Michael Agresta – words & ideas

I write about art, ideas, culture, and

Portfolio

Trenton Doyle Hancock: His Pet Monsters

100 Ways to Draw a Line (Transborder Biennial)

No, Austin Won’t Become Silicon Valley 2.0

What Is the Greatest Artwork in Texas?

Illustrating Border Life for the Next Generation

Lives in Limbo

Houston Photo Exhibit Documents First Markers of Modern U.S.-Mexico Border

Cult or Cure? (MDMA and PTSD)

While We Were Sleeping: The Feds Say a Price-fixing Scheme Costs Texas Patients Tens of Millions

The Great Mellowing

Houston’s National Women’s Conference, 40 Years Later

How the Western Was Lost, and Why It Matters

The Last Book Sale

Luz Maria Sanchez: Narco Violence, as Seen by a Journalist-Turned-Artist

Dario Robleto artist profile

Marfa, Texas Is Getting Its Own Solar-Powered Stonehenge

At Age 86, Painter Roger Winter Is Still Reinventing Himself

The Wonderful World of Bluth

How Texas Women Delivered the Nineteenth Amendment

Robert Pruitt: Wards Matter

The Fantastic World of Cande Aguilar

Brutally Suppressed in Her Lifetime, Gertrude Beasley Is Finally on Our Bookshelves

Forgetting How to Read? Stop Reading Online.

The Psychedelic State of South Texas (Fernando A. Flores)

EAST Austin Is Over. What’s Next for an Art Scene That’s Losing Its Nucleus?

The Steve Jobs of West Texas

Vincent Valdez: The Big Picture

Mark Rothko, Houston’s Absent Son

No Gogh!

Life During Wartime (book review)

LA Review of Books

The Great Texas Novel about the Spanish Flu

The People’s Champion (Vincent Valdez’s ‘Dream Baby Dream’)

Giant Steps

Can Hackers Mess With Texas’s Elections?

Welcome to Texas, Elon

Cody Wilson, Austin’s Edgelord Prince

Will the Next Election Be Hacked?

A Bigger Canvas (Houston Feature)

Travel & Leisure

The Redemption of Sinead O’Connor

Bonnie and Clyde at 50

What We Talk About When We Talk About Cults

Pacific Standard

Thinking Outside the Ballot Box

Has a San Antonio Inventor Solved a Problem of Small-scale Wind Power?

What Will Become of the Library?

The ‘Moby Dick’ of Texas Football Novels Is Hard-hitting as Ever

Wall Flowers

Did Texas Blackouts Reveal Austin’s New Real-Estate Hot Spots?

“Trapped” in the Limelight

Sedrick Huckaby Looks His Subjects in the Eye, from Dreamers to an Ex-President

The Image in the 21st Century

Unveiling “Austin”

A Tree Grows in San Antonio (Margarita Cabrera)

The Catastrophe Guru

What Will Become of the Paper Book?

Robert Irwin in Marfa

Adios Utopia, Hello Texas

The Clothes that Make the Man

No Sign of Trump’s “Millions” of Illegal Voters in Texas