Strand Gallery
November 23, 2019 – February 23, 2020
Opening Reception Saturday, November 30, 2019
6:00 – 9:00 PM
Artist talk at 6:30 PM
This exhibition is supported in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and Texas Commission on the Arts.
Amber Eagle
Nap Dreams
Amber Eagle’s exhibition, Nap Dreams, features multi-media works inspired by devotional, celebratory, and folk-art practices found throughout Mexico and the Southern United States. Eagle employs the ephemera of pageantry, ritual celebrations, and adornments often used to celebrate personal and historical events in her work. Influenced by her extensive experience spent between Mexico and Texas, Eagle creates narratives that are inspired by the role of the feminine in Mexican myths and folklore. Cake decorations, party favors, fireworks, prize ribbons, and trophies are represented in an evolving narrative translated through the artist’s personal experience living between two cultures.
Amber Eagle is an artist based in Houston, TX and San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico. Eagle received an MFA from the California College of the Arts and BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. She was a Core Fellow with the Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and has been an artist in residence at The Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA, The McColl Center, Charlotte, NC, The Portland College of Arts and Crafts in Oregon, and Lawndale Art Center, Houston. Eagle has spent extensive time in Mexico following an initial award from the Cultural Arts Council of Houston/Harris County to research fiestas and sugar sculpting traditions. Her work has been featured in exhibitions throughout North America and is included in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and Five Points Museum of Contemporary Art, Victoria, as well as public art installations in Houston’s East End and Cherryhurst House, Houston. Eagle is an accomplished art car artist whose cars Our Lady of Transportation and Rosebud have received awards at the Houston Art Car Parade.
October 6, 2019 - January 5, 2020
1878 & Brown Foundation Galleries
October 6, 2019 – January 5, 2020
Opening Reception Saturday, October 6, 2019
6:00 – 9:00 PM
Artist talk at 6:30 PM
This exhibition is supported in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and Texas Commission on the Arts.
Gerardo Rosales
Undercover
Gerardo Rosales explores issues of class, race, gender, and immigration to expose social inequalities experienced by immigrants coming from Latin America to the United States. Rosales appropriates ornamental aspects of folk art and geometric abstraction, infiltrated with elements that evoke adversity faced by these individuals looking for a better life, only to find themselves facing similar conditions of social and economic exclusion. His paintings include rich colors and patterns that juxtapose the harshness of the wilderness of the tropics with domestic imagery. His works mix conflict with playfulness as a means to exaggerate reality with irony.
Gerardo Rosales was born in Venezuela and is a multidisciplinary artist and educator who has lived and worked in Houston, TX since 2000. Rosales first started producing art as a self-taught artist before attending the Armando Reverón Art Institute in Caracas, Venezuela, where he earned a BA in Painting. After graduating, he moved to London to study at Chelsea College of Art and Design where he received an MA in Painting. Rosales has received recognition at leading art venues in Latin America and Europe, including exhibitions in Venezuela, Argentina, the United Kingdom, and France. His work was most recently featured at the TransArt Foundation for Art and Anthropology, Houston, where he was also a 2018-2019 artist-in-residence.
Gerardo Rosales explora temas de clase, raza, género e inmigración para exponer las desigualdades sociales experimentadas por los inmigrantes que van de América Latina a los Estados Unidos. Rosales se apropia de los aspectos ornamentales del arte popular y la abstracción geométrica, infiltrados con elementos que evocan la adversidad que enfrentan estos individuos que buscan una vida mejor, solo para encontrarse con condiciones similares de exclusion social y económica.
Gerardo Rosales nació en Venezuela y es un artista y educador multidisciplinario que ha vivido y trabajado en Houston, TX desde 2000. Rosales comenzó a producir arte como artista autodidacta antes de asistir al Instituto de Arte Armando Reverón en Caracas, Venezuela, donde obtuvo una licenciatura en pintura. Después de graduarse, se mudó a Londres para estudiar en el Chelsea College of Art and Design, donde recibió una maestría en pintura. Rosales ha recibido el reconocimiento en los principales lugares de arte en América Latina y Europa, incluidas exposiciones en Venezuela, Argentina, el Reino Unido y Francia. Su trabajo fue presentado recientemente en la Fundación TransArt para Arte y Antropología, Houston, donde también fue artista residente 2018-2019.
gerardorosales.net
August 24 - November 17, 2019
Strand Gallery
August 24 – November 17, 2019
Opening Reception Saturday, August 24, 2019
6:00 – 9:00 PM
Artist talk at 6:30 PM
This exhibition is supported in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and Texas Commission on the Arts.
