1878 & Brown Foundation Galleries
August 28 – November 14, 2021
ArtWalk Reception - Saturday, August 28, 2021
6 – 9 PM
This exhibition is supported in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and Texas Commission on the Arts.
Ryan Hawk
distorts of trespass
Ryan Hawk’s exhibition distorts of trespass showcases the artist’s continued analysis of masculinity and whiteness within both popular and sub-cultural modes of expression. Intentionally manipulating the common judicial term “torts of trespass,” the exhibition’s title serves to mirror the complex and contradictory forms of expropriation addressed in his work.
Central to the exhibition is Hawk’s 2019 film installation Untitled (blue), in which a 1958 heartache-ballad-turned-millennial-pop song is taken to score a mock horror narrative that scrutinizes traditional representations of engendered emotional capacities. Recent sculptures in silicone will also be displayed, such as tattooed ‘flesh-objects’ that confront appropriations of marginality and dispossession as well as abnormally long appendages that disorder subversive performances of power and privilege.
Spanning many mediums and approaches, Hawk exhibits in distorts of trespass an invitation to transverse the borders of our collective imagination and recognize the mechanics of fear that uphold systems of domination and oppression.
Ryan Hawk is an artist and scholar working with video, sculpture, and site-specific installation to imagine alternative corporealities and forms of embodiment. Either through filmic character studies that satirize notions of universal self-determination or sculptural ‘flesh-objects’ that confront sub-cultural expressions of power and privilege, Hawk’s projects disorder the symbolic and material conditioning of white, cis-heteropatriarchy. Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at Gray Contemporary, Lawndale Art Center, The Umlauf Sculpture Garden and Museum, and The Museum of Human Achievement. His work has also been included in group exhibitions, screenings, and festivals such as Perform Chinatown, Los Angeles; Grace Exhibition Space, Brooklyn; the Museum of Fine Arts, Nagoya; Jonathan Hopson Gallery, Houston; and many more. Hawk’s work will be included in the forthcoming 2021 Texas Biennial: A New Landscape, A Possible Horizon, co‑organized by curators and artistic directors Ryan N. Dennis and Evan Garza in collaboration with Max Fields of Fotofest International. Notable awards include an SMFA Traveling Fellowship, The Arch and Anne Giles Kimbrough Fund from the Dallas Museum of Art, and a two-year fellowship with the Core Residency Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Hawk holds a BFA in studio art from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and an MFA in studio art from the University of Texas at Austin.
July 17 - October 3, 2021
Strand Gallery
July 17 – October 3, 2021
ArtWalk Reception - Saturday, July 17, 6 - 9PM
Exhibit Connect: Nastassja Swift in conversation with Ann Johnson
Saturday, October 2, 2021
2PM via Zoom and Facebook Live
This exhibition is supported in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and Texas Commission on the Arts.
Work from the exhibition is made possible in part in part by the Black Box Press Foundation. Special thanks to Breanna Mahoney, Jazmine Diggs, Ryland Green, Stephanie Swift, Kyndal Swift, Evan Hannah, and Jessica Burroughs.
Nastassja Swift
Canaan: when I read your letter, I feel your voice
“When I read the physical yellow letter, torn from my brother’s legal pad, I’m often overwhelmed. Initially, it’s a reminder of where he is, and where he’ll be for some time. And then there’s the ability to read, and reread, thus harping on his thoughts and feelings- and it can be emotionally paralyzing. Yet it allows me to hold something that he’s touched - almost as if that’s our form of contact for the time being, reminding me of just how much I miss him. And strangely, that’s the moment that is special.”
Canaan: when I read your letter, I feel your voice is a multi-layered installation and collaborative performance that intimately displays the exchange between Nastassja Swift and her brother, who is currently incarcerated within the Virginia Department of Corrections. Articulating feelings of absence, erasure, and the personal and communal impact of mass incarceration, Nastassja’s culminating body of work explores her personal experience navigating, as his sister, the past few years of Canaan’s incarceration.
