Diverse Works is celebrating its 25th year of featuring the works of lesser-known artists, and in light of the occassion, the Houston art space is serving up some of the most eccentric and rarely seen visual and performance art.
Psychedelic folk musician Devendra Banhart offers Houstonians a chance to check out something other than his music this month.
Turns out when the San Francicso-based artist isn’t making music or touring in Madrid, he does a bit of drawing. So much so, in fact, that he has an exhibition showing at DiverseWorks, 1117 East Freeway through Dec 15.
Devendra Banhart: Some Drawings features an array of Banhart’s small, fine-grained line ink drawings. His works combine strange and somewhat heinous human and animal figures, ornamental framing devices, abstract symbols and bits of language. For the most part, Banhart’s drawings portray Indian narratives and Tantric diagrams and reveal a host of wild and unusual creatures.
Along with Banhart’s works Claude Wampler’s collection PERFORMANCE (career ender) will also run through Dec 15.
The New York-based visual and performance artist’s latest works mark her 10-year cycle of creating experimental works that encourage the viewer’s role as an audience.
With PERFORMANCE (career ender) – the last work of Wampler’s career performance -she exhibits how the audience’s interaction with a work of art is actually the final touch for creating performance art in the theatrical context. She offers viewers a chance to experience new beginnings and endings with each perfomance while toying with notions of presence and absence and the disappearance of the artist.
With this inventive performance, patrons will have the opportunity to actually take part in what’s happening in the performance rather that just sitting back.
For more information, call, (713) 223-8346 or visit
www.diverseworks.org