Erin Curtis
Night and Day
Erin Curtis’ exhibition, Night and Day, includes recent large-scale paintings that are dense with color and pattern. Her layered, cut-canvas works contain disrupted surfaces and reflect an interest in geometric abstraction and its historical roots in weaving, architecture, nature, and ritual. The paintings in Night and Day are nearly overwhelmed by an unreadable chaos that is pulled back to the edge of order by familiar patterns and forms. The works are rooted in landscape and domestic iconography, often sourced from textiles, and influenced by Curtis’ experience as a new mother. Just as night and day can be experienced as opposites, a continuum, or as cycles that shift subtly over the days and months, Curtis explores different ways of experiencing pattern and repetition, separateness and connectedness in her work.
Erin Curtis is an artist living and working in Austin, Texas. Curtis’s work combines utopian ideals of beauty and structure, with process and chance. Primarily working as a painter, she also creates large-scale, site-specific installations and public art projects. She has received grants from the Dallas Museum of Art, the Andy Warhol Foundation, the City of Austin and the District of Columbia. Curtis has had solo shows at Conduit Gallery, Dallas, TX (2017), CalPoly, San Luis Obispo, California (2016), Big Medium Gallery, Austin, Texas (2015) and Flashpoint Gallery, Washington, DC (2015). She has created commissioned works for the Chicago Transit Authority, the City of Washington D.C., Facebook, Art in Embassies and the City of Austin. In the summer of 2019, a 20-foot tall cut brick mural commissioned by Intelligentsia Coffee will be installed in downtown Austin. Curtis attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2010 and was awarded residencies at Anderson Ranch (2012) and Vermont Studio Center (2014). In 2008-2009, Curtis was a Fulbright Scholar in Jaipur, Rajasthan. Curtis graduated from Williams College with a BA in Liberal Arts in 1999 and received her MFA from the University of Texas at Austin in 2007.
July 13 - October 6, 2019
1878 & Brown Foundation Galleries
July 13 – October 6, 2019
Opening Reception Saturday, July 13, 2019
6:00 – 9:00 PM
Artist talks at 6:30 PM
This exhibition is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
1878 & Brown Foundation Galleries
Exchange Rate
Featuring work by Corey Ackelmire, Mike Beradino, Rene Cruz, Kevin Curry, Kathy Hall, Mary Jeys, Virginia Lee Montgomery, Ken Little, Deborah Mersky, Phillip Pyle II, Dan Tague, The Art Guys, and Anthony Thompson Shumate
Exchange Rate features artists who incorporate currency in their work as material and subject matter. Playing on the location of GAC’s home in the 1878 First National Bank Building and The Strand’s history as the “Wall Street of the South,” the artists in the exhibition address commercial systems of trade, value, and labor represented in paper, metal, plastic, and digital media. Addressing personal relationships to currency and the exchange of goods, services, and the accumulation of wealth, worth, and, value, this exhibition aims to give insights into the work of artists connected to the region who each take individual approaches to address this medium of exchange in their work.
About the artists:
Corey Ackelmire
As a metalsmith, Corey Ackelmire is interested in how people make, keep, alter, and use objects for emotional, superstitious, and practical purposes. Metal objects, from common currency to silver spoons, tend to be both durable and malleable, common and sacred, sentimental, and mundane. Exploring their place in material culture is the focus of her work.
Ackelmire earned her BFA in jewelry and metalsmithing from Missouri State University in 2003 and her MFA in jewelry/metals/enameling from Kent State University in 2007. She has been an educator since 2005, is a published author, and has exhibited her work in numerous national and international exhibitions. Currently, she is a full-time instructor and the Visual Art Program coordinator at Houston Community College in Houston, Texas.
Image: Corey Ackelmire, #betterangelsproject, 2019, Wood and copper pennies
Mike Beradino
Mike Beradino is an artist and educator based in Houston, TX. His work has been featured in exhibitions at Art Palace, Houston; Postmasters Gallery, New York; the National Science Foundation, Arlington, VA; the EMERGEncy Room at Rice University; and Lawndale Art Center, Houston. He has taught higher education courses including digital art and physical computing for the last decade. Currently he instructs Computer Science at The Post Oak High School. He has worked with the teen digital culture program at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston called hang@MFAH since the program’s inception in 2012. In his work, Beradino combines the successes and failures of technological advancement to manipulate the history of consumer technology prompting questions about digital mediation, the functional obsolete, and our collective notion of progress. Beradino holds a BFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago & MFA from Parsons, The New School of Design.