At the heart of the exhibition, Security Blanket includes a 40-foot fabric and glass beaded quilt, that serves as both a portal for channeling Canaan’s energy, and a representation of the artist’s feelings of responsibility towards her brother. She questions: “What does my own cell look like?” The oversized blanket looped through the steel fabrication of her brother’s prison cell acknowledges that their communication is both what comforts and consumes her. Measuring 6.5 of his shoes wide, 10 shoes high and 11 shoes long, the quilted room holds space for the artist, and others, to read written letters from loved ones whom they cannot reach due to incarceration. In a purposeful collaboration with her brother, the artist pieces together portraits, collages audio, and curates a space that visualizes the collective weight of confinement.
Nastassja Swift is a visual artist holding a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Art from Virginia Commonwealth University. She is the owner and artist of D for Dolls, an online collection of handmade needle felted figures. Along with being a doll maker, she works with fiber, audio, performance, and film within her studio practice. Her short film, and first collaborative performance, Remembering Her Homecoming, premiered at the Afrikana Independent Film Festival in Fall 2019, and screened at the Virginia Film Festival in Charlottesville and Current Art Fair in Richmond. Swift is the recipient of a Virginia Commission of the Arts Fellowship in Craft for the 2020 cycle, and recently the Black Box Press Foundation, Art as Activism Grant. Her work is permanently displayed at The Colored Girls Museum in Philadelphia and currently on view in a four women exhibition at Pentimenti Gallery in Philadelphia. Swift is an artist in residence for the First Patron Initiative with the Contemporary Arts Network Foundation, where her work is a part of the Foundation’s collection. Her work has been acquired into the Grace Linton Battle Memorial Fund for the Arts Collection, as well as the Quirk Hotel in Charlottesville. Swift’s work has been included in RVA Magazine, RHome Magazine and the Stranger, a Seattle publication. She has participated in several national and international residencies and exhibitions, including her first solo exhibit in Doha, Qatar in 2016, an exhibition at the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art in Michigan, satellite programs with 1708 Gallery, Quirk Gallery's Charlottesville location, and fellowships at the Vermont Studio Center and MASS MoCA. Swift is currently living and working in Virginia.
Press:
Houston Chronicle - Galveston Arts Center exhibit inspired by her brother’s prison letters
Arts & Culture Texas - Lost Time: Nastassja Swift at Galveston Arts Center
Glasstire.com - To Comfort and Consume: Nastassja Swift at Galveston Arts Center
June 5 - August 22, 2021
1878 & Brown Foundation Galleries
June 5 – August 22, 2021
ArtWalk Reception - Saturday, June 5, 2021
6 – 9 PM
This exhibition is supported in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and Texas Commission on the Arts.
Irene Antonia Diane Reece
Home-goings
Home-goings is an exhibition by Houston based contemporary artist and visual activist Irene Antonia Diane Reece featuring photography and installations that explore African American spirituality, Black southern churches, and Black Liberation Theology. The term home-goings describes the traditional funerary practice in the African American Christian church of celebrating the life of those who have passed and sending them on to the afterlife and their motherland. For Reece this practice represents the complexities of protecting Black lives and has become central to her work and life. Through experimentations with imagery from family archives, church objects, and multilayered metaphors and messages, Reece celebrates her family, identity, spirituality, and emphasizes that Black lives are sacred.
Irene Antonia Diane Reece identifies as a contemporary artist and visual activist. Born and raised in Houston, TX, she earned her BFA in Photography and Digital Media and MFA in Photography and Image-making. Reece’s work has been exhibited internationally, including recent exhibitions at the 5th Biennale Internationale de Casablanca, in Casablanca, Morocco; the virtual group exhibition MULTI at the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center, Austin, TX; and Unraveled. Restructured. Revealed: Where Contemporary Art and Diverse Perspectives Intersect curated by Tyanna Buie, Trout Museum of Art, Appleton, WI. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, ARTnews, and Lenscratch, along with editorial contributions for ProPublica. Reece is a 2021 recipient of the Black Rock Senegal Residency in Dakar, Senegal. Reece’s photographic works, appropriated films, usage of text, and found objects create an insight into her world. The topics surrounding her work are racial identity, African diaspora, social injustice, family histories, re-memory, mental and community health. Reece’s objectives are to continue to take up space, contribute to making work for the communities she represents, and create forms of racial equity in the arts.
April 24 - July 11, 2021
Strand Gallery
April 24 - July 11, 2021
ArtWalk Extended Hours - Saturday, April 24, until 8PM
Exhibit-Connect: Heyd Fontenot in conversation with Kristian Salinas and Dennis Nance
Saturday, June 12, 2021
2-3 PM (in-person at GAC - limited capacity)
Click here for more information and to register.
