The subway tunnels at George W. Bush International Airport. All photos: the author.

The energy venture capitalist in the AR sunglasses sitting next to me on the plane made me truly understand I was going to Houston. On the bus leaving the airport, the woman across from me wore Chevron merch. I’d been drawn there by the inaugural Untitled Art, Houston, but also to try and suss out this place, petroleum and all.

At the Rothko Chapel, fourteen paintings created between 1964 and 1967 wash bruised purples up canvas columns, limned with lighter edges along black parallelograms so dark they’re hard to call a color. Dove-gray walls above dark square stones, twelve chunky wooden benches squared toward the center. Unlike the stained-glass allegories of my churched childhood—Saint Michael spearing demons, Peter’s denials—here all image drowns beneath all this color, unevenly brushed in deepest pigment. If there’s a god, it’s only color. These canvases have bones of hidden armatures and skin of canvas, but whatever sacred sacrament exists is eaten only with your eyes, drunk only with the spirit.

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I always assumed the abyss was black, the void a lightless darkness, but as I dive with each passing minute into these paintings, I’m utterly convinced that both the void and the paintings are actually purple.

**Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk (designed 1963–67, installed 1970).

Outside, the Broken Obelisk by Barnett Newman (designed 1963–67) presides over a bubbling reflecting pool. The local government accepted the sculpture (which John and Dominique de Menil originally planned to purchase with the City of Houston) for a space in front of City Hall, but not the dedication to Martin Luther King Jr., whose assassination was then recent. The de Menils rejected the city, bought it outright, and set it here in 1971 as a rather wonderfully meaningful middle finger to local racism.

In the Menil Collection’s surrealist Wunderkammer of a building, a vegetal Arcimboldo face winks near a Max Ernst, which itself is surrounded by tribal objects hailing from lands ranging from Papua New Guinea to the Solomon Islands. Steps away in Francesca Fuchs’s exhibition “The Space Between Looking and Loving,” the artist softly, carefully remakes artworks, objects, and spaces composed by Dominique de Menil as an act of homage and summoning. A letter drawn from the de Menil house archives from John to Dr. Werner Fuchs, Francesca’s father, asks for help identifying the broken torso of a Greek god, a request that ultimately went unanswered. Nearby, a recorded conversation between the artist and her mother plays alongside a trio of sweetly handmade yellow koalas. Her mother tells the story of Francesca as a child making the original koala, someone accidentally destroying it, and the artist as a child remaking it for a mother who, when asked by her daughter, agrees that the replica takes the place of the original.

Francesca Fuchs in her studio.

When we met later at her studio, Francesca remarked: “Almost everything I do relates to my personal history . . . everything I make touches.” She moved her two pointer fingers together.

**Fernand Léger, Untitled (Fireplace Mural), 1939, and Henri Matisse, Le Chant (The Song), 1938. A pair of fireplace murals commissioned by Nelson Rockefeller for his Manhattan penthouse, at the MFA Houston. Stephen T. Rascoe, Oil Fields at Night, 1955–56, MFA Houston.

In one of the spookier museum galleries I’ve encountered, a softly extractivistic exhibition at the MFA Houston devoted to the concept of “Energy” features wall text explaining that: “energy in all its forms touches every aspect of life globally.” This bare fact—dressed in neutral museum language and gently illustrated by art—reminded me that oil, of course, built all this. This was driven home by Stephen T. Rascoe’s inky and rose abstraction Oil Fields at Night, 1955–56, as well as the more pointed Peter Saul painting Three Mile Island, 1980 (nuclear energy and not fossil fuel was perhaps a safer kind of culprit here).

**Interior of Reeves. ** Interior of Reeves. Apparently a Jules Olitski painting.

Between museums, I wandered into Reeves, an establishment that’s morphed into something between art gallery and antiques shop—piles of guitars and their cases stacked precariously throughout, with vintage curiosities mixed in with contemporary works of art. Tucked among the shelves was a possible Jules Olitski with a half dozen other canvases casually leaning against it. The staff winked but wouldn’t reveal the identity of the “Cisco Pete” on exhibition, offering only clues. In an otherwise empty room, one label simply said “Flooded Market,” and that was all I needed to tip me off to it being a work by Houstonian artist Mark Flood—a treasure amid this clusterfucked sprawl so gloriously true to his hometown.

Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern.

At the Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern, I was met by artist Lita Albuquerque for a special performance designed by Lita but performed by her daughter, dancer Jasmine Albuquerque, with singer Carmina Escobar and sundry musicians, all of whom were visible only as shadows in the back of the cistern. Lit in billowy gold pants and glittering lapis shoes, Lita introduced us to the event at the cement mouth of this underground concrete reservoir, telling us all about a fantasia of a twenty-fifth-century female astronaut. In order to be a being of light, she has to go through all kinds of initiation. With piercing voice, rippling water, ever more frantic wails as the lighting flickered, the performance became increasingly frenetic as it matched the strobing lightning on the countless columns of the cistern. The dancer collapsed into the water, the singer with breathy sighs hovering over her—a kind of Pietà lit white, all of it beautifully reflected in the thin pool of water covering the floor.

Michael Phelan. Melissa Bent. The scene at Lizzard’s.

Evening brought a party at Lizzard’s, a delightful dive, hosted by Half Gallery, KDR, Laura the Gallery, Martha’s, Megan Mulrooney, and Seven Sisters. Getting a ride from Melissa Bent and Michael Phelan, lately of the Marfa Invitational, summoned our memories from a shared past haunting other fairs. Bent, who cofounded the legendary Rivington Arms gallery on the Lower East Side with Mirabelle Marden in 2001—launching the careers of Dan Colen, Dash Snow, and Darren Bader—has found her home in Texas. We swapped stories of the old art world: journeying through the joyous clutter and tarnished comfort of Lizzard’s, me wandering into the Rivington Arms booth at some long-ago fair, flummoxed by the extravagant Carter Mull photo along the ceiling in 2005 or ’06.

Leonor Fini, The White Train, 1970, lithograph, at La Colombe d’Or hotel, Houston.

The night continued at BeDESIGN, trying out the fancy sofas (something connected to the VIP mise-en-scène at the fair), before ending at the fair’s kickoff party at La Colombe d’Or hotel. Francesca Bellavia from SECCI gallery mentioned the works of Leonor Fini and announced there was one inside the hotel, pulling a couple of us in to spot the piece. There it was, The White Train, a lithograph from 1970: two carrot-topped women, one sleeping topless, another awake in a corset, pulling the blue shade down at an angle, her face a mask of perfectly pinched, pretty loathing.

I was back at the Menil the following morning for the press preview for “Robert Rauschenberg: Fabric Works of the 1970s,” plotted for the centennial of the artist’s birth. His son Christopher Rauschenberg trailed the curatorial tour, adding color: He relayed tales of collecting silk in India with his dad and revealing that for Bed, 1955, his father used Dorothea Rockburne’s quilt. The exhibition consisted mostly of works from after Rauschenberg left New York for Captiva, Florida; the materials included “soiled cheesecloth” and “pungent colored crimson silks” along with dangling lace curtains and ghostly translucent scrims, the artist’s shifting fabrics printed with pictures, rippled with color, and billowing with diaphanous grace.

Asia Society Texas curator Owen Duffy in “Hung Hsien: Between Worlds,” Asia Society Texas, Houston.

Afterward, at the Asia Society Texas, the eminently charming curator Owen Duffy led us through works by Hung Hsien—now ninety-two—who quietly revolutionized traditional Chinese ink painting while living most of her life in relative obscurity up the street from the Museum District. Her works had a lava-lamp lyricism, with primordial forms bubbling up like magma, or maybe like oil. The Umico Niwa show, also on view, was a scavenger hunt for delicate floral sculptures tucked here and there throughout the museum, one perched in front of the glass that overlooked the misting second-floor infinity pool.

The entry to the Brown Convention Center. Untitled Art, Houston director Michael Slenske.

Then we dashed to the opening of Untitled Art, Houston, where, according to the signs, the George R. Brown Convention Center housed both Untitled Art’s eighty-eight galleries and the Fifty-Fourth Turbomachinery & Forty-First Pump Symposium—oil references everywhere in a city that doesn’t hide what it is. At the entrance we met Michael Slenske, looking remarkably fresh for the director of an inaugural fair, who remarked when asked how it was going: “It’s like building a city and then running it.”

