Short Takes

August 21, 2019 | Jim Townsend

Bayou Theater opens season with Mercury

Keeping a longstanding tradition, the Bay Area orchestra Mercury will open the 2019-20 season of University of Houston-Clear Lake’s Bayou Theater on Friday, Aug. 30, 7:30 p.m. Mercury will perform the baroque fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach and the tango music of Astor Piazzolla.

The Bayou Theater is located in UH-Clear Lake’s Bayou Building, 2700 Bay Area Blvd., Houston.

Mercury’s Artistic Director Antoine Plante says he looks forward to the opening of the Bayou Theater season every year. “We open the season for the theater. But it’s also the first performance of Mercury’s season,” he said.  “This is the night when the members of the orchestra get back together after the summer. The opening of the season is a special moment for the orchestra and we have felt this way for years. We love it.”

Learn more about the season’s lineup and purchase Bayou Theater tickets online.  

CLASP to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month

Learn about the diverse professional and personal accomplishments of Latinos in our community when the Clear Lake Association of Senior Programs opens its fall season on Tuesday, Sept. 10, with a celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month, which runs Sept. 15 – Oct. 15. Join in a lively panel discussion about their challenges and the lessons they learned while traveling the path to success.

CLASP is an outreach initiative of University of Houston-Clear Lake created to encourage life-long learning through free monthly presentations that engage community members of all ages in a wide variety of topics. UH-Clear Lake is designated a Hispanic Serving Institution by the U.S. Department of Education.

The discussion is 5:30-7 p.m. in the Garden Room of UHCL’s Bayou Building, 2700 Bay Area Blvd., Houston. CLASP presentations are open to the public. Free parking is available in the Visitors Lot. 

Art exhibit documents destruction of Iraqi, Kurdish culture

Piers Secunda is a New York-based British artist who uses paint to capture the marks and textures of violence inflicted by ISIS on Kurdish and Iraqi culture over the last decade. Secunda’s work, titled “ISIS Bullet Hole Paintings,” will be on exhibit Sept. 12 – Nov. 14 in the UHCL Art Gallery, 2700 Bay Area Blvd., Houston.

Secunda uses the paint to create casts, or moldings, to meticulously craft a disconcerting record of the destruction of ancient art that ISIS has wrought upon the Middle East, specifically in Iraq.

The exhibition includes paintings, drawing and artifacts, including an Arabic-language Christian prayer book that was partially burned by ISIS in Qarakosh, Iraq, and a traditional handwoven Kurdish shepherd’s bag, on loan from an Iraqi museum. This is the first loan from a museum in Iraq to an institution outside the country’s borders since the late 1980s.

Secunda will attend the opening of the exhibition Thursday, Sept. 12, 5-7 p.m. The Art Gallery is free and open to the public.