A recording of the conversation will be shared on this page following the event.
This exhibition is supported in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and Texas Commission on the Arts.
Heyd Fontenot
Sacred Order of Eternal Wounds
Heyd Fontenot’s exhibition, Sacred Order of Eternal Wounds, delves into the myth of American identity to explore the politicized topics of gender, sexuality, queer identity, and what the artist calls "the false-promise of comfort-in-conformity." Fontenot is well-known for his stylized and delicate nude portraits. This exhibition debuts new visual experiments in figuration, illustration, and decoration in a series of mural-scaled paintings. Blurring the lines between art gallery and theatrical prompt, this immersive installation transforms GAC’s main gallery into a space reminiscent of a secret fraternal order’s ceremonial chamber. This environment draws on the artist’s background in film and set design and is populated by images of contemporary figures, archetypal characters from mythology, and a codex of symbols and patterns. Fontenot’s work navigates perceptions of the human body as a political site that is conflicted by religious and political institutions, mass media, consumption, and social norms. This "sacred order" celebrates queer space in the face of nonstop social outrage motivating a newfound public dialogue and a growing awareness that tradition and nostalgia are oppressive forces.
Heyd Fontenot is a Texas-based multidisciplinary artist and curator whose career has included roles in advertising, theater, television, film and digital media, as a graphic artist, set designer, art director and producer. He has held positions as Director of CentralTrak (2011-2016), UTDallas' international artists' residency program and exhibition space, and was recently appointed as Director of the San Antonio non-profit art space Sala Diaz where he was previously a Casa Chuck resident artist (2019). Widely known for his figurative paintings and drawings, Fontenot recruits his friends and artistic peers as models and has in this process created a comprehensive portrait of his community over the last two decades. Fontenot has been awarded the Dozier Travel Grant through the Dallas Museum of Art, the Mastermind Award from the Dallas Observer, been named as one of 100 Dallas Creatives, and while directing the gallery at CentralTrak it was named “best art space” by both DMagazine and the Dallas Observer and top ten galleries by Glasstire and Culturemap. Fontenot has exhibited his experimental films at festivals nationally and internationally. His work has been featured in numerous exhibitions in Texas and the United States, including exhibitions at Mountain View College, Dallas, TX (2014); the Wrong Store, Marfa, TX (2013); Beige, Memphis, TN (2013); Allegheny College, Meadville, PA (2012); Inman Gallery, Houston, TX (2011); Rollins College, Winter Park, FL (2011) and the University of Maryland, College Park, FL (2010). As a working artist, Fontenot has participated in multiple residencies and is an active exhibiting artist represented by Conduit Gallery in Dallas.
March 6 - May 30, 2021
1878 Gallery
March 6 – May 30, 2021
This exhibition is supported in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and Texas Commission on the Arts.
Gregory Michael Carter
Port of Origin
Gregory Michael Carter is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily in drawing, painting, collage, and photography. His exhibition, Port of Origin, includes works based on the concept of Black relics and includes materials such as stone, papyrus, silk, basketball flooring, and Newport cigarette cartons. Through these works Carter interrogates the impacts of history on his current life through carefully constructed and coded ideograms that depict connections between various social and political issues. Gregory's practice is rooted in an expanded view of history, with a particular interest in human interaction and how it causes the spread of culture in the modern world.
Gregory Michael Carter (b. Houston, TX) is an artist currently living between Houston, TX and St. Louis, MO, where he is developing an artist residency and community development program. His work has been featured in exhibitions in Houston at Project Row Houses, Texas Southern University, Community Artist Collective, Wedge Space, and Hooks-Epstein Gallery, as well as exhibitions at Monaco, St. Louis, MO; Merton D. Simpson Gallery, New York, NY; and MadisMad Gallery, Madrid, Spain. He is the co-founder of Third Ward’s Finest. His work has been featured in New American Paintings Midwest issue #149 in 2020 and West issue #90 in 2010. Carter is a 2021 recipient of an Idea Fund Award for his project: Machine to Retrieve Reparations.
Brown Foundation Gallery
March 6 – May 30, 2021
This exhibition is supported in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and Texas Commission on the Arts.
