Vast and Varied: Texas Women Painters: New York

Ruiz-Healy Art presents Vast and Varied: Texan Women Painters, a group exhibition of works by Jennifer Agricola Mojica, Audrey Rodríguez, Eva Marengo Sánchez, 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. Motherhood and the complex emotions that accompany motherhood is a recurring theme in Jennifer’s work. 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.

Motifs of domesticity straddle the line between realism and abstraction in Agricola Mojica’s work, serving as vehicles to explore weighty themes such as grief, vulnerability, and maternal instinct. Carrying from her experiences as a mother, Agricola Mojica embraces a painterly style in which play and technique meet. The artist's process begins with a disruptive start, breathing life into shifting vantage points, monotonous repetition of shapes and forms, eventually ending in harmonious stillness.

“I strive to capture moments of profound unity, transcending multiple layers of perception.”

-Jennifer agricola Mojica

Chicana artist Marta Sánchez constructs a cultural identity portrait by merging everyday life scenes with folkloric expression. Taking from the centuries-old tradition of vanitas still life and genre paintings, she emphasizes a sense of community from her hometown, San Antonio, Texas. When she visited Pompeii, Sanchez was first introduced to Retablos and began to study the ancient process. 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. 

For over forty years, Sánchez has collaborated with artists, poets, cultural organizations, and museums in Philadelphia and beyond. Sánchez states that “Regardless of where I am living, I will always be the Chicana from San Antonio, Texas.”

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.

 

“Each of my paintings represents snapshots into moments and recurring themes in my life that tell a larger story about geography and culture.”

 - eva marengo sanchez

The work Highway Esperanza, features ordinary flowers such as the "Pride of Barbados" and "Esperanza" that flourish in the South Texas summer, which are depicted in a dramatic manner to express the joy of witnessing blooming life in harsh conditions.

Focusing on the often-overlooked signs and symbols of urban life, Shipton documents images from text, signs, and graffiti observed on the streets, repurposing them into screenprints and paintings. Her work frequently features texts and colloquialisms in English and Spanish, reflecting the influence of both languages in Texas culture. In Where Are We Going, I, an indiscernible highway highlights the dark underbelly of a Texas city, with road signs reading "Rough Ahead," "Wrong Way," and "Detour." In the accompanying piece, the same highway is surrounded by vines, bluebonnet flowers, and nopales, overlaid with the same road signs, now presented in a different context.

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.

 “Some items reflect care and permanence, like handmade ceramics passed down or found at markets, while others—plastic bottles, to-go cups—speak to convenience, movement, or economic necessity,”

- Audrey Rodríguez.