Rene Cruz
Rene Cruz is an artist, illustrator, and graphic designer based in Houston, TX. In his work he frequently employs blind-contour drawing processes, recreating well known illustrations of popular culture figures. His work has been included in exhibitions at Art Palace, Houston; Rudolf Blume Fine Art / Art Scan Gallery; The Joanna, Houston; Domy Books, Houston; and Flight Gallery, San Antonio. The exhibition will include a series of “blind-drawn” coins that are included in a public art installation by artist Elaine Bradford at the H-E-B Heights Houston grocery store.
Image: Rene Cruz, PENNY, 2018, Ink and bronze spray paint on wood
Kevin Curry
Kevin Curry received his BFA in Graphic Design from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, Michigan, and after working as an Art Director in New York and Philadelphia, started his own design & Illustration business before receiving his MFA in Sculpture from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois in 2008. Curry has completed multiple artist residencies, including residencies at Grand Canyon National Park; Redline, Denver, CO; Platteforum, Denver; Art342, Ft. Collins, CO; and Lawndale Arts Center, Houston, TX. His work has been included in group and solo exhibitions throughout the US, as well as public art commissions for the city of Denver. Curry has held teaching positions at the University of Denver, Regis University, and Baylor University. He is currently a professor at Florida State University.
Image: Kevin Curry, Value Added (Abraham Lincoln – detail), 2011, US Currency
Kathy Hall
Kathy Hall is an artist based in Houston, TX. She received her BFA and MFA from the University of Houston. Her works have been included in group and solo exhibitions throughout Texas, including exhibitions at the Art Car Museum, Art League Houston, DiverseWorks, Marfa Studio Art, Lawndale Art Center, and Galveston Arts Center. Hall is well known for the installations she creates in her front yard in the West University neighborhood of Houston in collaboration with her neighbors. Her works are in numerous collections including works commissioned by the Federal Reserve Bank, Houston Branch.
Image: Kathy Hall, Anonymous Interior (detail), Paper currency and glue
Mary Jeys
Mary Jeys is a multi-media artist and activist. She has worked to promote social change in non-fiction media settings including a non-profit documentary production company, Aubin Pictures, Inc.; Hunter College’s Integrated Media Arts MFA program; and the School of Visual Arts with CUNY Graduate Center that respectively sponsored and hosted Where the Truth Lies, a conference on propaganda. She has participated in creative research opportunities including The Laundromat Project’s Create Change Professional Development Fellowship and LMCC’s Swing Space in New York. She has received grants from FEAST in Brooklyn and Macktez. As a guest speaker, she has been invited to talk at Parsons The New School for Design’s MFA program in Transdisciplinary Design and The Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program’s Fix It Yourself Lectures. She received her BFA from the University of Texas at Austin.
Jeys’ notable projects include founding a local currency for north Brooklyn, NY called The Brooklyn Torch. A local currency is a method of trading goods and services meant to supplement other means of trade while improving the community wealth. Local currencies circulate in a defined region. Money does not leave the area because trade is restricted by the currency boundaries.
www.maryjeys.com
www.brooklyntorch.org
Virginia Lee Montgomery
Virginia Lee Montgomery (b. 1986; Houston, TX, USA) is a filmmaker, sculptor, and facilitator. She received her BFA from The University of Texas at Austin in 2008 and her MFA from Yale University in Sculpture in 2016. Working across video, performance, sound, and sculpture, her artwork is a material research practice of philosophical metaphysics. Its content is surreal, latently autobiographical, and often with a feminist impulse. The work is paradoxically cryptic and literal, conceptual and hand-built, digital and physical. VLM deploys an idiosyncratic visual vocabulary of repeating gestures like drilling, dousing, puncturing, or reaching and recursive symbols like circles, holes, spirals, or spheres. Her movements interrogate the complex relationship between physical and psychic structures. VLM also works as a professional mind-map scribe, a Graphic Facilitator.
