PAST EXHIBITIONS
2021
THE JOURNEY TO ME
VICKI MEEK
2021 TEXAS ARTIST OF THE YEAR
On View: September 10, 2021 - February 5, 2022 I ALH Galleries
Purchase Vicki Meek’s catalogue Installation as Social Commentary
PRESS
Culture Map Houston - 7 vivid, eye-catching September art events no Houstonian should miss
Arts and Culture Texas - Connecting Across Disciplines: Vicki Meek Texas Artist of the Year
365 Things To Do In Houston - The 12 Best Things to Do in Houston This Weekend: September 10 to 12, 2021
Houstonia - Vicki Meek is Art League Houston’s 2021 Artist of the Year
VIDEO
Video Interview with Vicki Meek
AUDIO
Exhibition Audio
Art League Houston (ALH) is honored to celebrate Dallas-based Artist Vicki Meek as the 2021 Texas Artist of the Year. Recognized as an artist, curator, writer, organizer and arts advocate, Meek’s career embodies the ethos of the Texas Artist of the Year award in her steadfast devotion to both the creation and support of the arts over the years. Meek’s multimedia, interdisciplinary practice focuses on cultural memory, identity, and social issues in relation to the African diaspora, underscored by an underlying hope and emphasis on collective healing. Meek’s exhibition at Art League Houston, The Journey to Me, thematically visualizes her development as an artist through a curated series of three site-specific installations extending throughout the ALH galleries. In a recent Dallas Morning News review by Lauren Smart of Meek’s 2021 Nasher Public installation for the Nasher Sculpture Center, Stony the Road We Trod, Meek states: “I want people to start thinking about the Black community in the affirmative. We didn’t just survive. We thrived in spite of everything.” This sense of hopefulness is highlighted throughout much of Meek’s practice, which prioritizes and supports forgotten, left behind histories and identities. In conjunction with the exhibition, ALH is publishing a catalogue designed by Lindsay Starr chronicling Meek’s history of installation-based work, including color images and a scholarly essay by Lauren Cross, PhD, College of Visual Arts and Design at the University of North Texas.
Meek’s solo exhibition at ALH will serve as a visual exploration of her artistic development over the years. Comprising of an amalgamation of installation-based work, sculpture, printmaking and technology, the exhibition will cite the major influences on Meek’s singular aesthetic and artistic practice, specifically relating to the late Elizabeth Catlett (Meek’s mentor) and African cosmology and spiritual practices.
“As an artist obtaining a Master of Fine Arts at the height of the Black Power Movement, it is not surprising that my work embraces a political outlook, especially given that my artistic idols are Elizabeth Catlett, Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden. The aesthetic I developed includes both the notion of utilizing text and symbolism derived from West Africa and other parts of the African diaspora, while striving to educate the viewer on lost history and social issues. I’ve explored imagery that is not rooted in polemics, but that prompts dialogue around cultural memory and identity.
My choice to create a three-gallery installation for my Texas Artist of the Year exhibition was one that I hope provides a summary of my artistic and aesthetic development. I have been working in the medium of installation for over 40 years and in that time have seen my practice grow in many ways. What started as an overt exploration of sociopolitical circumstances confronting African people worldwide that were more generic than personal, took a decidedly spiritual turn after the birth of my children.
I was raised on the artwork created by the late artist Elizabeth Catlett (Mora), an artist who never shied away from the difficult issues around race and gender. Much of my early work embraced her philosophy on the role of the artist in society, so likewise, it tackled similar issues. The Main Gallery installation at ALH reimagines twenty of Catlett’s most iconic political artworks, along with her voice and my singing.
As one moves into the Hallway Gallery space, the installation begins to chronicle my shift to exploring the sociopolitical through a spiritual lens, using African cosmology and spiritual ritual. Typically, prior to becoming a mother, I used the connection to history and memory as the inspiration for my work. With The Journey to Me, I continue doing this, only this time using my personal history & memory. My take on this shift is that motherhood humanized me in ways I could not have imagined!