Mari Hernandez
Figments of Truth
Mari Hernandez’ exhibition, Figments of Truth, features the artist’s ongoing exploration into self-portraits that examine the history of portraiture and the characteristics of canonical representation. Hernandez’ invented subjects are derived from theories of physiognomy that claimed to explain (and illustrate) that a person's physical features or expression are indicative of their personality, intellect, and moral character. The subjects are characters presented as strong, stoic, dignified, and important, while their histories are both present and unseen. Collectively, Hernandez’ photographs present a historical narrative under the guise of documentation and emphasize that history is storytelling—imagined narratives, intentionally constructed, and subjectively biased. The work questions how physiognomy and the characteristics of an individual inform identity, and how much of our identity is self-created or projected onto us. The work questions how much of an identity that is projected or fabricated gets internalized by an individual. Based on representation, which is the more authentic self?
Mari Hernandez is a multidisciplinary artist that utilizes self-portraiture to address questions about identity. Her career in non-profit arts organizations led her to explore socially engaged and identity-based art and offer her a platform to address the lack of representation of women of color in her arts community in San Antonio, TX. As a co-founder of the Chicana art collective Mas Rudas (2009-2015), her self-portraits focused on Chicana aesthetic. Hernandez’ work has been featured in exhibitions at the McNay Art Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, Artpace San Antonio, the Institute of Texan Cultures, Centro de Artes, and the Appalachian Center for Craft in Tennessee. Hernandez is a graduate of the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures Leadership Institute and Arts Advocacy Institute, and she participated in the inaugural Public Art San Antonio Mentorship Course. In 2017, she was awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation Emerging Artist Grant, and the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures Fund for the Arts Grant. Hernandez holds a Bachelor’s Degree in English Literature from the University of Texas at San Antonio. She lives and works in San Antonio, Texas.
January 30 - April 18, 2021
Strand Gallery
January 30 - April 18, 2021
This exhibition is supported in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and Texas Commission on the Arts.
Ronald L. Jones
Wave (Goodbye)
Wave (Goodbye) is a site-specific sculptural installation by Houston-based artist Ronald L. Jones. The installation is representative of a large tidal wave and its wake, sweeping through GAC’s main gallery space and engulfing visitors. Jones’ work adds physical context to the magnitude of repercussions regarding inaction and indifference in matters of human rights and equality, ecology, and industry. The wake of Wave asks visitors to acknowledge a shared responsibility to the preservation and maintenance of a living planet and its inhabitants.
Ronald Llewellyn Jones is an interdisciplinary artist based in Houston, Texas. Jones’ artwork explores barriers between artists and audiences, as well as individuals and their communities by challenging their respective perceptions as it relates to access and agency within normative societal structures. In addition to numerous installations in public spaces throughout Houston, Jones’ work has been included in exhibitions at Foltz Fine Art, Art League Houston, Fatland Gallery, Space HL, Hardy and Nance Studios, and BOX 13 ArtSpace.
2020
November 21, 2020 - February 28, 2021
1878 Gallery
November 21, 2020 – February 28, 2021
*This exhibition will be temporarily closed January 4 - 19 while the building undergoes renovations.
This exhibition is supported in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and Texas Commission on the Arts.
Stephen Wilson
Boy Life in America
Stephen Wilson's exhibition, Boy Life in America, features a new series of works on paper that present images of Black Americans as living extensions of contemporary, democratic possibilities. For generations, Black boys have exemplified an extraordinary method of adaptation toward unsettled situations, new experiences, diversity, and institutional change. The exhibition title and themes reference Albert Murray’s 1970 book The Omni-americans and music from Cody Chesnutt's 2012 album, The Headphone Masterpiece. The works are a continuation of Wilson’s use of anonymous models from barbershop styling posters. He presents these figures not as abnormal, non-white people, but as innocuous creators of culture, observing the world and adapting anonymously.
Stephen Wilson is a Houston based artist who co-runs Raincoat Creative, a company specializing in complex A/V installation, and works full time as a part of the Communications team at the ACLU of Texas. His personal practice evolved while an undergrad at UT-Austin. Wilson’s recent solo show Ultimate Justice, focused on the death penalty in Texas. His work explores digital representation, race and identity politics, and the aesthetics of installation as arbiter of message.
www.stephenwilsonyes.com
Click here to download a PDF that includes the exhibition checklist and artist’s resume.