Image: Virginia Lee Montgomery, BEYOND MEANS (video still), 2017, HD video, 02:17
Ken Little
Ken Little was born in 1947 in Canyon Texas. He was a graduate in the first Bachelor of Fine Arts class at Texas Tech University in 1970. He went on to earn a Masters of Fine Arts at the University of Utah in 1972. Since 1972 he has held tenured positions at major universities, including The University of Montana at Missoula, The University of Oklahoma in Norman. Since 1988 he has been a professor of Art in Sculpture at The University of Texas at San Antonio.
Ken Little is a nationally recognized artist who has been granted two Visual Arts Fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts in1982 and 1989. Since 1993, he has maintained a working studio and Rrose Amarillo, an alternative exhibition space in downtown San Antonio. His work in various media has been shown extensively both nationally and internationally. In south Texas he has exhibited at such venues as ArtPace, Finesilver Gallery, The Southwest School of Art and Craft, and the Blue Star Art Space where he was a board member from1989 to 1995. He currently serves on the Board of Directors at Artpace, San Antonio.
Little’s work has been featured in over 40 soloe exhibitions in national and international venues such as: The Washington Project for the Arts, Washington DC; The John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan Wisconsin; The Forum for Contemporary Art, St. Louis; Diverse Works, Houston; and The Honolulu Academy of the Arts. His work has also been featured in over 200 group exhibitions at institutions like: The Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston; The Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC; and The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
Little is also a songwriter and a performer. He plays guitar and sings in two bands, Rodeo Ho Ho and the Swingbillies. He has one CD out titled, “Simple America” which contains his original material.
Image: Ken Little, Soar, 2002, $1 bills on steel, frame, Collection of Tom and Laura Bacon, Houston, TX
Deborah Mersky
Deborah Mersky is an artist based in Johnson City, TX. She received her MFA from the University of Washington, Seattle. Mersky has been exhibiting her work since 1980 in exhibitions throughout Texas and Washington. Mersky has created numerous public art works throughout the US including projects in Phoenix, AZ, San Antonio, TX, Redmond, WA, Portland, OR, and Minneapolis, MN to name a few.
Phillip Pyle, II
Phillip Pyle, II is a visual artist, graphic designer, and photographer based in Houston, Texas whose primary interests are race, humor, advertising, sports and popular culture. Mining imagery from sources diverse as mass consumer culture, contemporary advertising, to ephemera, historical imagery, and hip-hop, Pyle introduces a complex vision that derives from a robust comedic foundation while also looking at the abstraction and transience of our values, and beliefs.
Pyle has exhibited his work in numerous institutions including Project Row Houses in Houston, Art League of Houston, Houston Museum of African American Culture, and the University Museum at Texas Southern University. Pyle was an inaugural participating artist in the City of Houston’s Resident Artist program where he worked with the Office of Veterans Affairs in the Third Ward.
Image: Phillip Pyle II, Family Money, 2012, Digital print
The Art Guys
The Art Guys (Michael Galbreth, b. 1956, Philadelphia, and Jack Massing, b. 1959, Buffalo) began working together in 1983 after meeting while students at the University of Houston and continued a collaboration that spanned more than thirty years.
Art Guys’ work has been included in more than 150 exhibitions in museums, galleries and public spaces throughout the United States and in other parts of the world including Europe and China. Their work has been seen in more than 40 solo exhibitions among which include the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Tacoma Art Museum, the de Saisset Museum, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art and the Tampa Museum of Art. The Art Guys realized major public art projects including Intercontinental Airport Houston, Phoenix Airport and the University of Houston as well as civic and private commissions. Additionally, The Art Guys lectured at more than 60 universities, museums and other institutions throughout the United States including Harvard, Chicago Art Institute, School of Visual Arts New York, Kansas City Art Institute, UCLA, Vanderbilt and many more.
Articles, reviews and stories about their work have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, Art In America, ArtNews, Artforum, Sculpture Magazine, CNN, CBS News Sunday Morning and many more. The Art Guys have been included in many books and catalogs including The Art Guys: Think Twice and SUITS: The Clothes Make the Man, published by Harry N. Abrams, New York; and the DVD The Art Guys: Home On The Range, a compilation of 25 years of video works published by Microcinema International.