The Front Gallery is the culminating installation and pays homage to four generations of my ancestry. Here I get to acknowledge my real foundation as both a woman and an artist: those ancestors upon whose shoulders I stand today, rooted in the history of Black Africa that was transplanted in America.” - Vicki Meek
Born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Meek is a nationally recognized artist who has exhibited widely throughout her career. She is currently represented by Talley Dunn Gallery, Dallas, Texas. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of the African American Museum of Dallas, Dallas, Texas; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Houston, Texas; Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Fort Wayne, Indiana; Paul Quinn College, Dallas, Texas; Serie Project, Austin, Texas; and Norwalk Community College, Norwalk, Connecticut. Meek was awarded three public arts commissions with the Dallas Area Rapid Transit Art Program and was selected as a co-artist for the Dallas Convention Center Public Art Project, the largest public art project in Dallas. Most recently, Meek exhibited at the Nasher Sculpture Center as part of their public art initiative, Nasher Public, featuring Stony the Road we Trod: A Shrine to Black America—a contemporary shrine dedicated to the Black community (January 7–February 14, 2021).
Meek was selected as one of ten national artists to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of the Nasher Sculpture Center with the commissioning of a site-specific installation that was part of Nasher XChange (October 2013 through February 2014). Meek’s retrospective, Vicki Meek: 3 Decades of Social Commentary, opened in November 2019 at the Houston Museum of African American Culture, Houston, Texas. In January 2020, she premiered an art video at Denton Black Film Festival, signaling a new period of creating work using video as the primary medium. The artist calls these new works “video comments” since they are no more than eight minutes in length and are created in a series format.
Meek is the recipient of numerous grants and honors including the National Endowment for the Arts NFRIG Grant; the Dallas Observer MasterMind Award; the Dallas Museum of Art Otis and Velma Davis Dozier Travel Grant; Texas Black Filmmakers Mission Award; Women of Visionary Influence Mentor Award; and the Dallas Women’s Foundation Maura Award. She was nominated for the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award and received the African American Museum of Dallas A. Maceo Smith Award for Cultural Achievement. In addition to working as an artist with an active studio practice, Meek is also an independent curator and writes cultural criticism for Dallas Weekly with her blog Art & Racenotes.
Meek recently served as an adjunct faculty member for UMass Arts Extension Service Program in Amherst, MA, where she taught a course in Cultural Equity in the Arts. With over forty years of arts administrative experience that includes working as a senior program administrator for a state arts agency, a local arts agency and running a non-profit visual arts center, Vicki Meek retired in March 2016 after nearly 20 years as the Manager of the South Dallas Cultural Center in Dallas, Texas. Additionally, she served on the board of the National Performance Network/Visual Artists Network, 2008–15 (Chair from 2012–14). In 2016, Meek was selected to be a Fellow in the Intercultural Leadership Institute and became a Voting Member of Alternate Roots, a national artist service organization. Vicki Meek currently spends time as Chief Operating Officer and Board Member of USEKRA: Center for Creative Investigation, a retreat for creatives in Costa Rica founded by internationally acclaimed performance artist Elia Arce. She is also Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson’s at-large appointment to the Arts and Culture Commission and the Public Art Committee.
Major funding for the 2021 Texas Artist of the Year exhibition and catalogue was generously provided by the John P. McGovern Foundation in the name of Kathrine G. McGovern, Jacques Louis Vidal Charitable Fund, Sheila Heimbinder, Rick Lowe Studio, Melanie Lawson & John Guess, Jr., Talley Dunn Gallery, Dallas, Texas, In Memoriam to Betty Hays, Ellie Meek & David Tweedy, and Jackie Jackson.
HOME IS…
2021 SUMMER TEEN INTENSIVE EXHIBITION
On View: July 31 - August 28, 2021 I Front Gallery
Art League Houston is excited to present the 2021 Summer High School Studio Art Intensive Exhibition: Home is..., an annual group exhibition by students from ALH’s Summer High School Studio Art Intensive Program. The Summer Intensive Program serves 16 students ages 14-17 from the Houston area over a twelve-week period in the summer. The program consists of three weeks of onsite workshops, talks, a public art project, and site visits to area art spaces. The program is led by teaching artists, art historians, educators, curators and arts professionals and delves into a variety of mediums, practices and concepts. The fourth week consists of open studio time for students to create their final projects – including one-on-one studio visits from teaching artists and curators. Students are supported by ALH as they independently complete their projects, and the program culminates in a four-week exhibition in the Art League Houston Front Gallery.
