1878 Gallery
November 14, 2026 - February 28, 2027
ArtWalk Opening Reception
Saturday, November 14, 2026
6 – 9 PM
Artist talk at 6:30 PM
GAC’s exhibitions are supported in part by a grant from Texas Commission on the Arts.
Jessica Simorte and Max Manning
The Spiny Lobsters
Spiny Lobsters is an exhibition of intimately scaled abstract works by Jessica Simorte and Max Manning. The title of the exhibition is drawn from an animal with a complex navigational system that allows it to find its way home. Spiny lobsters are capable of sensing minute changes in the earth’s magnetic fields, using this information to navigate through the ocean and return to their dens. Throughout their art practices, Simorte and Manning are similarly interested in the ways we navigate, orient ourselves, and find our way back to familiar places.
Simorte and Manning are a wife and husband artist team. Both maintain individual studio practices, but they share similar artistic sensibilities and tend to follow the same orbit. Spiny Lobsters explores the space between these individual practices—the points of convergence, divergence, and exchanges that emerge when two artists live and work alongside one another for over almost fifteen years. The works in the exhibition are intimate in scale and closely attuned to process, material, and gesture, reflecting two distinct practices that continually find their way back toward one another.
Jessica Simorte completed her MFA with an emphasis in painting at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning in 2014. She is currently living in the Houston area where she is an Associate Professor at Sam Houston State University. She has shown regionally, nationally and internationally and has been included in numerous publications, including multiple issues of New American Paintings. Most recently, she’s held a solo exhibition in upstate New York and is invested in a new body of work on paper. When she is not teaching, parenting or painting, she’s probably dreaming of adopting another dog.
jessicasimorte.com
Max Manning is an artist and educator who currently lives and works in Houston, Texas. He earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Two Dimensional Studies from Bowling Green State University in 2011 and his Master of Fine Arts from the University of Cincinnati in 2014. Max has exhibited work nationally and internationally and is currently represented by TW Fine Art in Brisbane, Australia and Todd Weiner Gallery in Kansas City, Missouri. Manning’s work was included in the 2017 Texas Biennial. His paintings have been shown in The Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati Ohio, Trestle Gallery in Brooklyn, New York, Ortega y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn, New York, Durden and Ray in Los Angeles, California, The Lawndale Art Center in Houston, the CICA Museum in Gimpo, South Korea Texas, Espacio 20/20 in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Le Practicable Espace D’ Exposition in Rennes, France, and The Saatchi Gallery in London, England. His work has been featured in Maake Magazine, Fresh Paint Magazine, and Studio Visit Magazine.
maxmanningart.com