Note: We are open by invitation only.

The Art of Music, an exploration of the relationship between art and music. The exhibition will feature music related art including photographs by Mickalene Thomas and Yousuf Karsh and a selection of original record album cover art created collaboratively by musicians and artists such as Salvador Dali and Jackie Gleason, Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground, Robert Rauschenberg and David Byrne and Jeff Koons and Lady Gaga.

Throughout the year, artists and musicians will be invited to create and perform sound inspired events that focus on how we connect to music, bring it into our lives and use it as an agent for transformation.

The Art of Music engages visitors in a multi-sensory experience that simultaneously engenders close looking, contemplation, and a consideration of the connection between visual and auditory art forms.

Above: Mickalene Thomas, Afro Goddess Ex Lovers Friend, 2006

Read Jonathan Blaustein's article about his experience at Cherryhurst House 

muse:  a person or personified force who is the source of inspiration for a creative artist. synonyms: inspiration, creative influence, stimulus.

For our Fall 2018 and Spring 2019 seasons, Cherryhurst House will explore the subject of the muse. Taking a unique approach, CH will act as a laboratory in which visitors, artworks and self expression in a variety of mediums will converge and dialogue with works in progress including self portraiture and performance.

Special events include a site specific performance by Hope Stone Dance, and Inside/Out, a video installation by Allison Hunter.

Above: from the CH Collection,  Marianne Rothen, Untitled #2 (from the series Franny), 2012

Havel Ruck Projects (Dan Havel and Dean Ruck) is an artist collaborative that works in public and private environments to repurpose architectural structures and remnants into works of art. For their artist in residency at Cherryhurst House, they have transformed an unremarkable on-site dwelling into an extraordinary sculptural space titled Ripple.    

Inspired by a series of drawings by Leonardo da Vinci about the power of nature and Gordon Matta-Clark’s architectural deconstructions of the 1970s, Havel Ruck has treated the walls, ceilings and floors throughout the 1300 square foot residency space at Cherryhurst House as layers to be excavated. Using drill saws and other tools to make cutout drawings into the structure, the artists have physically removed, rearranged and layered pieces of the interior to create an immersive ripple effect of hypnotic swirling shapes, lines, craters and patterns that are about transformation and reverberation within and beyond a domestic space.

About Havel Ruck Projects:

Havel Ruck Projects have made a variety of site specific works in Houston, Texas, including "Torrent”, 2011, a permanent public art sculpture for the City of Houston Permit and Licensing Building and "Fifth Ward Jam", a temporary public art park in Fifth Ward Houston.  In 2014, Art League Houston selected HRP as Texas Artists of the Year. As part of the award, they created a site-specific sculpture titled “Three Houses” in their Art League’s main gallery. In 2016, Havel Ruck Projects created a new work, “Sharp”, using a condemned house, in collaboration with “Seeds of Sharpstown”

Question? email us at inquiries@cherryhursthouse.com

Above image: Alec Soth, Dave and Trish, Denver Colorado, 2013.

During the period our visiting artists are working on their upcoming projects we will have a special exhibition featuring selections from the Cherryhurst House Collection. The exhibition explores the theme of portraits and picturing time and place. Highlights include contemporary photographers Alec Soth and Graciela Iturbide, a mixed media piece with neon by Ernesto Hernandez and works by past artists in residence, Tod Bailey and Daniela Edburg.

Open to the public by appointment only.
For an appointment contact us at inquiries@cherryhursthouse.com

In the Spring of 2015, artist Heather L. Johnson took to the road on her Yamaha XT250 motorcycle in pursuit of her ongoing quest,  In Search of the Frightening and Beautiful (ISFB), and rode through the United States, Mexico,Central and South America for ten months.

Upon her return to Houston, she began an artist in residency at Cherryhurst House and distilled her travel experiences into embroideries, watercolor paintings, large wall drawings along with writing on her popular ISFB blog. This new body of work is the latest chapter in her ongoing project and the focus of the exhibition.

A petite woman, Johnson encounters concern more often than encouragement when she reveals her plans for solo motorcycle travel into territories unknown. But the journey ignites her passion. By increasing her strength and speed, the motorcycle becomes an extension of the artist's body. When she stops along the road she sometimes leaves behind hand embroidered art works of motorcycle parts, accompanied by Spanish phrases describing experiences she has had on her travels thus far. She places the embroideries in select locations in the landscape with the hope they will be encountered, taken, and kept. Since the start of ISFB in 2013, Johnson has traveled over 38,000 miles and left 47 artworks in her wake.