PARTICIPATING HIGH SCHOOL ARTISTS
Alexia Burgos • Iris Chen • Katherine Citino • Alisha Hou • Sofia Liu • Gio Morales • Lee Pham • Soup Russell • Leila Irene Amelia Sanchez-O’Hara
Olivia Scott • Isabel Wesley
PARTICIPATING MENTORING ALUM (M.A.) STUDENTS
Andrea Aguilar • Juno Durcan • Andrea Nguyen
2021 INTENSIVE STUDIO ASSISTANT
Ava Jiang
2021 PARTICIPATING TEACHING ARTISTS
Armando Castellan, Bryan Cope, Marley Foster, Jill Hakala, Nyssa Juneau, Amie Krebbs, Moe Penders, Cassie Phan, Chasity Porter, Emily Sloan
2021 COMMUNITY COLLABORATORS
TXRX Labs, Mayors Office of Cultural Affairs. Hardy & Nance Studios, Fresh Arts, Galveston Arts Center, Nick Barbee, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, CAMH, Lawndale Art Center, and Houston Center for Contemporary Craft
2021 ALH STUDENT EXHIBITION
On View: July 31 - August 28, 2021 I Main Gallery
Art League Houston (ALH) is excited to present the annual 2021 ALH Student Exhibition, a group exhibition featuring works in drawing, mixed-media, ceramic, printmaking and painting by students who participated in classes through the Art League School during the past year.
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Erika Alonso • Moosa Badri • Linda Barloon • N’Deyah Belle • Laura Beverly Roger Boak • Jane Bowman • Sola Cardoso • EP Chiles • Alexandra Constantinou • April DeConick • Mary Ann Durham • Debbie Gibbs • Rachel Gonzales • Irene Guijarro • Mary Hallab • Allison Haun • Theresa Honeycheck • Jeanne Jones • Patrick Joven • Neveen Khalaf • Afshan Khan • Susanna Kieval Sheryl Kolasinski Kellie Lawrence • Erica Reed Lee • Jose Luis • Clint McManus • Joy Mullett • Betsy Nelson • Mary O’Neill • Caryn Ogier • Hugo Pérez • Leslie Rahuba • Janet Rexroad • Arturo Reyes • Janelle Rios • Martha Rollo • Esmeralda Sanchez Carol Sepulveda • Mehnaz Shafi • Amanda Sparks • Robert L. Straight • Erin Stroud • Rachel Toombs • Andrea Torroba • Jerrolyn Travers • Kathleen Van Wagoner • Pamela Vangiessen • Teresa Winkler • Yao Y.
ABOUT THE ALH SCHOOL
Founded in 1968, the Art League School seeks to develop Houston-area artists through its quarterly studio art classes and workshops. Each year, over 1,000 adult students of diverse backgrounds, skill levels, and ages enroll in over 100 classes and workshops annually at ALH. Led by professional artist instructors, classes and workshops take place in three fully equipped studio spaces where students work in painting, drawing, watercolor, printmaking, mixed media, collage, jewelry, and other media. To ensure individual attention and to accommodate varying skill levels, courses are maintained with a limited number of students. There are no prerequisites for enrollment and courses are offered at an affordable cost to allow broad access to anyone interested. Students also have access to exhibitions, lectures, public programs, and artist talks offered throughout the year to further their training as artists.
2021 ALH INSTRUCTOR EXHIBITION
On View: July 31 - August 28, 2021 I Hallway Gallery
Art League Houston (ALH) is excited to present the annual 2021 ALH Instructor Exhibition, a group exhibition featuring works in jewelry, drawing, mixed-media, ceramic, printmaking and painting by some of Houston’s exciting emerging and established artists who teach at the Art League School.
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Salli Babbitt • Lucinda Cobley • Caroline Graham • Nyssa Juneau • Molly Koehn • Nicolle LaMere • Polly Liu Steve Parker • Cary Reeder • Laura Spector • Alexander Squier • Myke Venable • Erika Whitney G.
ABOUT THE ALH SCHOOL
Founded in 1968, the Art League School seeks to develop Houston-area artists through its quarterly studio art classes and workshops. Each year, over 1,000 adult students of diverse backgrounds, skill levels, and ages enroll in over 100 classes and workshops annually at ALH. Led by professional artist instructors, classes and workshops take place in three fully equipped studio spaces where students work in painting, drawing, watercolor, printmaking, mixed media, collage, jewelry, and other media. To ensure individual attention and to accommodate varying skill levels, courses are maintained with a limited number of students. There are no prerequisites for enrollment and courses are offered at an affordable cost to allow broad access to anyone interested. Students also have access to exhibitions, lectures, public programs, and artist talks offered throughout the year to further their training as artists.
