Best Art Gallery

Sicardi GalleryMaría Inés Sicardi started her gallery ten years ago, focusing on Latin American artists. The always carefully curated space has a history of introducing intriguing contemporary work and thoughtfully presenting lesser-known works by 20th-century masters (such as the elegantly awkward late sculptures of the Venezuelan artist Gego). On the contemporary front, Oscar Muñoz's exhibition at Sicardi Gallery was the standout of FotoFest 2004. The artist delivered an aerial view of notoriously violent Cali, Colombia -- shown on the floor under fractured sheets of safety glass. Muñoz's video, in which he painted and repainted a rapidly disappearing self-portrait on concrete with a water-dipped brush, was, hands down, the best exploration of FotoFest's water theme. But the gallery is relaxed about straying from its Latin American specialization in order to show something unique like the (pre-Frank Stella) tape drawings of Houston artist Harvey Bott, which were made in the early 1950s, while he was still a teenager.