Vast and Varied: Texan Women Painters

Ruiz-Healy Art presents Vast and Varied: Texan Women Painters, a group exhibition of works by Jennifer Agricola Mojica, Eva Marengo Sánchez, Audrey Rodríguez, Marta Sánchez, and Ethel Shipton. The exhibition will be on view at our New York City gallery from June 12 to August 15, 2025, with an opening reception on June 12 from 6:00 to 8:00 PM. Vast and Varied: Texan Women Painters tackles the cultural milieu through themes of cityscapes, motherhood, mementos, and domesticity. 

San Antonio-based artist Jennifer Agricola Mojica paints vibrant, ephemeral spaces that offer belonging in a discordant world. Her superimposed compositions cross genres of abstraction and figurative painting. By stripping and rebuilding thick layers of paint, Agricola Mojica creates visual tensions that allude to fractured memory and the deception of time. In The Sixteen Dollar Cake, a sleeping figure is positioned under a lush canopy of monstera plants as lingering smoke rises from the wicks of extinguished birthday candles, alluding to memories and the passage of time. Jennifer Agricola Mojica’s paintings in the exhibition portray the transience of navigating through grief and motherhood with fragmented forms.

Eva Marengo Sánchez paints realistic still lifes of seemingly mundane subjects. The paintings displayed in the Vast and Varied exhibition celebrate her cultural heritage and document her upbringing in San Antonio, Texas. Marengo Sánchez captures snapshots of life to reveal the complex emotional experiences of memory, nostalgia, and loss. The painting titled No, I can fix it! To: Tia Lupe, focuses on a broken chair that was once a fixture in Tia Lupe’s kitchen. Marengo Sánchez explores the complexities of grief, guilt, and regret that arise from attachment to an inanimate object. She delves into the intersection of longing, hope, love, and nostalgia, exploring deep, sentimental ties to the ordinary. The artist emphasizes objects, prioritizing the expression of emotional truth.

Similarly, Audrey Rodríguez assembles objects of personal and social significance that she pulls from familial settings. Her observational still lifes, which are rooted in cross-cultural identity, integrate elements of magical realism that enable her work to reflect intergenerational attitudes towards migration and the circulation of objects and goods across borders. Growing up in Port Isabel, South Texas, and later moving to New York, the artist elaborates on how movement has shaped how she sees and values the everyday. “Living in Brooklyn now, I still carry those textures through color, material, and memory. The objects I paint aren’t just things; they hold a sense of movement, adaptation, and dual belonging.”

Born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, Chicana artist Marta Sánchez constructs a cultural identity portrait by merging everyday life scenes with folkloric expression. Her figurative style, featuring religious icons typically adorned in shrines and altars, renders her artworks as contemporary retablos. Retablos, small devotional paintings featuring religious scenes and Catholic saints, are popular folk art in Mexico derived from traditional Catholic church art brought to the Americas by the Spanish Empire. Sánchez follows in the traditions of retablos in paintings such as Rome, where Sánchez depicts a boy and a girl unaware of the saints that hover over their beds, with the text of a prayer framing the image.