Aaron Parazette is most known for his iconic word paintings in which he turns letters on end, stacking and overlapping them to create a nest of curving, linear forms. In the lineage of Hard-edged painting, Parazette more recent Color Key series often on shaped canvases devises a compositional structure wherein flawless planes of color unabashedly confront each other, yielding vibrant and vivid color relationships. Fluorescent-infused acrylic paints nearly jump from the background and further point to the artist’s attempt to create a three-dimensional space upon a two-dimensional surface.

Aaron Parazette (b. 1960) grew up in Ventura, California and holds an MFA in Painting from the Claremont Graduate University. In 1990, Parazette relocated to Houston as a Core Fellow at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. He is currently an Associate Professor of Painting at the University of Houston.

The abstract works of Giles Lyon celebrate the very process of painting—and the many accidents that can happen along the way. His paintings are full of spills, splatters, and stains, which the artist highlights and outlines against washes of bold, comic-book color. Detritus from his studio—hair, insects, dust—also finds its way into the artist’s compositions, creating a documentary portrait of their own creation. Lyon’s vivid use of color and commitment to non-representational art have earned him comparisons to the color field and action painters of the abstract expressionist era, though his works are updated and injected with his own hearty dose of contemporary pop culture.

Jackie Tileston’s paintings are heterotopic spaces in which recombinant strategies and nomadic thinking create complex images that investigate the contemporary sublime and states of being. Tileston (b. Manila, Philippines) spent her childhood as an itinerant “Third Culture Kid”, living in the Philippines, India, England, and France, before moving to the US. She has a B.A. from Yale University and an MFA from Indiana University.

Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions in Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, and Dallas, and group exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum (Houston), Art in General and the Painting Center (New York), and the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art. Tileston is the recipient of the Core Fellowship Residency, the Pew Fellowship in the Arts (2004), the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency (2005), the Guggenheim Fellowship (2006), and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (2011) and residency (2017).

Tileston lives and works in Philadelphia, where she is an Associate Professor in Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania.

Joe Mancuso lives and works in Houston, Texas. He received his MFA from Indiana University and BFA from Colorado State University. Mancusoís solo exhibitions have included the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, with an accompanying catalogue; the El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso, Texas; AR Contemporary, Milan, Italy; New York University, New York; and Galveston Art Center, Galveston, Texas. His group exhibitions have included the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH); Edward Albeeís Other Eye, Selections from the Albee Collection, Hillwood Art Museum, Brookeville, New York; ArtPace, San Antonio, Texas; the McKinney Avenue Contemporary (MAC), Dallas, Texas; Serio Tossi Contemporary in Florence, Italy; New Orleans Triennial, New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, Louisiana, with an accompanying catalogue; Art Cologne, Cologne, Germany; Galerie Rotoff, Karlsruhe, Germany; the Phoenix Art Museum, School 33, Baltimore, MD, and the Blaffer Gallery at the University of Houston, with an accompanying catalogue, and Kiyo Hagashi Gallery, Los Angeles. His works are included in a number of private and museum collections including the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, El Paso Museum of Art, and the University of Houston.

John Wilcox was a Texas artist. He grew up in Denison, Texas on the Red River and attended public schools in Denison and later attended secondary school in Austin at St. Stephen’s Episcopal School. At St. Stephen’s he excelled academically and won a first prize at the Laguna Gloria Art Museum in Austin for his canvases and drawings.

John attended Colorado College where he earned a BFA. Following his graduation Wilcox returned to Texas and worked at the Fort Worth Modern Art Museum (now the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth) during the late 1970’s. There he met and worked with well-known artists Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, and Dan Flavin.

In 1980 Wilcox moved to Carpinteria, California living on a ranch where he was able to make his home in an old bunk house high above the Pacific coast. Later in 1985 he moved to New York. In New York his artistic talents were readily recognized by critics such as Roberta Smith of The New York Times and Charles Dee Mitchell of Art in America. Wilcox’s years in New York resulted in numerous shows both at Fawbush Gallery and Michael Klein Gallery in New York as well as Barry Whistler Gallery in Dallas. Wilcox’s contemporaries in New York included Joan Nelson, Don Powley, Nan Goldin, Judy Rifka and Kiki Smith.