Brown Foundation Gallery
November 21, 2020 – February 28, 2021
*This exhibition will be temporarily closed January 4 - 19 while the building undergoes renovations.
This exhibition is supported in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and Texas Commission on the Arts.
Steve Parker
Day is Done
Day is Done features sound sculptures by Austin-based artist Steve Parker. His work explores communal experiences that examine history, systems, and behavior. The exhibition features a new work inspired by Guy Taylor’s public performance of Taps each evening in downtown Galveston and the tradition being carried on by Constable Clint Wayne Brown. Parker’s site-responsive sculpture for Galveston is made from salvaged brass instrument bells that play a composition of collected recordings of the lyrics of the well-known Taps tune. This work reflects on its roots as a call to retire for the evening and metaphor for life and death. The exhibition also features Parker’s 2018 work Sirens in the second-floor vault, which reimagines the function of the contemporary civil defense siren. Rather than projecting conventional warning tones, Sirens plays intermittent recordings of songs of distress as a call to action.
Steve Parker is an artist, musician, and curator in Austin, TX. He is the recipient of the Rome Prize, the Tito’s Prize, a Fulbright, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Parker works with salvaged musical instruments, amateur choirs, marching bands, urban bat colonies, flocks of grackles, and pedicab fleets to investigate how communal listening can provoke greater social awareness and responsibility. His projects include elaborate civic rituals for humans, animals, and machines; listening sculptures modeled after obsolete surveillance tools; and cathartic transportation symphonies for operators of cars, pedicabs, and bicycles.
Parker has exhibited and performed at institutions, public spaces, and festivals internationally. Highlights include Art Basel Miami Beach, the Lucerne Festival (Switzerland), MASS MoCA, the Lincoln Center Festival, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Fusebox Festival, Tanglewood, Los Angeles Philharmonic inSIGHT, SXSW, the Stone, Contemporary Arts Center (New Orleans), the Blanton Museum of Art (Austin), the Asian Arts Initiative (Philadelphia), The Contemporary Austin, Bowerbird, and the Gene Siskel Film Center (Chicago). As a soloist and as an artist of NYC-based "new music dream team" Ensemble Signal, he has premiered 200+ new works.
Parker has been awarded support from the National Endowment for the Arts, New Music USA, the Copland Foundation, the Puffin Foundation, and the Mid America Arts Alliance. He is the Curator of SoundSpace at the Blanton Museum of Art, Executive Director of Collide Arts, and a faculty member at UTSA. He holds degrees in Math and Music from Oberlin, Rice, and UT Austin.
steveparkerartist.com
Click here to download a PDF that includes the exhibition checklist and artist’s resume.
October 10, 2020 - January 3, 2021
Strand Gallery
October 10, 2020 – Janaury 3, 2021
This exhibition is supported in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and Texas Commission on the Arts.
Going Through a Phrase
Alicia Eggert, Candace Hicks, Stephanie Patton, Andrea Tosten, and Rachelle Vasquez
Going Through a Phrase includes text-based works by artists Alicia Eggert, Candace Hicks, Stephanie Patton, Andrea Tosten, and Rachelle Vasquez. Through neon signage, calligraphy, and textiles, each artist employs familiar fonts and shapes to communicate ideas, warnings, personal reflections, and social commentary. By bringing words into physical form, these works disrupt the constant flow of information we receive in the modern world, inviting viewers into a visual conversation.
Click here to download a PDF that includes the exhibition checklist and artist resumes.
Alicia Eggert (b. 1981) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work gives material form to language and time, the powerful but invisible forces that shape our perception of reality. Alicia's work has been exhibited at notable institutions nationally and internationally, including the CAFA Art Museum in Beijing, the Triennale Design Museum in Milan, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Corning Museum of Glass, the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History, the Telfair Museums, and many more. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Galeria Fernando Santos (Porto, Portugal), The MAC (Dallas, TX), and T+H Gallery (Boston, MA). Alicia is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including a TED Fellowship, a Washington Award from the S&R Foundation, a Direct Artist Grant from the Harpo Foundation, an Artist Microgrant from the Nasher Sculpture Center, and an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Maine Arts Commission. She has been an artist in residence at Google Tilt Brush, Sculpture Space, True/False Film Festival, and the Tides Institute and Museum of Art. In 2020, she was added to the Fulbright Specialist Roster by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Alicia earned a Bachelor of Science degree from Drexel University in 2004, and a Masters of Fine Arts in Sculpture/Dimensional Studies from Alfred University in 2009. She is currently a Presidential Early Career Professor of Studio Art and the Sculpture Program Coordinator at the University of North Texas. Her work is represented by Galeria Fernando Santos in Porto, Portugal, and Liliana Bloch Gallery in Dallas. She lives with her son, Zephyr, in Denton, Texas.
