Contemporary Arts Museum Houston Celebrates 75th Anniversary with Exhibit, Six Scenes From Our Future

Six Scenes From Our Future will be on display from October 27, 2023–March 17, 2024

Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH) revealed its newest exhibition, Six Scenes From Our Future, which is staged in celebration of the Museum’s 75th anniversary.

Six Scenes From Our Future features the work of six artists responding to CAMH’s inaugural exhibition, This Is Contemporary Art (1948). The exhibition will include new commissions alongside existing works from Mel Chin, JooYoung Choi, Leslie Hewitt, Lisa Lapinski, Jill Magid, and Leslie Martinez.

CAMH’s first show proposed a radically interdisciplinary approach to the presentation of art within a Museum. Displaying over 150 functional household objects alongside artworks—like a Jacob Lawrence painting alongside a cheese slicer, or an Alexander Calder Mobile with Eames screens and a Sunbeam coffeemaker—the exhibition challenged hierarchies between fine art and everyday design while merging museum and domestic contexts.

This Is Contemporary Art set the stage for CAMH’s ever-unfolding ethos as a place for experimentation and play, while announcing the Museum as a forward-thinking space centered around a belief in the transformational power of art and artists. So, too, did the inaugural exhibition position artists as uniquely capable of addressing and reflecting upon a constantly changing world, asserting art and life as inseparable.

Several artists included in this exhibition turned to abstraction as a conceptual strategy to contend with history—abstraction of the body in the case of Leslie Martinez’s light fixtures and rethinking architecture in the case of Leslie Hewitt’s leaning wall fragment.

Artists Mel Chin and JooYoung Choi each add playfulness through theatrical vignettes. Systems of display are central to Jill Magid’s multipart exploration of artistic legacy and Lisa Lapinski’s iconic department store scene. Each of these artists mine the curatorial framework from This Is Contemporary Art, looking at art in everyday life and extrapolating the different ways contemporary life and arts collide.

Six Scenes From Our Future extends CAMH’s longstanding trust in the visions and voices of living artists. Working across sculpture, photography, video, and painting, the six artists in this exhibition investigate CAMH’s history to inspire their work.

“It is thrilling that even in CAMH’s retrospective mode of reflecting on our upcoming anniversary milestone, we are harnessing a future-oriented methodology,“ says CAMH Curator Patricia Restrepo. “We are entrusting our history, and in turn our future, in the hands of a group of wildly-inventive, materially-diverse, and inimitable artists who welcomed this invitation as an opportunity to stretch their practices. Six Scenes From Our Future honors our inaugural show’s demonstration that contemporary art and design are integral to living.”

Six Scenes From Our Future is organized by Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and co-curated by Rebecca Matalon, Senior
Curator, and Patricia Restrepo, Curator, with Ginevra Bria, 2022–23 Rice University Curatorial Fellow.

“CAMH was founded by six artists and architects from Houston and we are proud to maintain their community-centric and boundarypushing ethos 75 years later,” says CAMH Executive Director Hesse McGraw. “Six Scenes From Our Future invites local and innovative artists to once again envision the possibilities of contemporary art. This is only the beginning of what will be a landmark year for the Museum, where we continue to invent the future.”

For more information, visit http://CAMH.ORG.

Photos: V. Sweeten