Scope and Contents This Houston neighborhood ranks among the coolest hipster havens in the U.S. By John Egan 7.26.18 | 3:25 pm 208 3 Beyonce Tumblr photo of Menil Collection No Montrose experience is complete without a visit to The Menil Collection lawn. Courtesy photoThanks to ever-rising home prices, dense traffic, and even the long lines at spots such as Blacksmith, we’re fully aware that Montrose is trendy. But that’s our own biased opinion, right? It’s cooler and weightier when an outside...

Scope and Contents Is Houston Finally Making a Place for Its Public? Thanks to some visionary residents and a new mindset, public spaces where citizens can gather to honor, remember, exult, and protest are proliferating.By Clifford Pugh 7/20/2018 at 12:00am Published in the August 2018 issue of Houstonia AddThis Sharing Buttons Share to Facebook210Share to TwitterShare to Google+Share to PinterestShare to SMSShare to EmailShare to PrintAn aerial view of the city’s magnificent Buffalo...

Scope and Contents Houston Has A Bunch Of Hidden Gems, Here Are The Ones That Don't Cost A Thing Keep that money in your purse or Sephora's cash register. Houston Has A Bunch Of Hidden Gems, Here Are The Ones That Don't Cost A Thing featured image @carlosl 3.5K shares Mira Milla · 5 days agoIt’s hard to do things around the city if your bank account is screaming for you to stay inside. Lucky for you, we gathered a list of great (and free) Houston hot spots that all Houstonians and tourists are sure...

Scope and Contents Houston is having another moment, which makes sense considering America’s fourth largest city somehow still remains underrated. Which isn’t such a bad thing if you live here. Still, it’s nice to be loved — and Time magazine and the Daily Beast are among those now heaping some serious praise on the Bayou City.Time calls Houston one of the World’s Greatest Places, putting Texas’ most interesting city right up there with Cannes, Arouca in Portugal, KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa and...

Scope and Contents 2. Spend Quiet Time In The Rothko ChapelAnother of de Menil’s contributions to Houston, the Rothko Chapel is located near the Menil Collection. The nondenominational chapel is named for the Russian-born artist, Mark Rothko, who painted the 14 massive canvases that at first glance appear nearly black. Have a seat on one of the chapel’s benches. As you adjust to the ambient light, you see colors, depth, and movement in his paintings.In keeping with John and Dominique de...

Scope and Contents The art historian Robert Rosenblum’s notion of the “abstract sublime” was conceived to justify Barnett Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 1951, along with the untitled abstractions Marc Rothko and Clyfford Still painted early in the 1950s. The works of all three have been grouped together as “post-painterly abstractions”—large, not to say grandiose paintings that eschewed the excited, manic, aggressive gestures of “painterly abstractions,” best exemplified by Jackson Pollock’s so-called...

Scope and Contents A pair of recently completed projects in Houston, contrasting in virtually every way yet each one elevating the ritual of experiencing the visual arts, neatly illustrate the shifting priorities and values within the field of architecture over the last few years.The more dramatic of these, and radically so, is the new Nancy and Rich Kinder Building of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. It is, unabashedly, a work of “starchitecture”: a signature, object-building designed by a...

Scope and Contents HoustonIf Philadelphia is a portal to the past, Houston is a preview of the American future, a vast zoning-free sprawl—the city and its suburbs are larger than Rhode Island—with a kaleidoscope of percolating cultures. Downtown is a bristling arsenal of gleaming office towers connected by a futuristic network of tunnels, and at night, the incessant traffic on the tangle of expressways lends a Blade Runner frisson: I wouldn’t have been surprised to see an alien warship hovering...

Scope and Contents NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE T he Rothko Chapel in Houston opened 50 years ago, on the weekend of February 26, 1971. Lots of events are planned throughout the year to celebrate and contextualize it, and deservedly so. The tiny building is not decorated by Mark Rothko’s last work, since “decorated” suggests that the art augments the chapel. Rather, the building is a mere stage for a suite of religious paintings, though “religious” isn’t precise, either. You won’t find angels on the walls, or...