Harbeer Sandhu’s blog Texphrastic featured weekly posts about the visual arts in Houston, TX, a city that offers artists much needed support in the form of work space, free time, gallery space, and even financial backing, but continues to lack the supportive and critical engagement necessary to fully realize its potential to be a rich arts community. Aimed at providing a local forum for criticism connected to world literature and international concerns, Harbeer Sandhu’s blog focused on Houston and on Texas in a global art context.
Harbeer Sandhu is a Houston-based freelance writer whose work regularly appears in Cite, Free Press Houston, and Glass Tire. His art writing draws on his background in literature and literary theory, often weaving together disparate voices and quotes, resulting in ekphrastic pieces which often stand alone as original essays even as they shed light and new meanings on the artworks which instigate them. For example, his essay “Ovoid: A Meditation,” an exploration of an architectural intervention in a condemned bungalow on Houston’s Cottage Street, uses first-person and second-person points of view with quotes from The Tao Te Ching and decades-old newspaper.