Image: The Art Guys, Credit Where Credit is Due, 1997-1998, Credit cards, business forms, 35 framed objects, Private Collection
Anthony Thompson Shumate
Anthony Thompson Shumate, a multimedia artist and designer, has an MFA in Sculpture from the University of Houston (2005) and a BFA from the University of Texas in San Antonio (2001). Shumate’s work often combines corporate design and contemporary art aesthetics in a subversive commentary on the modern American social landscape. He is the recipient of several arts and advertising awards including a 2006 New Works Fellowship for Emerging Artist from the former Cultural Arts Council of Houston/Harris County, an ArtPix Grant for Las Pozas: Steps and Falls, a CD-ROM produced in partnership with photographer/videographer Rob Ziebell, six ADDY Awards from the American Advertising Federation, and two Bronze Quill awards in excellence in design. Shumate’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout Houston including exhibitions at Lawndale Art Center and Barbara Davis Gallery, along with public art commissions for Buffalo Bayou Park, Houston; Ladybird Lake Trail, Austin; and the Greater East End Management District, Houston.
Image: Anthony Thompson Shumate, Five Dollar Amero Bill Proof, 2012, Hahnemuhle
June 8 - August 18, 2019
Strand Gallery
June 8 – August 18, 2019
Opening Reception Saturday, June 8, 2019
6:00 – 9:00 PM
Artist talk at 6:30 PM
This exhibition is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Chuck & George
Cat Butt Parfait: Chuck & George Explore the Ecosystem of Domestic Feline Digestion
Chuck & George create a colorful fantasia inspired by the parasites that populate the domestic feline digestive system. Often referencing their personal lives, their exhibition presents a good-humored dissection with variation and theme. The multiple media installation includes paintings, drawings, ceramics, and papier-mâché.
Chuck & George are the collaboration of Dallas-based artists Brian Keith Jones and Brian Keith Scott. Brian K. Jones (Chuck) earned a BFA from The University of North Texas in Painting. In 1990 he joined forces with U.N.T Printmaker Brian K. Scott (George) to form the acclaimed duo Chuck & George. Brian Scott has worked as an artist freelancing and collaborating all of his life. He earned his BFA in Printmaking from the University of North Texas. He was one of the founding and principle artist with the Holton and Associates from 1993-99. He is the founder and a principle artist of the Art Services Collective.
Chuck & George have exhibited both separately and collaboratively in numerous exhibitions, including presentations at the Fort Work Community Arts Center; The Wrong Store, Marfa, TX; McKinney Avenue Contemporary, Dallas; Southfork Gallery, Memphis, TN; Unit B Gallery, San Antonio, TX Conduit Gallery, Dallas, TX; Landmark Arts, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX; and CentralTrak, Dallas, TX. They were honored with the 2013 Dallas Observer Mastermind Award. Since 2000 the duo has organized the Oak Cliff Visual SpeedBump Art Tour, an annual public tour of artists’ studios, homes, and galleries that takes place each May.
April 27 - July 7, 2019
1878 Gallery
April 27 - July 7, 2019
Opening Reception Saturday, April 27, 2019
6:00 – 9:00 PM
Artist talk at 6:30 PM
This exhibition is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Chris Bakay
The Tangibility of Memory
Chris Bakay’s exhibition, The Tangibility of Memory, includes cast resin t-shirts and everyday objects that evoke nostalgic memories of youth and skate culture. Through a labor-intensive casting process, Bakay juxtaposes the materials of high and low culture. While his Retired Jersey t-shirts have specific meaning for the artist, the personal memories associated with many of these seemingly ordinary objects shifts for individual viewers. The humble t-shirt, ever-present in tourist towns, serve as a symbol of modern life with their various logos or emblems reflecting personal or lived experiences with shifting meanings.
Chris Bakay is a multidisciplinary visual artist living and working in Houston, TX. Born in 1977, in Atlanta, GA, he studied Design at The Creative Circus. His work has been featured in publications including High Snobiety, Design Taxi, Artnet News, Untitled Magazine, New York Observer, Stylus, Luxury Standard, Tech Cocktail and a segment on Fox News with Andrea Tantaros. Bakay’s work has been included in group exhibitions in Houston, Atlanta, and most recently in the exhibition Emerging To Established - A Group Show at Krause Gallery, New York, NY.
Brown Foundation Gallery
April 27 - July 7, 2019
Opening Reception Saturday, April 27, 2019
6:00 – 9:00 PM
Artist talk at 6:30 PM
This exhibition is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Jeffrey Dell
Maquette Moon
Jeffrey Dell’s exhibition, Maquette Moon, features a new series of screenprints that continue his abiding interest in space, color, pattern, and perception. Dell explores the human tendency to read into images for symbols, depth, and promises of pleasure. Mixing the languages of visual graphics and trompe l’oeil, Dell’s images create larger questions about the viewer’s imagination, blurring distinctions between actually seeing and projecting that which we want to see.
