Glasstire counts down the top five art events in Texas.
For last week’s picks, please go here.
1. Land that Raised Us
Mitochondria Gallery (Houston)
May 2 – May 30, 2026
From Mitochondria Gallery:
“Mitochondria Gallery presents Land that Raised Us, a group exhibition featuring new works by Okoye Chukwuemeka John, Matthew Eguavoen, Martin Jakaila, and Hirwa Bless Aine Jovial. The exhibition examines the relationship between place and the formation of masculine identity. Here, land is understood not as a passive backdrop but as an active force through which culture, memory, and belonging are negotiated.
Together, the artists consider how men come to understand themselves through their ties to homeland, city, village, street, and border. Their works ask what it means to grow within environments marked by continuity and fracture, by inherited traditions and the pressures of modern life. Through portraiture, figuration, landscape, and abstraction, masculinity emerges as layered, adaptive, and inseparable from the geographies that inform it. At its center, the exhibition proposes that identity develops through an ongoing dialogue with the places that hold us. Land becomes a site of instruction, memory, challenge, and possibility. It shapes how we move, how we remember, and how we imagine ourselves in relation to others. In this sense, the land does not simply surround us, it raises us.”
2. LAMP
MASS Gallery (Austin)
April 18 – May 23, 2026
Closing Reception: Saturday, May 23, 3-5 p.m.
From MASS Gallery:
“LAMP is a group exhibition rooted in practices of accumulation and adornment. Primarily sculptural, the works span ceramic, papier-mâché, textiles, and found objects — materials that carry the marks of touch, use, and return. The exhibition, featuring Caroline Perkison, Emma Rossoff, Gabrielle Constantine, Jamie Lerman, Julia Kunze, and Magdalena Jarkowiec, draws inspiration from the fantastical potential of a bookshelf alcove crowded with knickknacks, and from the push and pull of a warm light bulb: how it reveals the texture of its shade while allowing everything beyond its beam to slip into shadow.
LAMP lingers in this tension — between illumination and obscurity, excess and intimacy — asking what it means to look again at what we already have. At its core, LAMP is about making a home. Home here is not fixed, but a space of continual return. Each return brings something new: an object, a gesture, a layer. Through acts of adornment, familiar things are re-seen and re-translated. Function is rendered implicit; materiality, charm, and care emerges energetically.”
3. Five Painters: New Myths
Kirk Hopper Fine Art (Dallas)
April 11, 2026 – May 16, 2026
From Kirk Hopper Fine Art:
“For these five Texas painters, myth is a crucial storytelling mode that not only permits but actively requires a retelling. In their paintings, myth is where the conditions of irrationality, superstition and enchantment persist — images of wonder that depend on the disconnect between what we know for certain and what we simply believe. They also bring us face to face with fundamental mysteries and questions of human life. Was I born with a purpose? What am I willing to give my life for? Whose voices are overlooked? And which other versions of a story have been ignored?
When a mythic moment seizes us profoundly, we feel caught in a spell. We live the dimension of myth by faith, since that deep level teems with mystery and resists rational categorization. Only after we have experienced the rawness of life can we seek an understanding of it, thereby preserving its intensity through narratives that are courageous in scope and imagery. At KHFA, each artist takes us beneath surface appearances, stepping into the gap between themes of domination and self-reliance, between privilege and the thorns of history.”
4. Jinsung Kim: C.O.C.O.O.N.
K Space Contemporary (Corpus Christi)
May 1 – June 19, 2026
From K Space Contemporary:
“Interdisciplinary visual artist Jinsun Kim presents a compelling body of work that examines the profound relationship between physical space and human experience. Drawing from a rich academic and professional background in architecture, environmental planning, and sustainable design, Kim transforms complex spatial interactions into immersive, three-dimensional forms that invite reflection, connection, and transformation.
At the core of Kim’s recent work is the cocoon — explored as a powerful symbol of healing, survival, and transformation. Inspired by childhood memories of her mother’s struggle with diabetes, Kim reflects on visits to silkworm farms during her mother’s recovery, where she observed the quiet, deliberate process of cocoon-making. These early experiences inform her ongoing exploration of the cocoon as both a biological structure and an emotional metaphor— one that embodies fragility, resilience, and renewal. Rather than presenting healing as a passive state, Kim’s work frames it as an active and evolving process — a dialogue shaped by vulnerability, endurance, and transformation. By translating intimate experiences into universal spatial narratives, her practice encourages audiences to reconsider how we inhabit space and how space, in turn, shapes us.”
5. Carol Leigh Eaton Walsh: Monkey Brain: No Rhyme Nor Reason
Falling Star Gallery (Nacogdoches)
May 2 – June 13, 2026
From Falling Star Gallery:
“A colorful collection of paintings by local artist Carol Eaton Walsh. She has returned to painting after the loss of her husband and is flourishing. Her subjects range from her massive doll collection to abstract.”
