The Line-up: Eight exhibitions around Texas to look forward to

Looking beyond our Austin base, here’s eight museum exhibitions around Texas to look forward to in first quarter of the new year.

Ecstatic Land

Through May 23, Ballroom Marfa. ballroommarfa.org
This show brings together a multigenerational group of artists whose works explore the intersecting vitalities of the land and self. Artists including Laura Aguilar, Christie Blizard, The Frank Duncan Archive and Nancy Holt offer personal views of land and the landscape that would otherwise be invisible, intangible or overlooked.

Mark di Suvero: Steel Like Paper

Jan. 28 to Aug. 27, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas. nashersculpturecenter.org
Featuring 30 sculptures ranging in size from hand-held to monumental and more than 40 rarely-seen drawings and paintings spanning the artist’s career, “Mark di Suvero: Steel Like Paper” reveals the artist’s intimate studio practice that yields the power of his monumental vision.

I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen

Feb. 12 to April 30, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, themodern.org
More than 25,000 square feet of gallery space will be devoted to this exhibition, which will include iconic works by prominent national and international artists of the 20th and 21st centuries: Nam June Paik, Andy Warhol, Cory Arcangel, Gretchen Bender, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Arthur Jafaas well as several leading artists living in Texas, including Liss LaFleur, Kristin Lucas, and John Pomara.

Saints, Sinners, Lovers, and Fools: 300 Years of Flemish Masterworks

Feb. 19 to June 25, Dallas Museum of Art, dma.org
The exhibition Artnet called a “visual buffet” offers over 130 works from the Phoebus Foundation’s rich collection of Flemish artwork that illustrate the remarkable developments in art production by masters such as Hans Memling and Peter Paul Rubens.

In the Shadow of Dictatorship: Creating the Museum of Spanish Abstract Art

Feb. 26 to June 18, Meadows Museum, SMU, Dallas, meadowsmuseumdallas.org
While a repressive dictatorship ruled Spain, artist and collector Fernando Zóbel established the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español in 1966, the first institution of its kind in Spain. More than 40 highlights from its remarkable collection—most coming to the U.S. for the first time—tell the story of this pioneering artists’ museum and explore the rich panorama of abstract Spanish art under the Francoist regime.

Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest and Worry Will Vanish

March 12 to Sep. 4, Museum of Fine Arts-Houston, mfah.org
The MFAH continues its series of grand-scale, immersive presentations with two works from the museum’s collections by innovative Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist: “Pixel Forest,” an installation of thousands of hanging LED lights; and “Worry Will Vanish,” a video projection that takes viewers on a dreamlike journey through the natural landscape, the human body, and the heavens.

Emancipation: The Unfinished Project of Liberation

March 12–July 9, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, cartermuseum.org
Seven installations by contemporary Black artists — Sadie Barnette, Alfred Conteh, Maya Freelon, Hugh Hayden, Letitia Huckaby, Jeffrey Meris, and Sable Elyse Smith — respond to John Quincy Adams Ward’s bronze sculpture The Freedman (1863) from the Carter’s collection.

The Curatorial Imagination of Walter Hopps

Mar 24 to Aug 13, Menil Collection, Houston. menil.org
Once dubbed “the marvelous mad maven of modern art in America,” Walter Hopps (1932–2005) the Menil Collection’s Founding Director, once estimated that he had curated some 250 exhibitions in his long career. This exhibition celebrates Hopps’ influential curatorial vision as well as his distinctive approach to exhibition making, and appreciation for a variety of 20th-century art movements.