As an artist known for painterly/printerly abstraction, Dell’s flaps and portals can resemble moons, spaceships, aliens, the unknown, and various objects of longing. All of the titles for individual works are stolen from titles of science-fiction novels published in the 1970’s – novels for which famed illustrator Chris Foss did the cover art. Dell acknowledges the influence of Foss from hours spent staring at his images, both projecting himself into those futuristic worlds and consuming the promised pleasures depicted. Maquette Moon echoes the wistful narrators of these novels.
Jeffrey Dell has headed the Printmaking department at Texas State University for 18 years and currently lives in San Marcos, TX. Recent exhibitions include the International Print Center of New York; The Print Center of Philadelphia; Rochester Contemporary Art Center; Art Palace Gallery, Houston; and Galleri Urbane, Dallas. Dell was commissioned by The LINE Hotel to produce two large unique editions for their newest location in Austin, TX, in 2018. Dell received his MFA from the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque.
March 9 – June 2, 2019
Strand Gallery
March 9 - June 2, 2019
Opening Reception Saturday, March 9, 2019
6:00 – 9:00 PM
Artist talk at 6:30 PM
This exhibition is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Brad Tucker
Standard Tan
Brad Tucker’s exhibition, Standard Tan, includes a collection of wood, fabric, and painted sculptural objects that explore color, texture, and language. Often mimicking tools and utilitarian objects, Tucker’s work plays with the loose ends of craftsmanship at the border between painting and sculpture. Tucker’s experience as an artist, skateboarder, musician, and teacher reveals itself in his work through the use of abstracted shapes, text, and sound elements encountered in his daily life.
Brad Tucker (born 1965, West Covina, CA) earned a BFA from the University of North Texas, Denton (1991) and an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (2009). Tucker has exhibited and performed internationally for the past two decades, including solo exhibitions at Inman Gallery, Houston, TX (2015, 2012, and 2009); Re Gallery, Dallas, Texas (2015); Old Jail Art Center, Albany TX (2013); and Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX (2011). From 1999-2000 Tucker was an artist resident in the Core Program, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. His work is included in the public collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Menil Collection, Houston; the New Museum, New York, NY; and the Plains Museum, Fargo, ND. Tucker lives and works in Austin, TX. He is represented by Inman Gallery.
January 19 – April 21, 2019
1878 & Brown Foundation Galleries
January 19 - April 21, 2019
Opening Reception Saturday, January 19, 2019
6:00 – 9:00 PM
Artist talk at 6:30 PM
This exhibition is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Miss Pussycat
The Puppet Worlds of Miss Pussycat
The Puppet Worlds of Miss Pussycat features an installation of puppets and their worlds by New-Orleans based artist, musician, and puppeteer, Panacea Theriac (also known as Miss Pussycat). The exhibition includes puppets and puppet theaters, along with videos, photographs and ceramic sculptures of her puppets. The Puppet Worlds of Miss Pussycat highlights characters and worlds from her last five puppet shows: The Western Village Shopping Village, Clothes Made by Small Furry Animals, Frenchy and Jett, The Happy Castle of Goblinburg, and The Cookie Carnival Baking Contest. In her work, Miss Pussycat creates paracosmic fantasies that often relate to her own experience as an artist and musician. She’s in a band and her puppets have a band that releases records, while others are artists and museum workers in a fictitious museum. Each character assumes a life of their own in an ever-evolving series of stories.
Panacea Theriac's most widely known public role is as Miss Pussycat, performing puppet shows, singing, and playing maracas in the band “Quintron and Miss Pussycat”. Based in New Orleans, Quintron and Miss Pussycat present live organ-driven party music and puppet shows at parties all over the world.
Born in Antlers, Oklahoma, Theriac began her career in art and puppetry as a child in the Southern Baptist Church of Antlers as part of the Christian Puppet Youth Ministry. She later moved to New Orleans and started a secret nightclub called Pussycat Caverns, which hosted bands and all types of performance in a unique and lively atmosphere. Since 1997 she has run a similar secret night club, The Spellcaster Lodge, with the artist Quintron. Both of these enterprises have brought bands and other inspired people together to put on fun shows for the New Orleans 9th Ward neighborhood. For over 20 years, she has presented live puppet shows in rock clubs, libraries, and secret clubhouses all around the world. Theriac has also made a number of puppet movies and videos, including Trixie and the Treetunks, North Pole Nutrias, and Electric Swamp.