In 1990 Wilcox returned to Texas and painted in a studio in Dallas near Fair Park and in a cabin on Lake Texoma. Over the following decades Wilcox’s minimalist, abstract body of work included large pointillist canvases, methodically layered monochromes, and works on paper. Wilcox’s works are ethereal, spiritual and at times taut with juxtaposing dynamics, capturing, as Wilcox noted, “everything and nothing all at once”

John Pomara incorporates various technological platforms into his work to reflect our unconscious immersion in the digital world. His abstract paintings depict blurs, glitches, and printing imperfections, contradicting our vision of modern technology as cold, rational, and without error. Pomara describes his work as “multiplatform painting interfacing with social media while incorporating apps, photos on my iPhone, glitching software and Photoshop.” Entropy and mechanical failure are prevalent themes within his work. In his endeavors to visually represent these errors he utilizes printers, copy machines and the Internet. Even the medium upon which he works is evocative of his underlying message, the industrial surfaces of the aluminum panels complimenting and enhancing his artistic vision. There are many who would argue that making mistakes is part of the creative process, and Pomara’s work in part adheres to this sentiment, oftentimes inspired by the paint drips and spills that landed on the newspaper covering his studio floor. John Pomara (b. 1952) received an MFA and a BFA from East Texas State University.

Laurent Boccara was a painter and collage artist. A native of Tunisia, Mr. Bocarra was raised and educated in France. He had lived in the United States since the early 1970’s. He studied painting at the University of Houston in the mid eighties. He also studied law and economics at The Sorbonne University in Paris.

A field archeologist with over ten years experience, Mr. Boccara participated in excavations throughout Israel and Greece, Switzerland and the United States. It was the nature of this exacting science of baring back, of meticulous classification and creative reconstruction that permeated his artwork.«

Ludwig Schwarz completed his MFA at the School of Visual Arts New York and returned to Dallas, where he has continued to exhibit both locally and nationally. Recent exhibitions include; Untitled (series of eight paintings), The Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX (2018); Some Twenty Year Old Works on Paper and Two New Sculptures, The Box Company, Dallas, TX (2017); Rudolph Blume Fine Art/Artscan, Houston, TX (2017); Ludwig Schwarz: Retrospective (1990–2014), Rest Stop, Makebish, New York, NY (2015); Encounters, Lump, Raleigh, N.C. (2015); the Dallas Biennial, Retrospective (1990-2014); Oliver Francis Gallery, Dallas, TX; the 2012 and 2010 Brucennial, NY; Galerie Carolyn Heinz, Hamburg, Germany (2011); Leo Castelli Gallery, NY (2011); Re-Seeing the Contemporary: Selected from the Collection, Dallas Museum of Art (2010); The Rose Art Museum of Brandeis University, Walthum, MA (2008) and Road Agent Gallery, Dallas, TX (2007).

In an April 2014 feature about Schwarz, Dallas Morning News art critic Rick Brettell wrote of the artist, “I am surer than ever that Schwarz is a major artist. Indeed, he is quite possibly the most important painter who has lived in our city in the last generation…” In 2018, the Dallas Museum of Art acquired a suite of eight five by four foot paintings from Schwarz’s 2016 Desktop exhibition.

Michael Miller is primarily an abstract painter, but his diverse training in multiple mediums influences his techniques and methods. Miller studied painting with Paolo Frosecchi and instructors at the Art Students League of New York, including Bruce Dorfman, Kikuo Saito, Frank O’Cain, and Larry Poons. He was also an active photographer at an earlier point in his career. One of the most formative experiences of Miller’s professional life took place in 2006 when he moved to Mapuo, Mozambique and developed a love for Mapuo designs and the religious objects and crafts of sub-Saharan Africa. Today, Miller paints on both primed and unprimed canvas to better “incorporate visual contamination” in his work. He also makes assemblages with painted canvas cutouts suspended by wire in wooden boxes.

Susie Rosmarin’s works achieve tremendous optical illusions and effects through the almost-mechanic repetition of patterns and layers of color. Rosmarin’s work has often been compared to Op Art, though she considers this likeness incidental; instead, the root of her creativity comes from her fascination with mathematical patterns, and the fundamental variations of light and color. To make each painting, she works in alternating layers of tape and paint, always moving from light to dark colors to create her crisp and methodical forms. In fact, Rosmarin has no idea what the final composition looks like until she removes all the pieces of tape at the end of her process. Rosemarin finds inspiration in the works of Ellsworth Kelly and in landscape paintings, for both’s interest in the interplay of light, color, and atmosphere.