Latinx Art: Transcending Borders: Houston

Octavia Art Gallery (Houston, Texas) is pleased to announce the third collaborative exhibition with Ruiz-Healy Art (San Antonio & NYC) Latinx Art: Transcending Borders. The exhibition explores and celebrates Latinx visual arts in the United States, predominantly Texas. The exhibition opens the night before the National conference of Latino Art Now and is curated by Patricia Ruiz-Healy, Ph.D.

Showcasing the rich diversity that results in transcending borders, the exhibition features artworks by Ruiz-Healy Art represented artists Jesse Amado, Richard Armendariz, Margarita Cabrera, Michael Menchaca, Cecilia Paredes, Chuck Ramirez, and Ethel Shipton including paintings, drawings, sculptures, and edition prints.

Jesse Amado’s work endorses the quality of change and how limitless and liberating it can be for an artist. It resists the formulaic and instead embraces the free association and process that reflects the Freudian play of the creative act.

Being raised on the US-Mexico border heavily influences Richard Armendariz’s aesthetic and conceptual ideas. He carves and paints images that have cultural, biographical, and art historical references into the surface of his artwork.

Inspired by her upbringing in the US border city of El Paso, Margarita Cabrera has made one of her artistic research subjects the working conditions of assembly line factories. Influenced by iconic pop art imagery such as Andy Warhol’s celebrity portraits, Cabrera employs a similar compositional format in her series of hand-made quilts (2004). In Vocho Quilt, the iconic Volkswagen Beetle is replicated across numerous hand-stitched VW Beetles, referring to the tedious monotony of a manufacturing assembly line.

For this exhibition, Michael Menchaca has created compositions and motifs to explore personal memories of growing up in Texas. Menchaca’s narratives address current sociopolitical issues and the struggle that immigrants face in the United States. In his signature style, his works play with both repetition and scale with overlapping figures, patterns, and multiple windows of storyline and fable.

Cecilia Paredes combines themes found in nature, such as origins, camouflage, transformation, and her body to acquire multiple identities through a blend of sculptural recreations and photography. She works on the theme of building her own identity with the entourage or part of the world where she lives or where she feels she can call home.

Always personally relevant, Chuck Ramirez explored cultural identity, mortality, and consumerism through his photographs and installations. Using typography and digital imaging technology, Ramirez isolates and recontextualizes familiar objects and texts to explore the human condition.

Ethel Shipton’s practice is informed by a strong conceptual base and encompasses a variety of expressions. Through painting, installation, photography, and text, Shipton spotlights instants of clarity that flit by in the comings and goings of daily life. She challenges context and draws on the power of the unexpected.

view exhibition on artsy