Exhibitions and installations are an important part of Theriac’s work. These shows display puppets and their worlds in galleries and museums and have included exhibits at The New Orleans Museum of Art and an installation at the Center for Contemporary Art in New Orleans. In 2017, she was a featured artist for Prospect 4, New Orleans’ citywide contemporary art triennial, with an exhibition at The Ogden Museum of Southern Art. In 2014, she and Quintron were each awarded a Rauschenberg Residency.
www.panaceatheriac.com
2nd Floor Vault
January 19 - April 21, 2019
Opening Reception Saturday, January 19, 2019
6:00 – 9:00 PM
Artist talk at 6:30 PM
This exhibition is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Quintron
DRUM BUDDY (Miss Pussycat Model)
Playing on the unique acoustics of the concrete and steel lined second-floor vault of GAC’s 1878 First National Bank Building, New Orleans-based artist and musician Quintron, presents one of his most notable inventions, the Drum Buddy. The Drum Buddy is a light activated, analog synthesizer which creates murky, low-fidelity, rhythmic patterns triggered by the rotation of recycled #10 pizza sauce cans. Using the unique characteristics of optical sensors, the instrument produces drum-like tones, chirps, and buzzes in four distinct voices: kick, snare, bass, and "space". Quintron is credited with fostering an analog synth revival in the late 1990s / early 2000s with the invention and continual experimentation with the Drum Buddy. The piece on display at GAC is a one-of-a-kind version of the instrument created for Miss Pussycat in 2009. Visitors are invited to enter the vault to experience the unique soundscape produced by this innovative instrument.
Quintron is a New Orleans-based inventor, organist, and musical octopus behind the eponymous band, "Quintron and Miss Pussycat". He has been making genre-defying noise, soundscape, and house rocking dance music in New Orleans for over 20 years. The majority of his fifteen full-length albums, many created with artist/puppeteer Panacea Theriac (also known Miss Pussycat), have the psychedelic soul of New Orleans party jams as filtered through tough distorted organs and self-made electronic instruments. Quintron is a celebrated nightclub organist and inventor, who has patented a number of his own inventions, including the Drum Buddy. Notable performers who own and play the Drum Buddy include Nels Cline of Wilco, Laurie Anderson, Fred Armisen, and DJ Mr. Dibbs. In addition to his own recordings, Quintron has played on a number of other records, most notably The Oblivions 9 Songs and Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys Grand Isle, which earned a Grammy nomination in 2012 and included the Quintron penned song Chatterbox. In addition to performances throughout the world, Quintron’s instruments and inventions have been included in exhibitions at the New Orleans Museum of Art, Propsect 4 at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), Los Angeles, and a 2014 residency at the Rauschenberg Residency in Captiva, FL.
www.quintronandmisspussycat.com
www.weatherfortheblind.org
January 19 – March 3, 2019
Strand Gallery
January 19 - March 3, 2019
Opening Reception Saturday, January 19, 2019
6:00 – 9:00 PM
Artist talk at 6:30 PM
This exhibition is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Camp Bosworth
THANK YOU, PLEASE DRIVE THRU
Camp Bosworth creates elaborately carved and painted wood objects influenced by his West Texas and the U.S. Mexico border surroundings. Hand-carved, and often gilded or painted, the scale of his work often results in humorous and whimsical sculptures. His most recent works are inspired by the menu items of Dairy Queens ubiquitous to small towns throughout Texas. For his exhibition, THANK YOU, PLEASE DRIVE THRU, Bosworth brings steak finger baskets and soft-served ice cream sculptures to Galveston.
Born in Galveston in 1964, Camp Bosworth is an artist based in Marfa, TX. Bosworth received his BFA in painting from the University of North Texas. He has exhibited his work throughout Texas and the US, including exhibitions at Webb Gallery, Waxahachie, TX; The Old Jailhouse Art Center, Albany, TX; Yard Dog, Austin, TX; Tucson Museum of Contemporary Art, AZ; and the El Paso Museum of Art, TX. His work is in the collection of the AT&T Center/San Antonio Spurs and was commissioned for Cardinal Blasé Cupich’s crosier staff. Long-time residents of Marfa, he and his wife Buck Johnston own the shop and gallery The Wrong Store, which was named the “Most Beautiful Independent Store” in Texas by Architectural Digest in 2018.