READING THE WEATHER
HONG HONG
On View: April 23 - July 16, 2021 I ALH Sculpture Garden
Press: Houstonia - Take a Closer Look at Hong Hong’s Textural Masterpieces
Art League Houston (ALH) is proud to present Reading the Weather, an installation of work by Artist Hong Hong, currently based in Houston, Texas. Organized by the artist and Sarah Beth Wilson, ALH’s Director of Exhibitions and Curatorial Projects, Reading the Weather is a monumental, site responsive paper-work installed on the façade of ALH’s building adjacent to the Sculpture Garden. Hong creates her large-scale paper-works outside due to their size, often incorporating parts of the natural environment into her process. This will be the first time, however, for her work to be physically installed in an outdoor setting for an extended duration of time. Reading the Weather will change and interact/react with the environment while it is on view outside at ALH, visually evidencing shifts in our environmental atmosphere and recording the passage of time.
EXHIBITION STATEMENT by Hong Hong
One.
Two nights ago, I was standing outside with V. V is an artist. I love her work, but we are still strangers to each other. It’s possible that I simultaneously know her and don’t know her at all. She asked quite suddenly, “What am I supposed to do with beauty?”. Then, it started to rain. The drops were big and gentle. They smelled like handfuls of warm dust. There was so much to say and no right ways to say it. Is it time? Is it indecision? Is it language’s inability to circumscribe experience? Or is it simply my own cowardice?
Two.
Sarah and I first met in my studio last fall, after I moved to Texas to complete a yearlong fellowship at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft. We sat in front of a project that I made outside in the garden. Somewhere in my head, there was that poem about roses. There are these roses, after rain. She wants them. He doesn’t. He protests, saying that they are beautiful where they are. We were all beautiful once, she says and cuts them anyway.
Three.
I remember the drive from Connecticut towards the Gulf. There was the blue largeness of the sky, which seemed to become bluer and stretch further into the distance with every passing mile. M is an artist. I loved her work first. And with time, we became more than strangers to each other. During one of our conversations, she asked me to consider the instability of pigment. M, I miss you and this is what I would like to say to you now: color, like existence, is improvisational choreography. It is an act that is always vanishing.
Four.
In recent work, dyes are not sealed with a mordant. Colors fade from direct contact with lights and the sun. We are putting up one or two pieces on the exterior walls of Art League Houston, where it will be exposed to the elements. I’m hoping that it will move from saturation to grayscale. This project is called Reading the Weather. It is an attempt to record, cartographically and through abstraction, the complex conditions (meteorological, temporal, social, individual) that make possible each object’s conception, formulation, and disappearance.
Five.
V, I don’t really know what beauty is. But I used to play hide and seek with the moon when I was a child. This was it, I want to say to you, and maybe that is all.
There were the roses, in the rain. Don’t cut them, I pleaded. They won’t last, she said. But they’re so beautiful where they are. Agh, we were all beautiful once, she said, and cut them and gave them to me in my hand.
-The Act, William Carlos Williams
ARTIST STATEMENT by Hong Hong
The inanimate is born the same way the animal is. Openness to touch is the first condition of their creation: mammals form inside dark wombs, while landscapes and objects are forged with heat and pressure. A sheet of paper and a boulder both retain this malleability throughout their existence. They each accept and absorb gestures of tenderness, neglect, devotion, and violence. This porousness eventually leads to material instability and demise. Thus, all things continuously engage with the act of writing their own histories.
“As above, so below” is a phrase once used in esoteric alchemy and astrology. It refers to the idea that earth is the mirror image of God, or the astral plane. In numerous cultures, landscape is seen as an extension of a magical being’s body. In Chinese mythology, Pangu is a giant sleeping inside an egg. When he wakes up, he swings his axe to separate the sky from the earth. He holds up the sky for 18,000 years, pushing it away from land a few meters each day. After he dies, his breath becomes the wind; his voice, thunder; his left eye, the sun.
