Duyen and Marc Nguyen
“More than 220 Onstage Dinner guests, donning cocktail attire, attended both the performance and sold-out post-performance dinner,” said a rep for the company. “This year’s performance included John Neumeier’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, based on Shakespeare’s joyous romantic comedy.”
Besides celebrating the opening of the new season — and raising $250,000 in the process — patrons toasted Artistic Director Stanton Welch on his 20th year with Houston Ballet. Conveniently, it had been proclaimed to be Stanton Welch Day in the City of Houston.
“The dreamy décor, created by Bergner and Johnson, exuded an enchanted starry forest feel with arrangements of hydrangea, dahlias, roses and stock in jewel tones of sapphire, emerald and amethyst,” noted the Ballet rep. “Tall arrangements of similar flowers with greenery and vines twisting around the stands held votive candles beautifully suspended from the branches.”
Lynn Wyatt
A starry dinner on the Wortham stage
Hallie Vanderhider and Bobby Dees
Zoe Cadore
Bill Baldwin and Fady Armanious
Kristy Bradshaw and Melissa Reihle
Marvin McMurrey, Chase O'Connell, Martha McMurrey and Ed Septimus
Margaret Alkek Williams and Stanton Welch
Jay Jones and Terry Wayne Jones
Natalie Varnum and Beth Muecke
Phoebe and Bobby Tudor
Russell and Elise Joseph, Stanton Welch, and Jennifer and Christopher Laporte
Leslie and Shannon Sasser
The menu by Jackson and Company, included a salad of whipped feta with radish and kalamata olives served with and house-made pita. For the main course, guests were served monkfish with saffron, with sides of oregano-parsley orzo and grilled eggplant. For dessert: phyllo bread pudding with cardamom yogurt ice cream drizzled with carrot gastrique and garnished with candied rose petals.
Chairs for the event were Elise and Russell Joseph and Jennifer and Christopher Laporte, with boldface guests including Margaret Alkek Williams, Lynn Wyatt, Hallie Vanderhider, Jim Nelson, Leslie and Shannon Sasser, Linda and Walter McReynolds, Jenny Elkins, Kristy Bradshaw, Macey and Harry Reasoner, Jay Jones, Terry Wayne Jones, Jo Furr, Beth Muecke, Fady Armanious, Bill Baldwin, Ginni and Richard Mithoff, and Rose Cullen.
A selection of McGee's 'Tarot Cards'
Reigning over the exhibit are four, large-scale watercolor portraits of elegantly gowned Black women, all surrounded by exotic birds — including parrots, a recurring symbol in historical painting — and gigantic butterflies. On each canvas, the subject is pushed forward, as if onstage, and seems to be prepared for battle. “They are women fomented by the fire of injustice, and are in control of their own destiny,” says McGee. “They have embraced their future and their past.”
These equanimous women, each an amalgamation of figures from McGee’s imagination, first materialized in his tarot cards. Beautifully rendered in watercolor, ink and graphite, The Tarot Cards speak to McGee’s career-long obsession with image and language, and in our time of false narratives and virtual political realities, are designed to inspire some deeper thinking by first scrambling the viewer’s brain. In “Nature Girl,” a young Black woman in a gothic, high neck Victorian dress, her spine as straight as a soldier’s, holds a bloodied ax just to the left of her thousand-yard-stare. Two other cards, titled “The South” and “The North,” feature McGee’s variations on the screaming heads in Picasso’s 1937 anti-war masterpiece “Guernica,” and draw an uncomfortable parallel between the Civil War and how art history is narrated in the West.
'The Anointed'
One of 'The Gloria Paintings'
As a respite from the sensory overload of the tarot cards, Inman has dedicated an entire room to The Gloria Paintings, a series McGee began in the early months of the pandemic, when his mother Gloria was diagnosed with cancer. Hung together, these abstract, but somehow familiar shapes, reminiscent of foliage, clouds, and musical notes, realized in thickly applied oil brushstrokes on burlap, immerse the viewer in an unabashed celebration of ocular pleasure. “When the pandemic hit, I wanted to make a bouquet for my mother,” says McGee of The Gloria Paintings. “They are all about the joys of flowers and nature, and the plumage of life. I don’t know if these pictures were for Gloria or for me!” Now cancer-free, Gloria remains “a fountain of support and sustenance” for McGee.
Having come through the trauma of the past three years, and with a major retrospective of his work scheduled for 2025 at Charlotte's Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, McGee is sanguine about the future.
“You just have to do the best you can with the time you have.”
