weekend links: Hurricane Harvey, Robert Rauschenberg, truck art

Truck art by Remed, part of the Truck Art Project. Image courtesy Panci Calvo/The New York Times.

Our hearts go out to everyone whose lives have been uprooted by the tragedy of Hurricane Harvey. We would like to do our part to help, and so we will donate 100% of proceeds from subscriptions this weekend to a hurricane relief charity of your choice. Subscribe here and we'll get in touch with you to coordinate your donation.

Some may be wondering how Houston's museums have fared in the aftermath of the storm. Thankfully, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston are both barricaded with sandbags and equipped with water pumps and floodgate activation systems. The Project Row Houses, Rothko Chapel, and Menil Collection have also reported no damage. [Huffington Post]

Glasstire provides a more comprehensive list of east Texas art spaces and how they are coping with Harvey. Along with all of the major institutions included in the preceding article, Glasstire provides an update on nearly 30 art-based locations throughout the affected area. They note that the Houston Center for Photography is reaching out to artists in the area to provide support. Also, the Art Center of Corpus Christi is opening their space to safely store pieces of art for artists. [Glasstire]

Although most of Houston's major museums and non-profit art organizations were prepared for flooding and have been protected since the waters hit, many independent spaces in the Theater District of Houston have incurred severe water levels that will negatively impact the community. Similar to what happened when Hurricane Sandy hit New York in 2012, many artist studios and rehearsal spaces are under the roofs of unsafe infrastructure in disaster-prone locations. Fresh Arts and the Texas Commission of the Arts are compiling a list of resources like grants, funding, and art and disaster readiness supplies available to artists stricken by the disaster. [Hyperallergic]

We Are Here at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) recently opened “I Am You,” the first of three exhibits planned to celebrate the institution's 50th anniversary. The series is a look back at the museum's collection of 20th- and 21st-century artists, including Francis Bacon, Marisol, Jonathas de Andrade, and Shirin Neshat. The second exhibit, “You Are Here,” and third, “We Are Everywhere,” will open in October. The series covers a range of media from sculpture, video, sound, mixed, and painting that will showcase the power of art to change what we see and want in our culture. [Art Slant]

Louis Menard gives us a tip for interpreting Robert Rauschenberg's early work in the Museum of Modern Art's Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends. Covering the artist's seminal 15-year run of iconoclasm and anti-art aesthetics, Menard notes that all of Rauschenberg's memorable and ubiquitous work is on display along with contemporaneous ephemera. Rauschenberg's photographs from Black Mountain and collaborations with his wife Susan Weil, John Cage, Ty Twombly, Merce Cunningham, and Jasper Johns set the scene to understand the conceptual shift of the 1950s art scene. [The New Yorker]

Jaime Colsa, owner of a Spanish transport company, is financing the Truck Art Project, a series of semis painted by local Spanish artists that travel across the country. Counter intuitive to most of our understandings of a successful art career, the project moves away from the street to gallery path and more toward the gallery to street path. He wants to bring many reputable Spanish artists together, who possibly got their painting starts on the streets, to move their work away from insular institutions and into the public's view. The project has become so popular that there is now a waiting list of artists looking to join. [The New York Times]

—I. Feigle