aliciaeggert.com
Candace Hicks collects coincidences from the books she reads and gathers them in her embroidered artist books. Her compendiums of coincidence are records that show the world through a particular, specific, sometimes obsessive, point of view. She is an Associate Professor at Stephen F. Austin State University where she teaches foundational courses in two-dimensional media. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Austin College where she studied drawing, painting, and French. In 2009 she earned a Master of Fine Art degree in Printmaking from Texas Christian University. Her work consists of artist’s books, video, performance, printmaking and drawing. Books from her Common Threads series are in more than 80 collections around the world including, Boston Athenaeum, Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, Grolier Club, Harvard, Hungarian Multicultural Center, MIT, MoMA, Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna, UCLA Biomedical Library, Stanford, and Yale.
www.candacehicks.com
Click here to view pages from Candace Hicks’ The Case of the Endless Yarn.
Stephanie Patton is a multimedia artist whose work comprises sculpture, painting, photography, video and performance. Humor plays an important role in her work and is often used as a device to bring attention to more critical issues and transform her personal experiences into something universal. Based in Lafayette, LA, Patton received her BFA in Painting from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in 1993 and her MFA in Photography from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1996. Stephanie has shown her work nationally and internationally including at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Elizabeth Houston Gallery and Voltz Clarke Gallery in New York; the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Louisiana ArtWorks, the Contemporary Art Center and Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans, LA; and Galerie Patricia Dorfmann in Paris, France. She is represented by Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans and Voltz Clarke Gallery in New York City. She is also a founding member of The Front, an artist’s collective, in New Orleans, LA. Her work has been published in The New York Times, New American Paintings and the New Art Examiner. Stephanie has received several grants including a Career Advancement Grant from the Louisiana Division of the Arts in 2009 and 2012. She has been an artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center, the Santa Fe Art Institute and the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans. In 2019 Stephanie was a South Arts Fellowship Recipient for the state of Louisiana and a Finalist for the 1858 Prize for Contemporary Southern Art with The Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, SC. Stephanie is currently the producer and host (as the character Renella Rose Champagne) of Lost in Love on KRVS 88.7FM.
Andrea Tosten is a calligrapher and a bookbinder based in Dallas, TX. Her work explores social constructs, binary thinking, and the nature of existence. She received a Bachelor of Science in BioMedical Science from Texas A&M University and a Master of Liberal Arts in Museum Studies from the University of Oklahoma. Tosten is a self-taught calligraphy artist and has worked in the medium for over 15 years. She teaches calligraphy at Oil and Cotton in Dallas and restores and conserves books at The Book Doctor. Her work has been featured in exhibitions in the Dallas-Fort Worth area including an artist residency at Tarrant County College, South Campus in 2019-2020, along with exhibitions at Cedar Valley College, the Dallas Public Library’s Jillian Bradshaw Gallery, the South Dallas Cultural Center, the Bath House Cultural Center, the Oak Cliff Cultural Center, and Terrain Dallas.
a-scribe.squarespace.com
Rachelle Vasquez is a Houston-native and art educator, who received her BA in Art Education with a minor in Art History from the University of Houston. Vasquez is well known for her intricately crocheted works. She participated in artist residencies at DiverseWorks and the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft. Her work has been included in exhibitions throughout Houston, including solo exhibitions at Lawndale Art Center and Box 13 ArtSpace. Vasquez was an original member of Knitta, a group of artists known for starting the “knit graffiti” movement in Houston, TX in 2005. Her work has been reviewed in the Houston Press, Arts Houston magazine and Glasstire. In 2016, she received and Individual Artist Grant from the City of Houston and the Houston Arts Alliance.
www.rachellevasquez.com