Austin
Featured Show: Monica Martinez-Diaz, A Trajectory of Grief, May 18–Jul 4
Grief—simultaneously commonplace yet highly individualized—is something that each one of us must experience, navigating complex and often contradictory emotions on our own terms. In her multimedia exhibition A Trajectory of Grief, Monica Martinez-Diaz, inspired by the passing of her grandfather Antonio, uses the power of imagery to do exactly that. She originally conceived of the show in her hometown of Juarez, Mexico, during and after the pandemic. For its iteration at Women & Their Work, she employs photography, installations, video, and a book to express the paradoxical, multifaceted, and immersive qualities of grief: sorrow and relief, pain and acceptance, life and loss.
Dallas
Featured show: Sally Warren, The Press of My Hands, May 18–August 3
For her exhibition The Press of My Hands at Liliana Bloch Gallery, Sally Warren continues with her practice of appropriating digital imagery, but for this body of work she sought a specific kind of connection to make meaning, “a metaphorical bridge between virtual and material.” Using her hands for mark-making and pressure in her printmaking process, Warren smoothed paper over ink to transfer images of war-torn cities and those devastated by environmental disasters. As the gallery states, “each finished print is a site of invested meaning, and an embodied response to virtual experience.”
Houston
Featured show: Delita Martin, What the Night Knew, May 16–July 6
“The concept of Spirit World, what I refer to as the ‘Veilscape,’ is one that has been embraced by African American women as a powerful tool in their journey towards self-empowerment,” writes Delita Martin for her exhibition What the Night Knew. The show features mixed media figurative artworks that depict the embodiment of the four main elements of Martin’s Veilscape: duality, freedom from oppression, transformation, and connection to ancestors. The works on view allude to the physical and spiritual worlds that Black women traverse and transcend, and their experiences, transformations, and discoveries therein.
Featured show: Tracye Wear, From the Garden, May 4 – June 15
Cubism, early twentieth-century sculpture, and nature inform Tracye Wear’s large coil-built ceramic vessels, as does her own garden. Her studio is filled with bowls full of harvested dried seeds, seed pods, and branches, all of which inspire the artist’s irregular, asymmetric forms and their textured, notched, curved and ridged surfaces. Here, “off-kilter” is the highest compliment. Color plays a role as well, highlighting both protrusions and indentations. Moody Gallery’s exhibition From the Garden features new works by the artist, in keeping with her formal and conceptual sensibilities.
Marfa
Featured show: The Unusual Suspects, April 5–June 15
For The Unusual Suspects, RULE Gallery presents paintings on paper by Joe Clower and small-scale sculptures by Amber Cobb, two distinctly different artists who share a notable affinity for the unexpected. Familiar but unidentifiable, the works that each artist creates are wholly of worlds beyond this one. Clower’s angular contraptions populate mechanical environments, while Cobb’s organic pastel-colored forms meld figure and function. Together, the artists stretch viewers’ imaginations and probe at the mysterious depths of the psyche.
San Antonio
Featured Show: Vernacular Systems, March 1–June 9
Contemporary Art Month and the Contemporary at Blue Star present the 2024 CAM Perennial exhibition Vernacular Systems, with works by Ricky Armendariz, Jennifer Battaglia, Juan Carlos Escobedo, Preston Gaines, Monique Garza, Nela Garzón, Raul Rene Gonzalez, Mark Anthony Martinez, Shavon Aja Morris, Marc Newsome, Alán Serna, and Zulma Vega. Curated by Houston artist and curator Christopher Blay, the show “highlights themes of interconnectivity from personal and globalized perspectives,” with artists reflecting on humans’ proclivity for connection and critiquing the histories and systems that keep us separated.
—NANCY ZASTUDIL
