No matter how you celebrate the Winter season, artistic inspiration helps enliven the holiday spirit. If last month’s East Austin Studio Tour stirred your hunger for local art, Gallery Lombardi’s Xmas Expo will make your palette sing. Not only will the show feature over 50 local artists, including EAST visionaries Annie Simpson and Morgan Sorne, but live music will accompany your visuals, promising a full multisensory experience. ... [continue]

Hurricane Season: The Hidden Messages in the Water brings to life the struggles and strengths of New Orleans natives through an energetic amalgam of spoken word, video projection, dance, shadow art, and sound collage of personal testimonies. Electrifying spoken word activists Naima Pennimann and Alexia Garcia go straight to the core of the issues affecting the nation and the globe that have been ignited by the needless destruction of America’s most spirited and magical city.... [continue]

In the multifaceted vastness of this weekend's East Austin Studio Tour, Morgan Sorne is his own prism. His talent spans the artistic spectrum, but it's his visual art, along with incorporated poetry, that will call viewers into his studio this weekend.... [continue]

In the midst of the impending transformation that most of us celebrated on November 4th, the inhumane passage of Prop 8 saddened a nation already geared up for progress. But on Saturday, we have the chance to participate in a national uprising that could help overturn Prop 8 – thus promoting a generous leap toward real equality for the whole country. Bring your signs, banners, and friends to City Hall at 12:30 p.m. this Saturday,... [continue]

On Halloween night, at the Rhizome Collective, the barrier between our world and the spirit world will evaporate for one unforgettable evening. Why not break some other barriers, while we’re at it? Disko de los Muertos, a rockin’ amalgam of Middle-Eastern disco, techno, and punk, doesn’t stop at an all-night dance and costume party. ... [continue]

As Halloween approaches, autumn’s brisk air often provokes our hunger for shivers. While revisiting some of your favorite scary stories this year, consider Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book. His newest endeavor, written for children (children who would no doubt play well with Wednesday Addams), relates the musings and adventures of Nobody Owens, a boy who, orphaned after the murder of his family, grows up in a graveyard, raised by ghosts from a variety of backgrounds and time periods.... [continue]

The Casket of Passing Fancy is not a play, and it’s not, in any conventional sense, improv. It’s a hyper-participatory extravaganza of perpetual surprise, culminating in a theatrical experience that, like a psychedelic Choose Your Own Adventure story, tailors to each individual audience member’s taste, curiosity, or hunger.... [continue]

It’s rare for a production to offer a full-fledged meditation on grief, race/class struggles, greed, the questionable influences of technology, and the crippling effects of fear on human dynamics. It’s rarer for a large cast to offer such stellar performances that it’s nigh impossible to choose a standout. And it’s even rarer for these achievements to include Motown-inspired original songs that give beat and rhythm to an unpredictable story and a wide range of emotions.... [continue]

Ani Difranco’s been around. At eighteen she had already established a career as a ruthless wordsmith and ferocious guitar player.. Now thirty-seven and a new mother, she’s embraced a warm serenity that balances her signature blaze, and when she took the stage at Stubb’s on the night before the autumn Equinox, she outshone every purple light in the place.... [continue]

As we wait at the edge of a tumultuous era to see what November will bring, Jose Rivera’s Marisol couldn’t be more relevant to the hope and fear stirring these climates. Artfully weaving the poetic with the terrifying, this apocalyptic tale set in the Bronx brings life to the chaotic landscape that results when despairing angels revolt against a “senile God.” ... [continue]

RESET/PLAY, Arthouse's interactive multimedia exhibit curated by Marcin Ramocki and Paul Slocum, borrows much of its aesthetics directly from old video games, but no one looking for nostalgia will find sentimentality here. The exhibition seems sparse at first, with an almost jarring amount of wall space between each screen, but the unique melding of science and politics with art and technology will keep the theorists among us talking for days. ... [continue]

Students look warily at their books and the days are getting shorter, but summer lingers in Austin. Armed with both art and air-conditioning, Women and Their Work Gallery offers a respite from and celebration of the dripping heat that defines these months.... [continue]

Wanna get your art out? Art Alliance Austin seeks visual work for their annual juried outdoor show, Art City Austin. Open to every feast-for-the-eyes form from painting to three-dimensional mixed media, artists must submit their applications electronically, along with a $35 entry fee, by midnight (CST) on October 31. Those interested in creative transformation from the ground up can propose an outdoor installation at Art City Austin ’09, which encourages its entrants to engage their... [continue]

Waste Control Specialists LLC made some dangerous headway yesterday in a multimillion-dollar effort to operate a radioactive waste dump in Andrews County. Last May, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality gave the Dallas-based company a license to dispose of byproduct material, including waste from uranium mining and nuclear weapons processing.... [continue]

Everybody knows how hard goodbyes are, but this Sunday’s Opera House Store Closing Party promises a celebration of everything we love about the arts in Austin. The Opera House Collective enjoyed a vibrant three years of providing local artists with gallery and performance space, as well as an inspiring outlet for handmade retail. Their longtime support of the local noise and experimental music scene renders a fitting live soundtrack from Night Viking, Nano Bang Bang, Teddy and Marge, and Ich Ni San Chi. Lori16mm will screen experimental/collage films on handmade analog projectors.... [continue]

Gallery Lombardi's Erotica 2008 is more than a meditation on sexuality. It’s a multidimensional sensory explosion that challenges our relationship to sex, the body, and creativity with fearless exploration of these themes in nearly every conceivable form. The exhibit, curated by Rachel Koper and Ron Prince, showcases over 50 adventurous works including painting, sculpture, video, installation, and mixed media.... [continue]

There are coffee table books, and there are glittering behemoths, good behemoths, that happen to be book-shaped. Comic Book Tattoo, an anthology of standalone comics inspired by Tori Amos lyrics, comes alive in almost 500 pages of startlingly unique tales from over 80 different writers and illustrators. They provide a staggering artistic range – one moment you’re immersed in an oil painting, the next a photo realistic poem, then suddenly you’re smack in the middle of a stark black-white-red cityscape before emerging out of a bright cartoon.... [continue]

In a report released Tuesday, the Central Texas chapter of the ACLU confirmed many Austin citizens’ suspicions: APD could stand to better manage their resources.... [continue]

As the country’s most whispered recession rolls on, the city budget faces an estimated $25.3 million deficit in 2009. At this economically fragile hour, Austin’s nonprofit human services organizations worry that the city will cut their funding when their assistance is needed most.... [continue]

When local artist Sean Gaulager arrived at his newly-rented workspace on Allen Street, he didn’t expect to find the walls transformed into a floor-to-ceiling collage, or painted, as its creator Sarah Stevens described, both “gratuitously and without hesitation.” ... [continue]