Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH) presents Six Scenes From Our Future in conjunction with their 75th anniversary. The show features the work of six artists who were invited to respond to the institution’s inaugural exhibition, This Is Contemporary Art (1948). Now on view in Houston, Texas, through March 17, 2024, Six Scenes From Our Future includes new commissions alongside existing works from Mel Chin, JooYoung Choi, Leslie Hewitt, Lisa Lapinski, Jill Magid, and Leslie Martinez.
The 1948 show proposed a radical approach to the presentation of art. Offering unexpected pairings — like a Jacob Lawrence painting alongside a cheese slicer, or an Alexander Calder mobile in dialogue with Eames screens and a Sunbeam coffeemaker — it challenged hierarchies between fine art and everyday design while merging museum and domestic contexts. This Is Contemporary Art set the stage for CAMH as a site of 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 it position artists as uniquely capable of addressing and reflecting upon a constantly changing world, asserting art and life as inseparable.
Several artists included in Six Scenes From Our Future 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. 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 department store scene. Each of these artists mines 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 featured investigate the museum’s history to inspire their work. The exhibition provides an opportunity to honor CAMH’s past while emphasizing the central role that artists have played and will continue to play in envisioning its future.
For more information, visit camh.org.
Six Scenes From Our Future is organized by Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and curated by Rebecca Matalon, Senior Curator, and Patricia Restrepo, Curator, with Ginevra Bria, 2022–23 Rice University Curatorial Fellow.