Amber Elliott

5 days ago | houstonchronicle.com | Amber Elliott

Bryan Museum curator Meg Tucker does not recall meeting Kermit Oliver, the elusive mailman turned artist who currently resides in her hometown of Waco. A painting that is part of "Kermit Oliver & Hermès: Storytelling on Silk & Canvas" suggests otherwise. Upstairs in the Galveston museum, she's depicted as a young girl with a brunette bow cut poking out from under a straw hat. There's a colt, small dog, and white bird in the frame, too. The animals were pets from her grandparents' farm.

6 days ago | houstonchronicle.com | Amber Elliott

In the grand tradition of the Houston Symphony's annual Wine Dinner and Collector's Auction, which began in 2001 as the brainchild of Robert T. Sakowitz and then-music director Hans Graf, this year's rendition onstage at Jones Hall ever so coyly upped its own ante. Steven McDonald, the school teacher turned Pappas Bros. Steakhouse master sommelier, is no stranger to the event. Ann and Jonathan Ayre enlisted his expertise when they hosted the fundraiser at the Astorian in 2021, too.

1 week ago | houstonchronicle.com | Amber Elliott

Permission Whiskey & Service Co. hugs an unassuming corner on White Oak. The small-ish cocktail bar specializing in bourbon and other brown spirits stays pretty busy; most days, the first customers turn up around 4 p.m. and steadily occupy high top chairs until midnight, or 2 a.m. on weekends. The Kentucky Derby is another story. By 1 p.m. on Saturday, Permission owner Peter Nolan has spent the previous 12 hours transforming his little slice of the Heights into a compact Churchill Downs.

1 week ago | houstonchronicle.com | Amber Elliott

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston's summer immersive experience opens Sunday, and the first thing visitors should know about A.A. Murakami's "Floating World" is that those puffs of air are fog, not smoke. This will all make sense once patrons have entered two of the four sensory landscapes downstairs in the Audrey Jones Beck Building. There, nestled among collections of ancient, European and American art dating mostly to the mid-20th century, is decidedly conceptual.

2 weeks ago | houstonchronicle.com | Amber Elliott

At just over 900-square feet, the new Pucci store in River Oaks District isn't exactly a jewel box, though that was the idea. And one of the reasons the Italian fashion house selected Houston for its Lone Star State outpost over other Texas cities such as Dallas or Austin. Pucci prioritizes prospective spaces with an outdoor element, a retail and franchising director told the Chronicle. So the Galleria wasn't a fit.