Lovie Olivia is an artist living in, and hailing from, Houston, TX. I have visited this studio before, when I wrote about Olivia’s partner, Preetika Rajgariah.
Cast your brain on the ocean of pop culture references for “perpetual worker” and you may come up with workaholic TV dads, the Energizer Bunny, or even Sisyphus, doomed to an eternity of useless boulder-pushing.
Annette Lawrence reads me something she’s written about her work: “I’m tuned in to things that go unannounced and remain steady, continuous, and unremarkable on the surface, but hold magic over time.”
“There are associations that come with the use of a sarape, especially now with recent political and economic border issues,” says Adrian Esparza, referring to the brightly colored, blanket-like shawls from Latin America that inform and compose much of his work as well as the constant issue of the Mexican-American border, in which Texas is often found at the center.
When I walk into Audrya Flores’s home studio in San Antonio, I find a wood-paneled room, with a carefully curated selection of objects—needlework, prints, collages, fabric pieces—paired with found things—a turtle shell, stones, a preserved bat, potted plants.
I visited ceramicist Angel Oloshove at her studio in the Houston Heights to talk about her process, what’s on the horizon, and how she got to where she is.
The 2013 Hunting Art Prize winner describes the entire universe of a body or an object with subtle tones and pencil marks on translucent Mylar—a surface so delicate that one swipe of his hand could smudge it irreparably. In this way it is reminiscent of Buddhist sand mandalas, an effort of time and “intense study,” as the artist puts it.
Preetika Rajgariah will spend much of the remainder of 2018 travelling so I was lucky to catch her at her home studio in Houston that she shares with her partner, Lovie Olivia.