Pangu’s world is an emerging organism, one that simultaneously lives and erodes. In my work, material and process act as rigorous exercises in – and metaphors for – the formation and dissolution of postcolonial landscapes. I travel to faraway and distinct locations across the United States to create site-responsive, monumental paper-works. In this nomadic practice, traditional processes of Chinese papermaking coalesce with painting, feminist performances, and monastic rituals.
Each project begins with the inner bark of a mulberry tree, which is harvested before the first frost of the year. The bark is cooked with ash and hand-beaten using mallets. The softened bark is mixed with dyes and water sourced from local tributaries to form a gelatinous substance called pulp. Poured in successive layers and dried beneath the sun, pulp eventually becomes paper. These materials remain vulnerable to environmental variables as they cure, giving form to unfolding fluctuations within their surroundings.
The pours stage collisions between primordial forces (sky/earth, interior/exterior, day/night), while the terrestrial journeys examine the symbolic qualities of land and the act of navigation. Soil, like newly formed paper, is a flexible body, whereas the sky seems to be a closed corridor between the known (earth) and the unknown (the universe). What is, then, the relationship between the horizontal, which manifests as a single swing of Pangu’s axe or a series of lateral movements across borders, and the vertical, which represents spiritual ascendance and the final collapse of Pangu’s body?
In recent projects, the mulberry tree and the process of making paper from its bark are conduits for exile, divinity, migration, nativity, and the Chinese Diaspora. Space, time, and experiential connection form the core of my methods. Papermaking, like choreography, is an act that vanishes. The surface of paper is the sedimentation of these movements and gestures: it gives density and form to the biological process of living. Each sheet of paper is where the sky, weather, the marrow of trees, and my hands can momentarily touch and intersect. Any object that directly depends on the spinning of the earth to fully form, contains some version of truth.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Hong Hong is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans craft, painting, and earthwork. Born in Hefei, China, she immigrated with her family to North Dakota when she was ten years old. Hong earned her MFA from the University of Georgia in 2014, and her BFA from the State University of New York in 2011. Since then, Hong has traveled to different locations across the United States to make site-responsive, monumental paper-works. These investigations have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, GA; Penland School of Craft, Mitchell County, NC; Madison Museum of Fine Arts, Madison, GA; Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Pittsburgh, PA; Jewett Arts Center, Wellesley, MA; and New Mexico History Museum, Santa Fe, NM.
Hong is the recipient of fellowships and grants from MacDowell, Yaddo, the National Endowment for the Arts, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Connecticut Office for the Arts, Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Hartford Arts Council, and the Edward C. and Ann T. Roberts Foundation. Hong has been commissioned to create public projects for Real Art Ways, Center for the Arts at Wesleyan University, and Artspace New Haven. Her work has been reviewed by Art21, Hyperallergic, Artnet News, Art New England, Southwest Contemporary, Hand Papermaking, Glasstire, and Two Coats of Paint. Hong currently lives and works in Houston, Texas.
Brother Sing to Me
Pamela Council
Virtually On View: June 1-30, 2021 Click here to watch on the ALH YouTube channel or copy this link into your browser: https://youtu.be/u7zmdwR87mI
I have been talking to my family about my fountain series, value, and currency. During one of our conversations, my brother Paul N Council III offered a song. This is it, combined with some footage from my fountain research archive. - Pamela Council
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Pamela Council is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist creating fountains for Black joy. Guided by material, cultural, and metaphysical quests, Council’s practice embodies a darkly humorous and inventive Afro-Americana camp aesthetic, BLAXIDERMY. Through this lens, Council uses sculpture, print, design, architecture, writing, and performance to shed light on under-examined narratives, and to make tributes and dedications. Council has created commissions, exhibitions, performances or presentations for: New Museum for Contemporary Art, United States Library of Congress, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Studio Museum in Harlem, Nike, and MoCADA.
Council has been Artist-in-Residence at MacDowell Colony, Red Bull Arts, Bemis Center, Rush Arts, MANA Contemporary, Signal Culture, Mass MoCA, and Wassaic Project. A recipient of the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant, Toby Devan Lewis Award, Rema Hort Mann Community Fund Award, Council holds a BA from Williams College and an MFA from Columbia University. Council is currently Artist-in-Residence in the International Studio Program at ISCP and a studio member at Project for Empty Space.