Michael Agresta – words & ideas

I write about art, ideas, culture, and

Portfolio

Dario Robleto artist profile

Mark Rothko, Houston’s Absent Son

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

100 Ways to Draw a Line (Transborder Biennial)

What We Talk About When We Talk About Cults

Pacific Standard

Giant Steps

No Gogh!

A Tree Grows in San Antonio (Margarita Cabrera)

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

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

Illustrating Border Life for the Next Generation

What Will Become of the Library?

Will the Next Election Be Hacked?

Forgetting How to Read? Stop Reading Online.

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

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

The Great Mellowing

Life During Wartime (book review)

LA Review of Books

Can Hackers Mess With Texas’s Elections?

The Steve Jobs of West Texas

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

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

Welcome to Texas, Elon

Thinking Outside the Ballot Box

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

Trenton Doyle Hancock: His Pet Monsters

The Fantastic World of Cande Aguilar

Cody Wilson, Austin’s Edgelord Prince

At Age 86, Painter Roger Winter Is Still Reinventing Himself

Unveiling “Austin”

The Wonderful World of Bluth

The Clothes that Make the Man

How Texas Women Delivered the Nineteenth Amendment

The Catastrophe Guru

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

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

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

Adios Utopia, Hello Texas

Marfa, Texas Is Getting Its Own Solar-Powered Stonehenge

Wall Flowers

The Great Texas Novel about the Spanish Flu

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

Robert Pruitt: Wards Matter

No, Austin Won’t Become Silicon Valley 2.0

The Last Book Sale

Bonnie and Clyde at 50

Robert Irwin in Marfa

A Bigger Canvas (Houston Feature)

Travel & Leisure

How the Western Was Lost, and Why It Matters

The Redemption of Sinead O’Connor

What Will Become of the Paper Book?

Cult or Cure? (MDMA and PTSD)

Lives in Limbo

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

What Is the Greatest Artwork in Texas?

Vincent Valdez: The Big Picture

“Trapped” in the Limelight

The Image in the 21st Century