November 24, 2018 – January 13, 2019
Strand Gallery
November 24, 2018 - January 13, 2019
Opening Reception Saturday, November 24, 2018
6:00 – 9:00 PM
Artist talk at 6:30 PM
Kaneem Smith
Captive Sojourn and the Indefinite
Kaneem Smith’s exhibition, Captive Sojourn and the Indefinite, explores the tumultuous relationship between trade, consumption, and commodities. Referencing Galveston’s location on a natural port in the Gulf of Mexico, and its historical and contemporary ties to the exchange of goods and labor, her installation contemplates the trade of natural materials, specifically cotton and coffee through textiles, such as burlap used for import/export purposes. Smith draws inspiration from a familial and historical standpoint of personal experience and the human condition. Her exploration of three-dimensional form incorporates subtle psychological ideas of corruption and its lingering effects on human anthropology and American history. As a mixed media artist and sculptor with a background in fibers, these concepts run a complex thread throughout her body of work. Smith’s exhibition challenges viewers to contemplate global concerns of ethical trade, the West’s over-consumption of natural resources, and colonialist commodification of underprivileged producers and their products.
Kaneem Smith is an artist and educator based in Houston, TX. During her undergraduate art education, she studied at the Maryland Institute, College of Art and at Rice University before receiving her Bachelor of Arts degree from Sarah Lawrence College and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Syracuse University. Among her many accomplishments, exhibitions, awards, and residencies, Smith was the recipient of a visual arts fellowship through The Hungarian Multicultural Center Artists and Writers Residency Program in Hungary (2003), an Edward F. Albee Residency Grant (2005), Vermont Studio Center Fellowships (2006) (2008), and a Visual Arts Fellowship from the Creative Capital Foundation in New York (2008). Smith also received studio fellowships for the Atelierhaus Hilmsen Residency for Artists and Professionals in Germany (2010) (2012). In 2015 Smith co-organized the 2015 Texas Sculpture Symposium in Lubbock, TX, with featured Keynote speaker and distinguished visual artist Judy Pfaff and San Antonio sculptor Ken Little. In 2017, she received a visual artist grant award in sculpture from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation and received a Houston Artadia Award through Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue. Smith exhibits with Devin Borden Gallery in Houston.
artadia.org/artist/kaneem-smith
1878 Gallery
November 24, 2018 - January 13, 2019
Opening Reception Saturday, November 24, 2018
6:00 – 9:00 PM
Artist talk at 6:30 PM
Renata Lucia
News vs. Nature (Gulf)
For the exhibition News vs. Nature (Gulf), Renata Lucia’s paintings reflect on the widening social divides that unfold in the current news cycle. Her works incorporate national and local newspapers, including works created specifically for this exhibition that use pages from The Galveston Daily News. Acrylic paint and drawing media are applied to crumpled newspaper pages that are selected for composition and content, resulting in a textured topographical illusion. The intimacy of reading a physical newspaper is contrasted with a detached aerial view. Lucia began the News vs. Nature seriesconsidering the organized chaos of nature reigning supreme against the psychological toll of bad news. The series shifted and took on new importance in late 2017 as an epic battle began to rage in our perception and discussion of the news. Lucia’s works consider the questions “Is the news fake or, more likely, a last bastion of truth? Is nature sublime, or does it represent the most disturbing aspects of human nature?”
Native Texan Renata Lucia is influenced by her familial heritage of outsider artists, writers, quilters, embroiderers, miniaturists, and a research scientist. She explores memory, craft, domesticity, and the current socio-political climate through multiple mediums and processes. Her subjects range from traditional quilt patterns in encaustic interlaced with photographic images of unknown persons, to newspapers that have been manipulated to resemble our natural, organic surroundings, to photographs referencing the connectivity between consumerism, advertising, graffiti.
Lucia worked as a classically-trained, professional violist in the 1980’s and ‘90s, followed by a career in technical writing. After a chondrosarcoma diagnosis in 2000, she took her first art class when she joined the Glassell School of Art, MFAH. She became the first trained artist in her family when she graduated there with a Painting specialization.
Her work has been featured twice in the periodical New American Paintings and is part of the public collection of the International Women’s Museum in Marfa, TX. Additionally, she was a resident artist at Houston’s Project Row Houses, and a recent award winner at the 2017 Lawndale Big Show and the 2018 Assistance League of Houston Celebrates Texas Art exhibition. Lucia lives in Houston, TX and works out of her home studio.
www.renatalucia.com