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This sweet opportunity comes to us from the Downtown Austin Alliance, the Pease Park Conservancy, and Ride Bikes Austin – so we know it's a damned good thing indeed. Take the self-guided Art & Parks Tour to explore the best of what Downtown Austin art and parks have to offer through this selection of curated murals, artworks, and green spaces. You can sign up anytime, so click that URL and get ready to learn the most vibrantly visual parts of your city soon – live and in person.

Use your smartphone to access self-guided tours of the outdoor public art sited by UT's award-winning Landmarks program any time you feel like it. BONUS: There's also a free, docent-led tour starting at Marc Quinn's "Spiral of the Galaxy" (1501 Red River) on Sun., Jan. 8, 11am.

Oh my love, my darling, why not have your own Patrick Swayze/Demi Moore moment with the Clay Studio Tour? Try your hand at the wheel through pottery demos and workshops. Or just support those magical mud-makers and buy some art. So sorry, but you can’t use location as an excuse not to go – these tours are happening throughout the Austin area, from Pflugerville to Manchaca and everywhere in between. Get messy and make financial mistakes while witnessing some truly staggering claywork. – Cat McCarrey

Austin, where even the suburbs keep it weird and artsy. That’s definitely true of the Georgetown Art Center and their carefully curated local exhibits. Take a trip up north and enjoy the latest from multimedia artist Kelly Wagner Steinke. Her strikingly textural works find beauty in chaos, rejoicing in the boundaries of materials like wax, pigments, and birch panels. Oddly hypnotic and comforting, they’ll definitely spark some thought. Check it out and ponder the art’s meaning while walking through the “most beautiful town square in Texas.” – Cat McCarrey

Traveling in Mexico, you frequently encounter changarritos – portable food carts or tienditas run by hardworking entrepreneurs. The carts usually operate outside of any formal regulation and, in that way, mirror the resilience and creativity of Mexican culture. In 2005, artist Máximo González appropriated the concept of the changarrito as a way for artists to take their work directly to the people. The idea came to Austin’s venerable Mexic-Arte Museum in 2012, with dozens of artists displaying art and interacting with the public outside the Downtown gallery. The concept is back and will run through August. – Brant Bingamon

They say Texas is the gun capital of America; no arguments here. And many gun collectors treat them almost like toys, taking pride in amassing safeloads of the things and procuring the latest gadgets. Internationally acclaimed Italian photographer Gabriele Galimberti set out to capture images of American gun owners among their massive collections of weapons for “Ameriguns,” resulting in some stunning imagery. This series is juxtaposed with children showcasing their toy collections for “Toy Stories,” for which Galimberti also made observations about socioeconomic and other factors influencing the subjects’ relationship to their possessions, making for a thoughtful and provocative exhibition. – Kat McNevins

Art conservation can be a contradiction: to destroy to preserve. Thus it is with the HRC and its efforts to restore the Clarkson Stanfield album, one of the most remarkable volumes in the history of art photography. More correctly known as “100 Calotypes by D. O. Hill, R.S.A., and R. Adamson,” the collection of over 100 salted paper prints was collated by the photographers for landscape artist Stanfield and depicts the lords, laborers, clergy, and scientists of 19th-century Scotland and the landscapes in which they lived. Currently undergoing repairs, the center staff are using its deconstructed state to display 39 plates, along with more works from Hill and Adamson, as separate works since the first time they were bound. – Richard Whittaker

As a glasses-wearer, my vision unobstructed by assistive frames reveals a world of shapes – formless, edgeless, but colorful wonders nonetheless. Take a glance at Jen Garrido’s work, and you’ll feel as though your glasses have fallen away, too. The artist’s process, as she puts it, is “a delicate balance of choice and process.” She gravitates toward shapes that “tangle, overlap, sit, lean and lay” as a vessel for personal narratives and internal dialogues. While first looks may reveal only color and texture, Garrido’s paintings invite projection – so project your meanings any Tuesday-Sunday before the show’s April 28 end date. – James Scott

How do we experience each singular second of our lives? An enormous question for an event listing, sure, but that’s exactly what artist Karn Knutson tackles in her current exhibition. “Knutson attempts to show us ourselves in moments of reflection,” the show description reads, “contemplating the transitions through life, processing the struggles, finding ways forward with knowledge, sometimes hard lessons from our past, and learning from our choices good and bad. She aims to represent the things we all feel but can’t always express until we see something that lets us talk about it outside ourselves.” Maybe the something that unlocks your inner feelings is waiting just inside Link & Pin, ready to unleash all those singular seconds. – James Scott

This local treasure of a venue, run by those Contemporary Austin folks who also bring us the Jones Center shows Downtown, is all about the outdoors – which is perfect for these trickily navigated times of ours, n'est-ce pas? Recommended: Stop by and breathe in the air, enjoy the lawns and gardens and the many examples of world-class sculpture arrayed across the property, and (as Frankie used to say) r-e-l-a-x.

A piece of Dallas artist Molly Sydnor lives in Austin this spring thanks to “After the Rain Part I,” a Big Medium pop-up exhibition of bright textiles. Like a touchable rainbow, the multicolor weavings run ceiling-to-floor in a tiny room of the arts organization’s South Congress Avenue gallery space. The claustrophobic container may “evoke anxiety,” the artist notes, but for Sydnor, the act of weaving is a meditative process. Catch the display from 7 to 9pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays, or weekends from 11am to 4pm. – Carys Anderson

Enter the fascinating world of illusions in this new venue that boasts a stunning array of intriguing visual, sensory, and educational experiences among new, unexplored optical wonderments.

This place, ah, it's one of our favorite places in the entire city; and of course they're properly corona-closed. But check 'em out online right now – it's a rich, wonder-filled website – to whet your appetite for when things get back to … uh … are we still calling it "normal," these days?

In a gear-up for Independent Bookstore Day on April 27, Bolm Arts offers up a new exhibit, “Ode to the Book.” Musicians Jade Parx, Jac Carson, Amir Neubach, Liz Emme, and Nico Little will play as visitors peruse a diverse collection of illustrations, letterpress prints, book shrine sculptures, art books, and art made from books. “Elevating them beyond their functional purpose, artists Stephen Dubov, Sandra C. Fernandez, Emily Mitchell, Kyle Schlesinger, Jennie Tudor Gray and Beckette Rivera have created their own unique tribute to books,” writes the gallery. For more bookworm content, check out a talk by author Eric Heisner, a Western-loving screenwriter, actor, and filmmaker who will speak on the Austin Book Trail April 27. – Lina Fisher