Paper Trails

Ruiz-Healy Art is pleased to present Paper Trails, concurrent group exhibitions of works by Carlos Almaraz, Nate Cassie, Nicolas Leiva, Constance Lowe, Ethel Shipton, Rufino Tamayo, and Jennifer Agricola Mojica, among others, at our San Antonio and New York City galleries. The exhibition will be on view at our San Antonio gallery from March 11 to May 2, 2026. Paper Trails explores distinct processes that use paper as a primary substrate, including painting, printmaking, experimental drawing, and mixed-media works. These procedures offer intimacy and insight into an artist’s diverse techniques, revealing their processes, aesthetic experimentation, and operations. 

The immediacy of drawing allows artists to explore the power of the artist’s hand, merging their process with the familiarity of paper. The fundamental artistic technique motivates artists to experiment with media and styles, allowing for different modes of expression. Nicolas Leiva’s vessels, boats, abstract forms, and flying carriages transform into playful charcoal illustrations. His imaginative world unfolds in infinite realms like a Möbius strip. Leiva’s works are fantastical landscapes that utilize gestural, organic, and geometric forms to present a host of archetypes in his emblems of flight, safety, and delight. 

While Leiva’s abstracted, experimental drawings stretch the limits of charcoal and paper, Nate Cassie’s works on paper are more tranquil. Some of Cassie’s works are words alone, illustrated with simply silver leaf on paper, while others are solitary drawings, envisioning mountainscapes without human intervention. Constance Lowe similarly explores depictions of landscapes. Lowe’s mixed-media works draw from her Midwestern farming background, landscape photography, and the tradition of geometric abstract painting. These influences are combined with the physical use of materials like felt and leather. The work features an archival digital print on paper depicting a bright blue, cloud-dotted sky, overlaid with geometric paper shapes in blues and purples, and mixed with the physical textures of felt and leather.

Vibrant slices of life are the main focus of Carlos Almaraz’s multicolor screenprints, which camouflage a cast of animalistic and anthropomorphic characters amid dark, shadowy figures in the foreground. With his technique and aesthetic, Almaraz creates a textured oil pastel effect on the screen that seems carnivalesque. His upbringing heavily informs Almaraz’s work: born in Mexico City, he moved with his family at a young age and settled in East Los Angeles. Similarly, Rufino Tamayo experiments with shape and composition in his fractured, schematic, and abstract portraiture. Adroitly synthesizing influences from Mexican and international sources, including Cubism and Surrealism, Tamayo conceived life and Art as a universal heartbeat: “Art, like culture, is international. It’s the result of many parts to which we add our own tone.” 

The age-old medium of paper, often regarded as secondary to painting and sculpture, gives artists greater creative freedom than other media may offer. Paper Trails encourages viewers to reflect on universal themes of imagination and identity, as well as the powerful impact of lived experience on artists’ creative methods.