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OBSESSIONS. DECORATION. SALIENT FACTS. T he most unique art gift of the season is your family's portrait dramatically rendered within an installation that invokes Houston's historic Deco-era City Hall. Far from a regular photo session, this one is enacted by international talent Leandro Erlich — one of the brightest lights of the MFAH Glassell's Core Program and a specialist in mining illusion from staged environments. Erlich's Swimming Pool sculpture, which visitors entered "underwater," is still the most iconic creation ever crafted for a Core Fellow exhibition (first shown at the Glassell in 1999, it's now owned and permanently on view at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan). Now Erlich is the cornerstone of the Paris-founded Nuit Miles Blanche experience, which travels to Houston April 6, 2019. Support the nonprofit Nuit Blanche Houston and the White Night for our town by acquiring one of only 20 Erlich images offered, with you and your family and friends in starring vertiginous roles, portrayed scaling the robust Moderne façade of City Hall. Prior to taking on Houston's City Hall, Erlich cast individuals in dialogue with a 19th-century Parisian building, complete with mansard roof, from the age of Baron Haussmann; Paris Bâtiment created a sensation when it was created in 2011. Expect the Argentinian artist's Houston project to do the same. Commissioned photograph $8,000, edition of 20 (reduced from gallery value $16,000); info nuitblanchehouston. com, inquiries hello@nuitblanchehouston. com. Catherine D. Anspon ART STAR + White Night performances, and art-making. Gershon — program coordinator for the MFAH's Core Fellow Residency and Bert Long Jr.'s archivist — is at least a generation younger than most of his subjects, as well as someone who arrived later in the game to Houston. Being an outsider enabled him to see the big picture of the sizable and significant history of our scene. Like a time traveler, he evokes the days when the CAMH (as we now know it) came into being and when talents such as William Wegman and John Chamberlain came to town to mix with locals Dorothy Hood, Dick Wray, Richard Stout, Earl Staley, and Jesse Lott, among others. And CAMH director maverick Jim Harithas and artists James Surls, John Alexander, and Bert Long Jr. all played mythic roles. At area booksellers and tamupress.com. More on Collision at papercitymag.com. Catherine D. Anspon COLLISION THROWS SPARKS A nnie Leibovitz. Her name is synonymous w i t h c e l e b r i t y, portraiture, and some of the most lavish photo shoots of our time. Over her 48-year career, Leibovitz has become as renowned as her sitters. She has created covers for magazines — Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Vogue — ranging from the Rolling Stones on tour, shot in gritty black and white, to a nude John Lennon cradled by wife Yoko Ono (Lennon's final photo shoot, hours before his assassination), a pregnant Demi Moore, and the coming-out photo of the glamorous, transgendered Caitlyn Jenner. Join the famed photographer for An Evening with Annie Leibovitz Monday, December 17, 7 pm, at the University of Houston's Cullen Performance Hall, presented by Brazos Bookstore in partnership with FotoFest. Leibovitz's biggest appearance to date in Houston took place in 1993, when a traveling retrospective of her work, organized by the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, landed at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She returns to celebrate the release of a revised, expanded edition of Annie Leibovitz at Work, the classic volume first published in 2008. Hear her share the story behind images that defined and transcended their time. General admission $53, includes an unsigned At Work book; orchestra seating $103, includes a signed At Work book; upfront seating $223, includes signed At Work and Portraits books; tickets fotofest.org. Catherine D. Anspon LENS ON LEIBOVITZ COURTESY THE ARTIST AND FOTOFEST Annie Leibovitz, a self-portrait I t landed on my desk with a resounding thump: the press copy of Pete Gershon's Collision: The Contemporary Art Scene in Houston, 1972 – 1985 — an impressive 480-page volume whose heft mirrors its richly layered content (Texas A&M University Press; $65). Years in the making, Gershon's book amounts to a textured tell-all of a period in Texas art where Houston artists ruled, when Lawndale Art Center and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston were the epicenters of boisterous international, national, and regional exhibitions, COURTESY THE ARTIST AND NUIT BLANCHE Leandro Erlich's Project for Houston City Hall, 2019, and Paris Bâtiment, 2011 William Wegman, Pam Glosserman, and John Alberty during the installation of CAMH's "10" show, 1972 COURTESY PAM GLOSSERMAN