AUSTIN, TX.- The Austin Museum of Art features two exhibits. The first, Over and Over: Passion for Process runs through August 6. The artists’ materials are ordinary, their patience and results extraordinary. As the digitized image becomes the ubiquitous means of communication, and the keyboard supplants the hand, a number of artists draw inspiration instead from the tenets of the Arts and Crafts movement of a hundred years ago. Informed by Process Art of the 1970s, these artists use hobby and craft skills, including meticulous hand-beading, sewing, silhouette cutting, collaging, and collecting. Their two- and three-dimensional contemporary works negotiate a path between organic and geometric form, between the pixilated and the painterly. Although there have been other investigations of extreme craft, this is the first exhibition to focus on the work of artists whose subject matter is obsession.

Exhibition artists: Chakaia Booker, Juliann Cydylo, Tom Friedman, Tom Fruin, Victoria Haven, Lisa Hoke, Nina Katchadourian, Liza Lou, Jennifer Maestre, Elizabeth Simonson, Devorah Sperber, Fred Tomaselli, and Rachel Perry Welty.

Organized by Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and curated by Ginger Gregg Duggan and Judith Hoos Fox.

The second exhibit is Again + Again: Cycles in Video and Light which presents eight video and light projects that engage repetition in diverse, sometimes obsessive, sometimes reflective ways. The works push our perception of the limits of stillness and movement. Some are modestly-sized, intimate portraits and still lifes that connect to painting traditions, while others are on the scale of murals, or even bathe the viewer in vibrating, hypnotic light patterns. This exhibition offers an introduction to important media works from the Austin Museum of Art and six private Austin collections, while providing a provocative pairing for the concurrent mixed-media exhibition Over + Over: Passion for Process.

Exhibition artists: Burt Barr, Jim Campbell, Barna Kantor, Euan Macdonald, Christian Marclay, Nam June Paik, Dane Picard, Jason Salavon, and Jennifer Steinkamp.

Organized by the Austin Museum of Art and curated by the Dr. and Mrs. Ernest C. Butler Executive Director and Chief Curator Dana Friis-Hansen.