While the embroideries, painstakingly made, serve as conversation starters and map markers, her large watercolor painting based on photographs taken while on the road unravel stories from the journey itself.

Cinematic images depict uncanny subjects ranging from a roadside brush fire to a family battling torrents of rain with a picnic umbrella; from a barbed wire-lined wallof concrete stained with streaks of blood-colored rust to a cemetery’s Virgin Mary locked in her own glasshouse; from a shipping container painted with ecstatic dancing people surrounded by piles of rubble to ascraggly tree whose ultra-long roots cling for dear life to a tall clump of earth. “This project is all about embracing spontaneity, random interactions and occurrences that testify to the ‘frightening and beautiful:’ thecoincidences, contradictions, and struggles that reveal the essence of human experience.

Born in 1969, Johnson has shown her work in galleries, museums and in the public realm throughout the U.S., Europe, Japan and Mexico.  She has given lectures about her work at CalPoly University (San Luis Obispo, CA), Moravian College (Bethlehem, PA) and other venues, and has curated several exhibitions and collaborative projects, including Cracks in the Pavement: Gifts in the Urban Landscape, involving artists from around the world, and Love Letter, a collection of collaborative site-specific works presented in New York and Paris. She is currently based in Twentynine Palms, CA.

Cherryhurst House is open Saturdays and Sundays 12-5 (except holidays) The artist will be present to give tours of the exhibition.

For further info or press release contact Barbara Levine, Cherryhurst House Curator.

Strangely Familiar is an exhibition of photography and mixed media artworks that explore ideas of being at "at home": in one's environment, time and place. The exhibition features work produced by Daniela Edburg and Barbara Levine during their Spring 2015 artist residency at Cherryhurst House.

Daniela Edburg is a visual artist who mixes photography, crochet and other media. During her residency, she focused on representations of adaptability by crocheting artificial moss and using it as a metaphor for exploring ideas about living structures, boundaries and identity.  Moss, according to Edburg, "is an ancient plant that defies the idea you need strong roots to thrive. Instead of deep roots moss just needs a favorable environment."  As part of her process, Daniela invited people from Houston's craft and artist communities to Cherryhurst House twice a week to crochet moss and help her create characters for a series of family portraits titled "The Mossmakers." Also on view will be Edburg's large format constructed photographs and intimate shadow boxes that invite the viewer into worlds of pure fiction.

Barbara Levine is an artist, collector and curator who uses found photographs to enact, or comment on, the inherent tension between the familiar, the remembered and the mysterious. For her residency project, Levine was inspired by the environment of Cherryhurst House to create a large object in the shape of a house which she then covered in antique tintype photographs. The miniature tin house is instantly recognizable as a domestic form, something that suggests it can be lived in and is a repository of memories and stories. In Levine's hands, the house is abstract and remote with no doors or windows. The found family photographs form a fragile skin on the house, softening the structure, yet remaining only as an exterior reminder of what might have been. Accompanying the house are photographic collages (made in collaboration with artist and graphic designer, Martin Venezky) which address the sometimes irreconcilable dimensions of time and space, as anonymous figures and details from old photographs interact in a landscape composed of geometric structures and abstract color blocks.

In Strangely Familiar, both Daniela Edburg and Barbara Levine investigate the meaning of place by creating provisional structures, spaces and topographies. Edburg intervenes in domestic and natural environments by inserting her artificial Mossmaker characters in timeless settings thereby creating new fictions about place and identity and Levine deploys the juxtaposition of vintage photography with contemporary artistic methods, technologies and imagery to create new ways of experiencing the photographic image. In this exhibition, each artist invites us to enter a place both familiar and strange - some aspects of which are recognizable, and others, wonderfully unexpected.

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The first reaction when one feels out of place is to look for ways of connecting. Artists Daniela Edburg and Barbara Levine met in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico in 2009, a town they called home but felt dislocated from.  From this feeling of dislocation, they started a dialogue about photography and collecting and making images to express personal maps and anchors to navigate unfamiliar environments.  Out of Place presents viewers with a window into Levine and Edburg’s extended ongoing conversation and challenges us to consider places between certainty and uncertainty, natural and artificial and our own sense of place, home and memory.

Project B’s founder Barbara Levine—artist, curator, collector—has long been sensitive to the unique mystery of found photographs. Together, she and Paige Ramey find and preserve anonymous images from the lively margins of history and recast them as large format archival pigment prints. What results from this practice is a fresh encounter with the past and with photography itself: the humble original images take on unaccustomed starring roles as freeze frames from a world long gone, while their meticulous, breathtaking enlargements invite us to engage with that world in contemporary ways.