Stop, Look and Listen! | Fragility

DACAMERA Young Artists are playing at The Menil Collection's Menil Drawing Institute on Saturday, November 14, from 3 to 4 PM. It's part of Stop, Look and Listen!, a series of free chamber music and jazz concerts presented by DACAMERA and The Menil Collection at the Drawing Institute. This particular afternoon is held in conjunction with the exhibition Fragility, which runs from September 10, 2026, to January 24, 2027.

The ensemble on the bill is a full chamber group: Rebecca Benjamin on clarinet, Kenny Ford on bassoon, Miranda Hollingsworth and Luke Lee on violin, Yoon Jun Kim on percussion, and Fiona Tsang on cello, joined by DACAMERA alumni artist Anne Pinkerton on oboe. That's seven players across strings, woodwinds, and percussion, so it's a fairly substantial group for a chamber set.

Fragility is curated by Kelly Montana and draws from the Menil Collection's holdings, treating paper itself as an artistic material. It puts the material's incongruous and variable characteristics on display alongside paper sculptures and found papers. Among the artists, Lee Krasner relentlessly critiqued her own work, often destroying drawings only to reconstitute them as abstract collages; Ann Hamilton brought papers together in surprising ways, stitching soft wool between sheets of handmade paper in poche (2014); and Zarina grieved the loss of her husband and her native India by painstakingly puncturing paper with a needle. Artistic Director Sarah Rothenberg frames the concert around John Cage's question about the noise of crumpling paper, which inspired his papiers froissés and papiers déchirés.

If you're planning to go, the concert is at the Menil Drawing Institute, 1533 Sul Ross St, Houston TX 77006, on Saturday, November 14, from 3 to 4 PM. Admission is free.