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Big Momma’s House Is Texas’s Most Intriguing New Art Space
When Hallie Beatrice Welcome Carpenter, known as Big Momma to family and friends, died in 2008, she left behind a home in significant disrepair in Polytechnic Heights, a historically Black community on...
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‘The Plastic Bag Store’ Is a Shrine to Weird, Anti-Consumerist Austin
Not so long ago, Austin was the Texas capital of farmers’ markets, hippie soup peddlers, anarchist freegans, and grocery co-ops. They embodied the city’s prevalent anti-consumerist ethos: many...
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“Nature Cult” Is a Thicket of Remarkable Art on Ecological Themes
No creature on Earth apart from homo sapiens practices the art of landscape painting. An afternoon spent wandering among great works of nature-themed art is liable to get one thinking about the...
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Linda Pace’s Penthouse, Listed at $7.25 Million, Is An Art Collector’s Dream
Some über-wealthy Texans surround themselves with vast acreages of ranchland, while others build out enormous garages for sports cars or room-size closets for designer apparel. Late San Antonio...
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‘It’s An Earthquake’: This Texas Author Has Long Predicted Our Post-Roe Reality
When Merritt Tierce became pregnant at age nineteen, she was a student at Abilene Christian University who had hopes of attending graduate school. Instead, she was pressured by her Southern Baptist...
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The ‘Moby Dick’ of Texas Football Novels Is Hard-hitting as Ever
Summer days are getting shorter, and—despite war overseas, societal upheaval, and apocalyptic warnings in the headlines—our boys are out in the fields again, hitting one another. How could all not be...
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Ghostly Presences Haunt the Art of “Tangible/Nothing” in San Antonio
On quiet days, most museums can feel a bit like ancient mausoleums, cool chambers full of precious things that once belonged to the rich and deceased. Ruby City, opened in 2019, is San Antonio’s...
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Twelve Artists and Installations to Watch at Austin Studio Tour 2022
Despite momentous recent changes and a lot of new arrivals, Austin still, in many ways, understands and defines itself as a community of backyard-shed artists and in-it-for-the-love creative weirdos....
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The Year We Banned Books
Texas K-12 public schools typically come out fair to middling in state-by-state rankings of student performance, so it’s an occasion worth noting any time we come first in something. This year, we led...
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Where Does Airbnb Art Come From?
When Andy Warhol, American genius of mass-produced visual art, famously said “I like boring things,” he probably wasn’t taking into consideration what uses the print-to-order home décor industry might...
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Dallas Was the Birthplace of the Microchip Revolution
This article is part of Texas Monthly’s special fiftieth-anniversary issue. Read about the other icons that have defined Texas since 1973. In the late fifties, computer engineers faced a challenge...
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The Year’s Most Fascinating Documentary Won’t Be at the Oscars
When the 2023 Oscar nominations were announced last week, media outlets that traffic in awards-show coverage as a form of celebrity gossip flooded the internet with lists of high-profile snubs,...
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In San Antonio, a Road Map for the Future of Texas Art
Visitors and locals alike flock to San Antonio’s Historic Market Square to get a broad, if perhaps superficial, taste of Texas’s rich Latino heritage: classic Tex-Mex fare, mariachi performers, and...
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A San Antonio Artwork Is a Sauna Modeled on a Box Truck Where 53 Migrants Died
Nine months ago, on June 27, 2022, an abandoned box truck was discovered by the side of the road in southeast San Antonio containing the bodies of more than fifty dead and dying migrants. The victims,...
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An El Paso–Bred Children’s Author Illustrates Border Life for the Next...
Raúl Gonzalez, better known to young readers by his pen name, Raúl the Third, grew up between his hometown of El Paso and neighboring Ciudad Juárez, where his mother’s family lived. Whenever his...
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The Blanton Debuted a Flowery Renovation. Will the Austin Museum Scene Bloom...
It stands to reason that residents should expect both pluses and minuses from Austin’s transformation into a bigger, richer, and more expensive city. For the city’s art community, the downsides of the...
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How Gray Malin Built a Photography Empire on the Dream of a Basic Getaway
Dallas-born photographer Gray Malin’s job sure looks like a lot of fun. He has spoken to interviewers of a professional schedule of “one week at home, one week on the road,” with the biweekly trips...
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The Texas Artist You Hope to Never Meet
On a warm and breezy Saturday this spring—May 6, 2023, to be exact—Israel Enriquez and a friend stopped by the Allen Premium Outlets mall for a bite to eat. Moments later, a man with an AR-15-style...
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Urban Frontier Artist Jesse Lott Found a New Kind of Beauty in Houston
It’s difficult to overstate Jesse Lott’s importance to the visual arts world of Houston. Lott has been called a “shaman-like presence,” a “philosopher king,” and “the John Henry of the art community.”...
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Has a San Antonio Inventor Solved a Problem of Small-scale Wind Power?
On arriving at Dan Marsh’s home in the King William Historic District of San Antonio, the first thing you notice is the oddly modified truck in the driveway. A custom wooden platform sits on the front...
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