Everyone kept talking all week about Houston’s “no zoning” policies—how gas stations could become day cares, or how tanneries could transform into gyms in this city. Turbomachinery and pumps and art, petrochemicals pouring through everything. I had drifted in and out through what Untitled founder Jeff Lawson called a “town square” at the party the night before, the fair being organized as a series of spaces rather than rows and booths. The opening day felt long, if relaxed, though the energy picked up after five.

Artist Mel Chin. PAC Art artistic director Jennifer Teets and founder Paola Creixell.

At one of the special projects, Mel Chin’s Pool of Light, 2024–25, transformed chairs from a secretarial pool into a chandelier, their casters recast into glass bulbs. “An homage to all the secretaries, female labor, that has been disappeared,” he explained. “The chandelier is the pool, and its ceiling fixture we call the boss, a mandala for meditation. Nine to five, Dolly Parton and the gals, the chairback as means of support.” The piece was brought by the vibrantly wonderful Paola Creixell and Jennifer Teets of PAC Art, a new residency initiative yet to formally open in Houston.

Laura Burton of Laura the Gallery and a curious child.

The energy at the fair’s preview day was light, breezy. One of the favorite humans I met amid the booths was Laura Burton of Laura the Gallery, presiding over Shuling Guo’s works with a pink electric fan in her hand, breezing her hair. Laura had a humor, grace, and wit rare anywhere. I earnestly tried to persuade her to make a line of fan merch labeled Laura the Fan to give out at the next fair.

F Gallery founder Adam Marnie.

At F Gallery’s booth, Adam Marnie—who moved to Houston with his partner Rebecca Matalon, senior curator at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston—showed beautiful Doug Welsh paintings, leafstorms of color.

**De Boer director Jacob Vasa. ** De Boer’s de bar.

At de boer Gallery’s booth—with walls painted black under red lights—I grabbed drinks beneath hot chroma Sara Carter paintings and Noelia Towers’s elegant woman under her black veil, Veiled, 2024.

Jessica Silverman with Rebecca Manson’s Split Radicchio, 2025.

At Jessica Silverman Gallery’s booth, a beautiful geometric Beverly Fishman, Equilibrium, 2025, hung not far from Rebecca Manson’s splayed-ceramic Split Radicchio, 2025.

At El Apartamento’s booth, Reynier Leyva Novo’s Sacred Dust: Global Active Dust Collection Center, Houston Texas, 2025, collected dust from numerous sites, the detritus a humbly spectral portrait. A special project at Untitled, Isabelle Brourman’s “Drawing Power,” 2022–25—“the Ralph Steadman of our time,” according to Slenske. Interior of Haii Keii.

In the evening, a dinner hosted by the firm Gin Design Group was held at its Tokyo-inspired cyber restaurant Haii Keii; gold leaf twinkled from sushi rolls and flounder floated in a pool of coconut cream as conversations continued about this inaugural attempt to plant a flag in Houston’s art ecosystem. Anne Leigh Massoni, director of the Houston Center for Photography, remarked upon their search for a new home that could handle everything from photo classes for kids to galleries, as well as what it means to live and labor in Houston.

Ryan N. Dennis, codirector and chief curator at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH).

Friday morning brought a gallery tour at Inman Gallery and then a walkthrough of the Tomashi Jackson show at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston with codirecor and chief curator Ryan N. Dennis. For Jackson, who was born in Houston and raised in LA, her exhibition felt geographically special, a link between home and here. Though her fabricated and awning-shaped meditations on Black history circuited moments of raw beauty, her collaborative Black boy band D’TALENTZ held a particularly glorious and ridiculous magic, leaking their smooth R&B into the rest of the exhibition.

Just outside the museum, I met Mary Ellen Carroll, who was preparing scaffolding in a building next door for her upcoming exhibition at CAMH, organized by Rebecca Matalon. When I asked Carroll, who returns to Houston often, if she just really likes it here, she said simply: “I actually do. I get this town.”

At the airport an hour later, I departed past signs reading “96% of the products we use every day come from oil and gas. We move energy” from the firm Energy Transfer. A burst of jet fuel sent me home.