Five Museum Shows to See During Houston Art Week
From A.A. Murakami’s immersive U.S. debut to a Tomashi Jackson survey, the city's first-ever Art Week has inspired a series of must-see exhibitions across its leading arts institutions.
Houston has not always been a fixture on the international art calendar, even with world-class institutions like the Menil Collection anchoring the city’s cultural landscape. In recent years, though, the city has attracted a remarkable influx of people and capital, fueled not only by its longstanding oil wealth and leadership in medical research and treatment but also by expansions from major corporations. Tech giants like Apple and SpaceX, along with U.S. powerhouses such as United Airlines and Foxconn subsidiaries, have established or expanded their presence in the region. As ever, art follows money because money fuels opportunity.
With Untitled Art launching its inaugural Houston edition September 19-21, 2025, the city will stage its inaugural Art Week, bringing together renowned museums and private foundations with dynamic local organizations and a fast-rising gallery scene. For those heading south this weekend, we’ve selected five shows you shouldn’t miss.
Immersive exhibitions in today’s art world are most often synonymous with pop-aesthetic displays or tech-driven entertainment. A.A. Murakami’s exhibition, however, offers something altogether different. Here, the immersivity of the multi-sensory experience and the artworks that expand into entire environments invite viewers into a more spiritual and contemplative dimension. A must-see survey nearing its close at Asia Society Texas in Houston pays homage to the long-overlooked oeuvre of Chinese-born, Houston-based artist Hung Hsien, underscoring her unique role in bridging traditional Chinese ink painting with postwar abstraction. One of the most quietly innovative ink painters of the 20th century, Hung Hsien’s work evolved in a continuous oscillation between East and West, the visible and the felt, the earthly and the celestial. Houston-native Tomashi Jackson is finally receiving a major museum survey in her hometown. The mid-career exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH) presents a comprehensive overview of more than a decade of her layered, multidimensional practice and vibrant research, which fuses material abstraction with sociopolitical and anthropological investigation. Moving seamlessly across painting, fiber, printmaking, video, photography and performance, Jackson’s work is driven by a sharp inquiry into societal mechanisms, dynamics of power and the histories of communities of color and their struggles for empowerment. Deeply embedded in the fabric of society, her works surface as both vibrant and disillusioned commentaries that confront long-standing biases, stereotypes and systemic injustice. As one of the world’s most renowned private collections—with few equals in both quality and scope—the Menil Collection is an essential stop on any visit to Houston. Founded by Dominique and John de Menil and opened to the public in 1987, the museum reflects the couple’s conviction that art should be accessible, free and encountered in intimate, unmediated ways. Designed by architect Renzo Piano, the building is a landmark of quiet modernism that integrates seamlessly into the neighborhood, even as it houses a collection spanning antiquity to the present, with particular strengths in Surrealism, modern and contemporary art, Byzantine and Medieval objects, African and Pacific art and works from the ancient Mediterranean. For his first museum exhibition, Saif Azzuz draws on myths, origin stories and folklore that animate the land now called Houston, using them as a framework to explore a lost ancestral connection to the region. Through site-specific, newly commissioned installations, paintings and assemblages, the artist examines the privatization of land, water and natural resources under settler-colonial systems. In contrast, his works imagine an alternative paradigm of knowledge and engagement with the land, one that seeks harmony with its natural rhythms.
“Floating World: A.A.Murakami”
A.A. Murakami—the Japan-based duo of Alexander Groves and Azusa Murakami—are pioneers of what they call “ephemeral tech,” employing cutting-edge technologies to create fleeting encounters where visitors engage directly with technology, unmediated by screens or keyboards. In contrast to the infinite replication and storage that defines our digital age, their practice draws on naturally transient materials such as smoke, bubbles and plasma to shape moments that exist only in the present, demanding a heightened awareness of beauty’s fragility and impermanence. Rooted in Japanese philosophy and aesthetics, “Floating Words” unfolds as a sequence of immersive, sensory landscapes where technology conjures natural phenomena, opening space for slow contemplation of their elusive beauty and mystery.
In this exhibition marking their U.S. institutional debut, A.A. Murakami act not simply as artists but as orchestrators of impermanence, architects of experience who bring visitors back to the most genuine, universal sense of awe and wonder that nature can still awaken, inviting a creative and generative connection with it.
Hung Hsien’s “Between Worlds”
From the East, Hsien drew not only on traditional ink painting techniques but also on a profound spiritual and philosophical grounding that allowed her to expand the evocative, near-mystical possibilities of abstraction—guiding us toward the invisible, opening pathways to the not-yet-seen, and engaging with the enduring mysteries of the universe.
Featuring 50 works spanning 70 years of her career and drawn primarily from private collections and the artist’s archives, the exhibition unfolds across the upper floor of Asia Society Texas, itself a must-visit architectural landmark designed by Japan-born, Harvard-educated Taniguchi & Associates. As the first free-standing structure in the U.S. by the renowned architect—who also designed the Museum of Modern Art’s expansion and renovation in New York City a decade earlier—Asia Society Texas embodies a striking marriage of East and West aesthetics, combining the rigor of contemporary international museum design with meticulous attention to craftsmanship, while achieving a harmonious integration with its surroundings and a serene sense of space.
Tomashi Jackson’s “Across the Universe”
Even her two-dimensional works, often constructed from layered textiles, prints and luminous planes of color, reach beyond the modernist tradition of abstraction to incorporate the raw materials of lived reality—newsprint, archival photographs and locally sourced ephemera—that root her abstract surfaces in social history and communal memory.
“The Space Between Looking and Loving: Francesca Fuchs and the Menil House”
Its current exhibition dedicated to Houston-based artist Francesca Fuchs also warrants close attention. In her solo presentation, Fuchs stages a witty meta discourse on the collection’s history and legacy, weaving together the personal and the institutional. The project began with a discovery during her residency in the museum’s archives: a letter written by John de Menil to German classical archaeologist Dr. Werner Fuchs—her father—seeking to identify the subject of a Roman male torso in the collection. The letter went unanswered, but its rediscovery revealed an unexpected familial connection, which the artist transforms into the conceptual foundation of the exhibition.
Featuring new works by Fuchs alongside selections from the museum’s holdings and archives, the exhibition moves across space and time to explore the relational histories tied to objects in domestic contexts—particularly within the famed de Menil house in Houston, whose influence and cultural gravitas helped link the city to the wider world.
Saif Azzuz, “Keet Hegehlpa’ (the water is rising)”
Drawing on archives, material histories and his experiences across diverse cultural contexts, Azzuz stages a series of historicized fictions that expose the processes of manipulation that eroded the agency and autonomy of the land and its native inhabitants—the Sana, Atakapa-Ishak, Akokisa and Karankawa peoples. What emerges is a deliberate use of speculative fiction that connects with contemporary audiences through symbolic and mythical storytelling that illuminates obscured truths about Houston’s past.
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