The Gulf Coast Blog

Craft • Culture • News

Craft • Culture • News

Tragedy and Art

Aja Gabel

I am living on Cape Cod, at the very tip, where, on a clear day, at the top of Pilgrim Monument, you can see Boston in the distance, across the water. When the marathon bombing happened, it was a sunny, beautiful day, almost warm enough not to wear a…


Do the Locomotion

Brennan K Peel

Writing may be tough work but rarely is it physically taxing. Sure, writers often suffer our own vocation-driven afflictions: carpal tunnel, bleary eyes, that idiosyncratic aversion to waking up early or using Microsoft Word that manifests in panting,…


Common Objects: Artists Take on the Familiar

Misha Burgett

Relatively new to Houston, the David Shelton Gallery concentrates on the showcasing of regional emerging artists. Common Objects (January 11-February 16, 2013) brings together the work of Ted Gahl, Nathan Hayden, and Lane Hagood. Each of these artists…


Performing Blackness: Radical Presence

Arnea Williams

Five decades of artistry which may otherwise have been disregarded--that's what senior curator Valerie Cassel-Oliver showcased through her selection of over forty exemplary artists in Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art (November 17,…


Repetition, Variation, Connection

Aaron Bielish

The group show Present Tense, curated by Sapphire Williams (Lawndale Art Center, January 25-March 2, 2013), revolves around the concepts of premeditated and restricted actions. These are works which craft multiple and successive images, creating recurring…


A Mistaken Notion: The False Epiphany in Fiction

Justin Chrestman

By now most of us are probably familiar with the prominent role of epiphany in contemporary American short stories. In his craft book Making Shapely Fiction, Jerome Stern describes the epiphanic story, or what he calls "The Aha! Story," as the shape "of…


Leslie Hewitt, Bradford Young, and a Cold Intimacy

Betsy Huete

Artist Leslie Hewitt and filmmaker Bradford Young are currently showing (until May 5, 2013) their second and most recent collaborative effort, Untitled (Structures), at the Menil Collection. Commissioned by curator Michelle White in 2010, the pair began…


Luck Is Not Chance

Frances Justine Post

There is a revolution going on in the shiny, humid halls of the University of Houston's English Department. Though it is so far a small revolution, a whispered revolution, we want it to grow and multiply, jump genre lines, departmental lines, state lines.…


Fictional Exhaustion? Write a Letter!

Thomas Calder

Dear Reader, I've been working on my novel now for the last two years. I'm about six drafts in. After each draft I usually take a break to let the words sit, so that upon my return the flaws can jump out at me. Usually, these breaks don't last very long.…