Houston-Based TikTok Violinist Releases New Album — and It’s Like Nothing You’ve Heard Before

Chris Becker

SOME MUSICIANS ARE born with a gift for melody. Notes seem to stream from their fingers, creating phrases that stick in your mind’s ear, like a tune you’ve always wanted to hear, and finally have.

In an Exhibit of Compelling Self Portraits, a Photographer Explores His Complicated Origins

“WHO ARE YOUR people?” It’s a very Southern question Dallas-based photographer Hakeem Adewumi has heard since childhood, when he would visit his mother’s family in rural Texas. There, he’d see horses, cows, pigs and chickens — different sights than he and his friends usually saw in the city.

A Latin American Art Icon Turns 90 — and His Best Work Is on Display at a Houston Gallery Now

Chris Becker

THIS MONTH, COLOMBIAN artist Fernando Botero turns 90. Houston’s Art of the World Gallery is marking that milestone with Celebrating 90 Years of Botero, a museum-worthy exhibit of Botero’s paintings, sculptures and works-on-paper. The show includes pieces from the earliest decades of his career, a series of never-before-seen paintings created during the Covid-19 pandemic, and his monumental four-panel polyptych La Calle (The Street), described as “the largest oil painting ever created by the Master of Volume.” The exhibit continues through May 31.

David Ansell, Bennie Flores Ansell, Thuy Tran and James Tiebout

THE ROTHKO CHAPEL held its Inspirit fundraiser — a celebration of the power of art and activism — at the industrial-chic Astorian. The evening featured cocktails, hors d’oeuvres, and an onstage conversation with actor Cheech Marin, one of the world’s foremost collectors of Chicano art; 2023 Art League of Houston Texas Artist of the Year Vincent Valdez; and legendary civil rights advocate Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the United Farm Workers of America with César Chávez. (She’s 93, by the way!)

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Art + Entertainment

Cheech Marin reflecting outside of The Cheech (photo by David Fouts)

WHEN YOU TALK to Los Angeles-born actor Cheech Marin, regardless of how serious the subject, you can’t help but smile. His pop-culture presence is infused with an astute awareness of politics and history, and a “can do, make do, find a way to move ahead” spirit he connects to the word “Chicano,” a derogatory term that came to signify resilience, creative thinking, and social consciousness. “My dad, who died at age 93, always described himself as a Chicano, because it described him,” says Marin.

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Art + Entertainment