The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston presents CORE Performance Company in this free "Artful Thursday" event on April 17 at 6:30 p.m. The dancers of CORE Performance Company create an original dance inspired by the textures, colors and themes of John Alexander's work.

John Alexander’s paintings and drawings convey humor, rage, and a deeply sensual appreciation of the world in which we live. Born in Beaumont, Alexander was raised among the big thickets, marshlands, docks, and oil refineries of East Texas and came of age with a profound love of nature. “Have you ever seen an East Texas swamp on a foggy morning?” he asks. “Everything works together to give you an incredible sensation, a spiritual communications with nature. Painting is the only other thing that can give me that kind of feeling.”

Alexander is also a deeply engaged witness, attesting to the erosion of our environment. “Not one day since I was born has the landscape gained an inch.  Every single day habitat is lost, and species are vanishing at an alarming rate. This is a battle we’re not going to win.” Internationally acclaimed CORE Performance Company of Several Dancers Core responds to Alexander’s work with new choreography that engages the human body in the artist’s passionate elegy to our world.

Artful Thursdays receive generous funding from the Rockwell Fund. Promotional support is generously provided by KUHF 88.7 FM, Houston Public Radio. Refreshments are generously provided by Starbucks. All education programs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, receive endowment income from funds provided by Caroline Wiess Law, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the William Randolph Hearst Foundation, the Fondren Foundation, BMC Software, Inc., the Wallace Foundation, The Louise Jarrett Moran Bequest, and the Favrot Fund.