Post Houston’s New Art Club Is Now Open Downtown

A midcentury bomb shelter full of Soviet propaganda rests beneath downtown Houston, its concrete walls a geometric spray of red, white, and black. Metal pipes exposed. A gridded gate and disabled elevator.

Welcome to Art Club.

Located at Post, the combination installation art gallery and night club officially opened to the public on December 7. Featuring 13 global artists spread across two stories and 28,500 square feet, as well as the return of Tomo, a formerly Montrose-based magazine and art shop, Art Club intends to pick up where massive multimedia festivals like Day for Night—which hasn’t been held since 2017—left off.

“We went through and developed Post, but we wanted to bring back some of that edginess and artistic vibe that was associated with Day for Night and bring it back into the building,” says Kirby Liu, Art Club founder and Post director. He previously worked as an organizer with Day for Night, so he came to the project with both experience and a cohesive vision.

Art Club offered a teaser this past summer with Quiet Ensemble’s Solar Dust, a cosmic fusion of tulle, flashing lights, and otherworldly soundscapes meant to take visitors on an interstellar voyage. Now that the venue’s first season is underway, with the current installations on view between nine months to a year, it follows through on its promise to bring world-class creative experiences to Houston.

One such experience comes courtesy of Cuban multimedia artist Reynier Leyva Novo’s Revolution is an Abstraction, which fills Post’s aforementioned bomb shelter with paintings and videos deconstructing the aesthetics of authoritarianism. Liu refers to this space as the “Red Room,” and plans for it to be the only gallery devoted to more traditional art styles like painting and video rather than heavily technical installations. Exhibits in here will also revolve around a unifying theme.

“We are trying to set the curatorial mission of the Red Room to be about art that’s dealing with apocalyptic scenarios,” Liu says. “Different elements that we’re trying to weave in between the building’s old history and its recent history.”

Appropriately, Revolution is an Abstraction is also the last installation visitors walk through before reaching the “club” portion of the Art Club, a fascinating transition from breaking down state-mandated restrictiveness to enjoying the full freedom of movement. Dancing and DJs make their home here among the throbbing beats and pulsing lights. One almost expects to spot Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Ann Moss slinking among the crowds in their leathery finest.

It’s hard to not think of The Matrix and other pre-Y2K cyberpunk fever dreams, even as one moves away from the designated clubbing area. Though with fewer people-as-batteries, thankfully. Many of the installations use lasers, reflective materials, and LEDs to create three-dimensional soundscapes and visuals: not unlike miniature night clubs in and of themselves, if one removes the impetus to start grooving.

“I always say that Art Club is a transformer, and its name is really literal. In art and museum mode, visitors experience all the exhibitions through more of a traditional kind of gallery type of way of navigating a space,” Liu says. “And then in club mode, most of the museum shuts down, except for the rooms that are set up to be the club. Then that’s when a DJ or VJ comes in and operates the exhibits like an extension of their sound.”

Upon immediately exiting the main dance floor, visitors come face to face with Media.Tribe.’s Encaged. A horizontal cage full of thin white lasers reflect off the walls and floor, creating a smoky effect soundtracked by the music one room over. It’s cinematic, in a way, heightening the overall sci-fi vibes. You could picture the replicants from Blade Runner congregating here, or T-800 stomping through in pursuit of a time-traveling cyborg villain.

Ditto Dioptrique by Boris Acket, located two galleries down. The last vestiges of muffled music have already faded by the time you step in, but the gritty effect remains the same. Here, the artist has suspended a reflective polymer fabric from the ceiling. It crinkles back and forth on winches, creating lightscapes along the walls and inviting questions about destruction and decay.

Not all of Art Club’s offerings appear to be plucked out of Ridley Scott’s or the Wachowskis’ or James Cameron’s imaginations, of course. Organic forms and natural themes punctuate the dreamlike journey through the galleries as well.

Icelandic artist Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir, also known as “Shoplifter,” is the first creator visitors encounter when entering the exhibition space. In her Neverscape, lengths of colorful fur mimic the neuronic networks in the brain. Along with finding inspiration in nature’s shapes, she also absorbs herself in the sciences, particularly psychiatry, and believes “vanity is just wonderful” because so much creativity blossoms from it.

To her, Art Club provides an opportunity to fully utilize what she calls “cavernous space.” Visitors can walk through Neverscape comfortably, winding around the neon nerves and following their eyes upward and across the dynamic interactive sculpture.

“I love when I have a space to work in that has a really tall ceiling, because then I can really create this cathedral experience,” Arnardóttir says. “What I liked a lot about this space is that I’m in entrance to this series of sensory installations. And the beauty is that it’s just covered in glass. It’s almost like a fishbowl or a fish tank, and you can see it from afar. As you come walking, you see these twirls of colors that draw you in.”

Located in between Encaged and Dioptrique sits the gentle WET:LAND by local landscape designer and artist Skyler Smith. You can smell real flowers growing alongside native grasses and listen to the tinkling of dripping water, a slice of greenery and natural beauty in between the scintillating synthetics.

Liu is keeping mum about what he has planned for season two of Art Club after season one wraps up in December 2025, whether it will continue to feature disparate themes or trod some exciting new ground in experiential, immersive multimedia art. Citing art critic Walter Pater as an influence, he shares a quote from 1873’s The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Literature: “All art aspires to the condition of music.” By hybridizing the dual disciplines, Liu and the Art Club team expose a wider variety of visitors to a wider variety of aesthetic escapades.

Clubgoers who love spending their nights and weekends absorbed in the thumping cocoon of Houston nightlife will have a chance to enhance their experience through the incorporation of art with firm statements and themes posted right there on the wall. Art buffs who enjoy a glass of wine and making small talk at openings will be exposed to the potential of music and movement as a complement to visuals, a reminder that fine art exists outside the stark white walls of a gallery.