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As the temperatures begin to ease and the holiday season approaches, fall is an ideal time to make a trip to the Corpus Christi Bayfront and experience the Art Museum of South Texas. A compelling lineup of exhibitions, a striking waterfront setting, and a gorgeous mediterranean café make it easy to linger. The Art Museum of South Texas, perched along the downtown bayfront, is a good place to do exactly that.
This fall, the Museum has assembled an exhibition schedule that makes a visit feel less like checking an attraction off a list and more like spending an afternoon moving through different versions of Texas, and the people who have shaped, documented, and explored it.
The centerpiece is “Target Texas: ESTABLISHED through the Female Gaze,”the latest installment of the Museum’s biennial Target Texas series. The exhibition brings together five established Texas artists—Linda Ridgway, Ann Stautberg, Frances Bagley, Pat Colville, and Joey Fauerso—whose work spans photography, painting, sculpture, installation, printmaking, and video. Their practices take on identity, memory, place, perception, landscape, and the human experience from distinctly different perspectives.
The result isn’t a single definition of what it means to see Texas through a female perspective. Instead, it is a conversation among artists whose careers have developed across decades and whose work demonstrates just how varied the State’s contemporary art landscape can be.
Photography takes another turn with “Edward S. Curtis: Photographs from the Wittliff Collections.” The exhibition draws from Curtis’s monumental The North American Indian, the twenty-volume project he produced between 1907 and 1930. The photographs are remarkable historical documents, but they also invite more complicated questions about representation and the choices involved in documenting Indigenous people and cultures.
That tension is part of what makes the exhibition worth slowing down for. These aren’t simply photographs to admire; they are images with histories behind them, asking contemporary viewers to consider how photographs shape what, and who, we think we know.
Then there is Will Vogt: “These Americans / Behind the Hedges,” a very different kind of photographic record. Vogt has spent decades photographing people within his own social world, including family, friends, gatherings, and places associated with privilege. His photographs move between Watch Hill, Rhode Island, a South Texas family ranch, beach houses, hunting weekends, and formal parties.
Seen together, Vogt’s photographs become something more than snapshots of a particular American lifestyle. They offer an insider’s view of belonging, family, leisure, wealth, and the rituals that can quietly define a social world.
And as fall gives way to the holiday season, the Museum’s beloved Christmas Tree Forest adds a festive tradition to the experience. Created in partnership with H-E-B and the Junior League of Corpus Christi, the annual Christmas Tree Forest: A Reading Wonderland features creatively decorated trees inspired by children’s literature and brings local schools and families together through art, reading, and imagination. Visitors can expect 30 trees created by area school groups, continuing a tradition designed to encourage creativity and a love of literature illustration.
All this exploration can leave a visitor thirsty and hungry for more than chicken soup for the soul.
Inside the Art Museum of South Texas, Elizabeth’s makes it possible to turn an art outing into a proper afternoon. The restaurant serves Mediterranean-inspired food and signature cocktails in a setting overlooking the Port channel, shimmering bay waters, and historic USS Lexington.
There is something particularly Texan about the whole experience: art that asks you to look more carefully at the place around you, photographs that question ideas of identity and belonging, and a meal enjoyed while the views stretch out beyond the walls.
You don’t need to be an art aficionado to appreciate the Art Museum of South Texas this fall. Come for one exhibition and stay for another. Bring the kids when the Christmas trees arrive. Have lunch at Elizabeth’s. Explore for a while and linger for longer.
The Art Museum of South Texas is located at 1902 N. Shoreline Blvd. in Corpus Christi. Explore current exhibitions and plan a visit through Art Museum of South Texas and find dining information for Elizabeth’s at Elizabeth’s at the Art Museum.