lot of love, especially from Austinites who invoke it as a negative example of soulless sprawl and traffic. True, Houston is a sprawling major city with congested highways (although I swear Austin may be its equal in traffic jams). But in-town you’ll ...
Looking Up at Laguna Gloria and Austin City Hall
November 23, 2015 Last Saturday, a chilly, blustery day under a brilliant cobalt-blue sky, my dad and I attended two docent-led tours about the landscape architecture at cultural sites in Austin: one at Laguna Gloria, the other at Austin City Hall. Led by landscape architects who’ve restored or designed these ...
Perot Museum of Nature and Science plaza, frogs, and rooftop garden
October 06, 2014 Over the weekend we traveled to Dallas to visit our son at college and do a little sightseeing in Big D. We’d stared curiously at this Borg-like building from the highway through downtown Dallas on several previous visits, and this time we finally had a chance to ...
Cockrell Butterfly Center in Houston
July 13, 2009 While in Houston last weekend, we visited the marvelous Cockrell Butterfly Center at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. We enjoyed a fun, interactive exhibit about insects (not just butterflies), looked at displays of preserved specimens and live creepy-crawlies, and gazed through a protective, see-through case to ...
Laguna Gloria
June 27, 2006 Water lily at Laguna Gloria Today I visited the grounds of Laguna Gloria. Once the home of Clara Driscoll, “Savior of the Alamo” (she raised money in 1903 to keep the Alamo from being destroyed to make way for a hotel), nowadays Laguna Gloria is home to ...