Houston
Featured Show: Nick Vaughan & Jake Margolin: Around the Corner and Two Blocks Down, Jan. 15-March 7
For their second exhibition at McClain Gallery, Houston-based interdisciplinary artists Nick Vaughan and Jake Margolin have created new wind drawings. The artists, who are married and long-time creative collaborators, have dedicated their professional lives to documenting sites that are important to queer histories in the US, primarily mid-American gay and lesbian bars. To create their poignant wind drawings, they stencil imagery onto paper using loose charcoal powder that is then blown away. The resulting ghostly images, infused with life and loss, join the artists’ 50 States Project, inspired by the documented sites and informed by extensive research.
Featured Show: Marcelyn McNeil, solo exhibition, Jan. 9–Feb. 14
Marcelyn McNeil’s most recent abstract geometric paintings contain a “deep, absorbing darkness,” as described by the artist, an effect she achieves by layering thinned, poured pigments such as ink and oil paint onto raw canvas. The illusory result is made all the more contemplative by the blips and bleeds that emerge during her painting process, hinting at the inherent time-based nature of painting and our connection to the natural world. Paint lovers can catch her first solo exhibition at David Shelton Gallery in the new year, which features new large- and medium-scale works.
Dallas
Featured Show: Heap of Broken Images, Jan. 10–Feb. 21
Redemption is a powerful concept, and one ripe with powerful potential in the hands of an artist. Ashley Canty embraces the idea that “nothing is too far gone or beyond redemption” by incorporating reclaimed discarded wallpaper in her mixed media works. Her solo exhibition Heap of Broken Images, on view at Kirk Hopper Fine Art, surveys the past decade of her career, featuring her use of the quilt format and its patterns, stitching together ethereal connections among past, present, and future.
Featured show: Dawn Okoro, Grit, Jan. 10–March 5
Fashion photography, pop art, punk, Afropunk, and hip-hop are just a few of the cultural elements that influence Dawn Okoro’s portraiture and figurative works. As a child, she pored over glossy fashion magazines, and today she creates her own representations of beauty, style, and power in painting series such as Mad Explosive Spontaneity, Deconstructed Vixens, and Crown and Glory that incorporate high-chroma environments, gold leaf, expressive markmaking, three-dimensional elements, and more. Okoro debuts her new series Grit in 2026 at Pencil on Paper Gallery, and her permanent art installation, The Liberty Vault, remains on view at Meow Wolf Houston.
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HOUSTON: Nick Vaughan & Jake Margolin, Round Up (Kansas City, Missouri), 2025, charcoal powder and wind on paper, 96 x 240 inches, image courtesy of the artists and McClain Gallery.
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HOUSTON: Marcelyn McNeil, Tailor Made, 2025, oil on canvas, 30 x 20 inches, image courtesy of the artist and David Shelton Gallery.
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DALLAS: Ashley Canty, Heap of Boken Images, 2025, wallpaper, thread, and mixed media, 67 x 57 ¾ inches, image courtesy of the artist and Kirk Hopper Fine Art.
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DALLAS: Dawn Okoro, Untitled, 2025, oil on canvas, 48 x 36 inches, image courtesy of the artist and Pencil on Paper Gallery.
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FORT WORTH: Luis A. Jiménez, Mustang, 1997, hand-colored lithograph, 18 1/4 x 16 1/4 inches, image courtesy of the artist and Gallery 440.
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SAN ANTONIO: Gil Rocha, Esta Noche Arde La Cumbia / Tonight the Cumbia Burns, 2025, found objects, 13 1/2 x 20 x 1 1/2 inches, image courtesy of the artist and Presa House Gallery.
Fort Worth
Featured show: Bloodlines: The Jiménez–Cardwell Legacy, Nov. 15, 2025–Jan. 16, 2026
Gallery 400 kicks off the new year with a look at how creativity evolves across generations. Reflecting on shared heritage and vision, Bloodlines: The Jiménez–Cardwell Legacy, the first Jiménez family exhibition of its kind, explores the legacies of sculptor Luis A. Jiménez (1940–2006), painter Vicky Cardwell Balcou, multidisciplinary artist Elisa Jimenez, and educator Marguerite Knight Cardwell. Bloodlines features nearly a dozen of Luis Jiménez’s dynamic hand-colored lithographs alongside his experimental couture and illustrations, and it highlights Cardwell’s connection to the Fort Worth Circle, a progressive artist group of the 1940s and ʼ50s.
San Antonio
Featured show: YONKE EncontraDOS, Jan. 17–Feb. 28
Presa House Gallery’s first exhibition of the year, YONKE EncontraDOS, features work by South Texas artists Ruben Luna (aka GachoStyle) and Gil Rocha, who share an appreciation of rasquache aesthetics and what the gallery describes as “the inventive spirit found in working-class Mexican American communities.” Both artists assemble found materials to create cultural portraits that draw attention to the resourcefulness and humor embedded in everyday materials, highlighting the “makeshift strategies” of life along the U.S.–Mexico border and South Texas.
—NANCY ZASTUDIL
