VISUAL ARTS + MUSEUMS

Blaffer Gallery, the Art Museum of the University of Houston, will host a Brown Bag Gallery Tour for the museum's current exhibition, Electric Mud, at noon on Wednesday, Feb. 25. The tour is free and open to the public, and lunch will be provided. Blaffer Gallery is located in the Fine Arts Building on the University of Houston's central campus.

The informal, guided talk will be led by local artist Lucinda Cobley and Cindi Strauss, the curator for modern and contemporary decorative arts and design at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. 

British-born Cobley is a painter who incorporates glass and other translucent materials into her work. In 2008 she was featured in her first solo exhibition at Wade Wilson Art. Strauss oversees the collection of post-1900 decorative arts, design and craft at the MFAH. Recent exhibitions that she organized include the traveling show Ornament as Art: Avant-Garde Jewelry from the Helen Williams Drutt Collection, The Past Made Present: Contemporary Art and Memory and The Scholar's Eye: Contemporary Ceramics from the Garth Clark and Mark Del Vecchio Collection.

Featuring the work of Californians Brian Calvin, Ron Nagle, Michael Reafsnyder, James Richards, Anna Sew Hoy and Patrick Wilson, Electric Mud explores visual art that blurs the boundaries between clay, traditionally used for its functionality, and paint, conventionally used for aesthetics. It highlights the basic properties of these crude, gooey substances to turn conventional ideas on their ears, confounding preconceived differences between art and craft, painting and ceramics, form and function, leisure and labor and still life and real life.

"The two varying viewpoints of an accomplished artist and art historian will give this Brown Bag Gallery Tour a slight Blaffer Gallery Contemporary Salon feel," stated Katherine Veneman, the museum's curator of education. "Lucinda is a dynamic painter whose hands-on experience will provide wonderful insight to the formal elements in the exhibition. Conversely, Cindi's expertise in design history will offer a unique perspective on the functional pieces in the show. Combined, their observations will shed light on how the works in Electric Mud confuse the boundaries between clay and paint and form and function."

Electric Mud is on view at the museum through March 29. It runs concurrently with Texas Oil: Landscape of an Industry, an exhibition by the Center for Land Use Interpretation that presents aerial photography and video, informational text and maps to show how the landscape of Texas has been shaped by the oil industry.

Pictured:  Michael Reafsnyder, Distant Sun, 2008, Acrylic on linen, 64 x 57 inches, Courtesy the artist and Western Project.