Kate Newby was born in Auckland, New Zealand and lives and works in Floresville, TX. In 2015, she graduated with a Doctorate of Fine Art from the Elam School of Fine Art at the University of Auckland.

Kate Newby creates sculptures and installations using a variety of media including ceramics, glass and textiles. By incorporating discarded everyday objects (cigarette butts, coins, broken glass), she magnifies the prosaic by giving it new form and space, from the minuscule to the monumental. Her interventions are unique and site-specific, playing with their luminosity, their spatiality and their original use. The artist interferes in these places with handmade works, transforming raw materials into bricks, match sticks or windows and invites the spectators to come closer to better (re)discover their textures and details.

Her work has been shown at the 21st Biennale of Sydney in 2018, as well as in various institutions and galleries around the world: at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Villeurbane (2019), Kunsthalle Vienna (2018) and Index, Contemporary Swedish Art Foundation (2017). In 2012 she won the Walters Prize, New Zealand’s largest contemporary art prize. In 2019 Kate was awarded a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors grant.

Gwenneth Boelens’ work is concerned with touch, thought and capturing time. Throughout her work she is moving towards an understanding of our response-ability. The porous boundaries between what is internal and external are where her art takes shape. An entwinement can be sensed through abstract forms that often carry a metaphoric charge, whether by the choice of material or of subject matter. The work focuses on how we, and things, move, circulate, distribute, and the blockages that come with that movement; travelling the land, moving the body and mind, movement in communication. This movement is fleeting, like liquid, fluid. She tries to materialize the carriers or vessels of that distribution. The work is a proposal for a momentary solidification, a space between thought and its expression.

Gwenneth Boelens (1980) works and lives in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. A visual artist since 2003, she also teaches at Art&Research, St. Joost School of Art and Design, Breda and practises Ayurvedic Medicine. Boelens was educated in photography and fine arts at Royal Academy of Art in Den Hague and was a resident artist at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam in 2006-07. Her work has been exhibited at MIT List Centre, Cambridge (US), Shimmer, Rotterdam (NL), KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (DE), Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (NL), C/O, Berlin (DE), ACCA, Melbourne (AU) amongst others. Her work is represented by Galerie Klemm’s, Berlin.

Anna Mayer’s art practice is sculptural and social, with an emphasis on hand-built ceramics and another molten material: bronze. Her methodology emerges from site-specific analogue firing projects and critical engagement with pre- and post-petroculture. Mayer revels in the fact that ceramics historically have been used to create highly functional items as well as intensely symbolic objects. Her work is part of this lineage, with equal concern for the future and a dramatically shifting climate—ecological and political.

Mayer recently had solo exhibitions at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft (2021) and the Jung Center (2022), also in Houston. Other recent solo exhibitions include A-B Projects, AWHRHWAR, and Adjunct Positions, all in Los Angeles. Other exhibitions include Hammer Museum (CA), Glasgow International (UK), NCECA’s 2021 Annual (invited artist), Ballroom Marfa (TX), Commonwealth & Council (CA), and Kendall Koppe (UK). In 2021 Mayer was invited by UK organizations Arts Cabinet and the Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires, Environment and Society to be part of a research residency, for which she was paired with an engineer from the Hazelab at Imperial College, London.

Mayer has a 16-year collaborative practice with Jemima Wyman called CamLab, which has exhibited at MOCA Los Angeles and Hammer Museum. CamLab’s feminist and collective practice models a horizontal and intimate relationship, which they believe is necessary in a culture that tends to devalue compassion, communal concerns, the mental health of women, and radical care. Mayer was Assistant Director of the LA-based Institute For Figuring from 2009 – 2018. Currently she is Assistant Professor of Sculpture at the University of Houston.

George Smith is a contemporary artist who lives and worked in Houston, Texas. He is known for his steel sculpture and oil on paper works which reference the Dogon aesthetic and the expressive power of African geometry. For the past forty years, he has created works in metal, steel and paper that evoke a powerful and spiritual quality, grounded in the very essence of the material itself. Smith’s use of steel references the Buffalo Steel Industry, where his father worked in a local mill. The personal significance of this material combined with the primordial qualities of steel and fire, produce a lingering source of strength and endurance in the work that not only speaks to the contemporary experience but also acknowledges a symbolic vocabulary of the past. 

Born in Buffalo, NY, Smith received a B.F.A. in Sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1969. In 1972, he received an M.A. in Sculpture from Hunter College, New York where the artist worked with sculptor Tony Smith. Additionally, Smith met and studied under curator and arts advocate James Harithas, who at that time was a Professor of Art History. He has been awarded numerous fellowships and grants including a National Endowment Planning Grant (1980); National Endowment Individual Grant (1977); two New York State Council on the Arts Grants (1976, 1973); two Cultural Arts Council of Houston Grants (1975), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1971). Smith has been featured in solo exhibitions in galleries and museums throughout the United States including Nicole Longnecker Gallery, Houston, TX (2018, 2020); O’Kane Gallery, University of Houston/Downtown, TX (2016); Project Row Houses, Houston, TX (2014); Burchfield-Penny Art Center, the Museum of Western New York Arts, Buffalo, NY (2001); Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY (1980): Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Ithaca, NY (1979): Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY (1972) and Whitney Museum, New York, NY (1970).

Roberto Tejada is the award-winning poet and author of art histories that include National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment (Minnesota, 2009) and Celia Alvarez Muñoz (Minnesota, 2009); a Latinx poetics of the Americas, Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastness (Noemi, 2019), and catalog essays in Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980 (Hammer Museum, 2011) and Allora & Calzadilla: Specters of Noon (The Menil Collection; Yale, 2021). His poetry appears in the collections Why the Assembly Disbanded (Fordham, 2022), Full Foreground (Arizona, 2012), Exposition Park (Wesleyan, 2010), Mirrors for Gold (Krupskaya, 2006), and Todo en el ahora (Libros Magenta, 2015), selected poems in Spanish translation. Tejada’s writing spans method, discipline, and form to address the political imagination and impurity of time in shared image environments. Awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Poetry (2021), he serves as the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor at the University of Houston where he teaches Creative Writing and Art History.