As the air shifts and autumn arrives, Houston’s cultural calendar comes alive with exhibitions that reimagine perception, memory, and identity. This fall, galleries like RUBY Projects, and others across the city highlight practices that draw from science, history, heritage, and collaboration. Whether revisiting a hometown voice, connecting across continents, or celebrating a career milestone, these shows remind us that art thrives at the intersection of intimacy and expansiveness.
Colector
Juana Subercaseaux: “Bag of Cells”
Upper Kirby
Juana Subercaseaux, “Fix,” Courtesy of the artist and Colector.
At Colector, Juana Subercaseaux reveals a suite of paintings that quiver with microscopic intensity, as though glimpsed through a lens. Instead of literal subjects, she layers drifting shapes and swelling colors into atmospheres that feel alive, echoing the structures of organisms and natural cycles. Each canvas suspends shifting forms in a state of fragile balance, like breath captured mid-inhale. The exhibition borrows its title from Canadian writer and poet Anne Carson, whose words mirror Subercaseaux’s pursuit of rhythm and pulse. Her work extends the language of abstraction into a space where science, imagination, and the uncanny merge.
What we love: Each canvas feels like a portal into unseen worlds, where color and form echo the secret choreography of life itself.
Juana Subercaseaux: “Bag of Cells” at Colector
March 20 – October 4, 2025
Art League Houston
Dario Robleto: “If You Remember, I’ll Remember”
Montrose
Dario Robleto, “American Seabed,” 2014,
Fossilized prehistoric whale ear bones salvaged from the sea (1 to 10 million years), various butterflies, butterfly antennae made from stretched and pulled audiotape recordings of Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row,” concrete, ocean water, pigments, coral, brass, steel, Plexiglas;
37 x 68 x 55 inches (overall without pedestal); Courtesy of the artist and Art League Houston.
Dario Robleto’s solo exhibition at Art League Houston meditates on memory and empathy as guiding forces of human existence. The artist draws upon astronomy, biology, and cultural history to create objects that fuse past and future. Works inspired by recordings sent into space resonate alongside sculptures that visualize the heartbeat, placing emotion and biology in conversation. Robleto invites us to ask how love and care might endure beyond a lifetime, or even across galaxies. The show foregrounds tenderness as a form of knowledge, positioning art as a vessel for remembrance and connection.
What we love: The way Robleto unites science and tenderness into one seamless inquiry.
Dario Robleto: “If You Remember, I’ll Remember” at Art League Houston
September 26 – December 21, 2025
McClain Gallery
Aaron Parazette: “Sweet”
Houston Heights
Aaron Parazette, “Autumn Rhythm,” 2025, acrylic on canvas, 45 x 95 inches; Courtesy of the artist and McClain Gallery.
With “Sweet,” Aaron Parazette reflects on three decades of painting while introducing a fresh body of work created during a residency at the iconic Elaine de Kooning House. Known for vibrant text-based pieces and shaped supports, Parazette continues to experiment with rhythm and geometry. Here, looping lines stretch and twist into unbroken paths, while blocks of color radiate with asymmetry. The exhibition coincides with the release of his first monograph, marking a year of recognition and momentum. “Sweet” signals gratitude and joy—qualities embedded in the artist’s precise yet playful explorations of form, color, and cultural language.
What we love: Parazette’s works hum with a buoyant rhythm, turning line and color into a celebration of possibility. Don’t miss the Artist Conversation and Book Signing at MFAH: Thursday, October 23, 6:30 – 8 PM.
Aaron Parazette: “Sweet” at McClain Gallery
September 13 – November 1, 2025
Josh Pazda Hiram Butler
Ana Villagomez: “The Fugitive Sensations”
Midtown
Ana Villagomez,
“The Fugitive Sensations (Las Fugitivas Sensaciones),” 2025,
Acrylic and flashe on canvas (two parts),
50 1/8 x 128 1
/4 in (127.3 x 325.8 cm); Courtesy of the artist and Josh Pazda Hiram Butler.
At Josh Pazda Hiram Butler, Houston native Ana Villagomez layers abstraction with texture, gesture, and geometry in “The Fugitive Sensations.” Her canvases evolve through processes of sanding, peeling, and repainting, generating surfaces that hold history and depth. Vibrant colors collide with architectural framing, recalling both vernacular design and surrealist traditions. Villagomez’s influences reach back to her family’s creative resilience in Houston’s East End, where the blending of labor and imagination shaped her outlook. The resulting works glow with the tension between construction and erosion, order and improvisation—each painting becoming a site where personal memory meets collective symbolism.
What we love: Villagomez builds paintings like lived-in spaces, where realms of structure and pattern carry the nostalgia of both reality and fantasy.
September 20 – November 8, 2025
Laura (the gallery)
“An Ocean Between”
The Heights
Image courtesy Laura (the gallery), © Graham W Bell.
“An Ocean Between” unites Keiko Moriuchi, Wang Mengsha, and Komie Kim Le, whose practices represent three generations of women artists connected across continents. Moriuchi, the last member of Japan’s Gutai group, layers gold leaf and impasto into works that shimmer with spiritual intensity. Beijing-based Mengsha creates dreamlike ink paintings that wander between fable and abstraction. Houston-born Le builds sprawling ceramic sculptures energized by memory, food, and immigrant life. The exhibition highlights how lineage and culture ripple across bodies of work, not as direct inheritance but as echoes and reinventions. Together, the three voices form a conversation that is as interwoven as it is distinct.
What we love: The cross-generational dialogue between female artists of Asian descent feels like a chorus—harmonious yet beautifully unresolved.
“An Ocean Between” at Laura (the gallery)
September 2025
RUBY Projects
Brian Zievert: “Epoch”
Midtown (La Ruche HTX)
Brian Zievert: “Epoch,” Courtesy of the artist and RUBY Projects.
RUBY Projects launches “Epoch,” featuring new work by Brian Zievert alongside a citywide parade of programming. Zievert’s multi-faceted paintings and built environments reshape memory and domestic space into gateways of reflection. Deftly curated by Alton DuLaney and Megan Olivia Ebel, the exhibition expands outward with dinners, talks, and collaborative pop-ups, creating a rapturous framework that blurs art and community. Rather than presenting a singular narrative, “Epoch” proposes a collective experience where artists, curators, and audiences share authorship.
What we love: The presentation’s wide embrace and jubilant energy, where art, community, and ingenuity propel forward the cultural ecosystem.
Brian Zievert: “Epoch” at RUBY Projects
September 14 – October 12, 2025
