Issue link: http://papercitymagazine.uberflip.com/i/1291043
Cary Leibowitz, whose Contemporary Arts Museum Houston exhibition was a highlight of the 2018 Texas museum calendar, is a disrupter of the art world. His brand stands for social consciousness, identity issues, and queer politics, all wrapped in wit- filled text works encased in kitsch. Case in point is this cat-shaped canvas from the artist's series Respect for the United States Constitution is a Turn On, 2020, through 12.26 gallery. Billy Hassell is a mid-career Texan whose work upholds the banner of flora and fauna via vibrant depictions of a dense, color-saturated nature scape. His paintings are both timeless and so now, perfectly in step with next- gen environmental consciousness. In the Caprock Country, 2016, available from William Campbell Contemporary Art, bears all the hallmarks of a signature Hassell, with its menagerie of butterflies, a bird, fox, and iguana populating a landscape bursting with sunflowers and blooming cacti. One of the leaders of the San Antonio art scene — and an early Artpace resident — the late Chuck Ramirez redefined contemporary Texas photography. His image-making mirrored identity and cultural issues and alluded to the fleeting quality of life. Nationally collected by prestigious players such as the Pérez Art Museum Miami and the Smithsonian, Ramirez's estate is exclusively represented by Ruiz-Healy Art, which offers this poignant image of a hospital arrangement uncannily in step with today: Quarantine: Turquoise, 2000/2011. At David Shelton Gallery, Houston artist Robert Hodge addresses the African-American experience. Hodge's text-based collages incorporate mash-ups of current events, social consciousness, and rich historical currents of blues, hip hop, soul and other musical stylings; their Baroque surfaces are exuberant and encourage deciphering. The late Texas talent Harry Geffert was known for his depictions of the natural world, often informed by humor, which were meticulously cast in his Green Mountain Foundry. In the elegiac Cabbages the Crop I, 2005, the artist departs from bronze to render a ghostly vegetable in cast paper. The artist's estate is represented by Cris Worley Fine Arts. Internationally exhibited and Met-, Guggenheim-, and Whitney-collected Hunt Slonem embraces fauna such as this preferred subject: a kaleidoscope of butterflies. Emblematic of the human soul, the gossamer-winged creatures also evoke Slonem's childhood memories of growing up in Nicaragua as the son of a Navy officer, then later his time as a foreign exchange student. The painter's Guardians and Butterflies Cloak, 2019, is available from his Texas gallerist, Laura Rathe Fine Art. A haunting futuristic landscape that posits life in other solar systems, Eduard Portillo's Cassiopeiae, 2020, is named after a star in the constellation Cassiopeia. An acrylic on shaped canvas, this abstract work hovers between painting and sculpture. Born in El Salvador, based in Houston, Portillo has been featured at the Dallas nonprofit space Site131 and is in the esteemed stable of recent Culture Place arrival Barbara Davis Gallery. Also conjuring extraterrestrial worlds, Philadelphia painter Jackie Tileston creates canvases awash with golden pigment offset by meticulously painted details informed by the history of ornamentation. Reflective of months living in Italy and India, Expanse of the Space Treasury, 2018, also mirrors Tileston's time in Texas, where she was a Core Fellow at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, based in the home city for NASA. The artist is offered through Holly Johnson Gallery. See all images in this story at papercitymag.com. Eduardo Portillo's Cassiopeiae, 2020, at Barbara Davis Gallery All imAges courtesy the Artists And their respective culture plAce gAlleries 57 Artworks Exclusively Available on CulturePlace.com