The School of Art and Design’s February and March calendars are packed with exhibits across all UTRGV galleries exploring themes ranging from the surroundings, culture and culture appropriation to flora and fauna.
Charles and Dorothy Clark Art Gallery
“Dreams in Spanish” art exhibition by Associate Professor Paul Valadez and Lecturer Elizabeth McCormack-Whittemore continues through March 6 and features themes of culture and childhood.
The six-month project is arranged in a way to look like a market with items of several media, including photography, T-shirts, stickers and more.
Jesmil Maldonado, director of galleries at UTRGV and a professor in the School of Art and Design, said Valadez expresses the way he thinks through his artwork, regardless of how other people might interpret it.
“When you start looking into the works and you start to try to understand the image behind it, it can lead to very interesting or even controversial ways of thinking,” Maldonado said.
She said some of his art pieces might appear as humorous but once the audience pays closer attention, they see the real meaning behind it.
McCormack-Whittemore said the pieces of art were not originally meant to go in any direction, but was a fun project with no rules and no expectations.
“[Valadez’s] goal is to feel and communicate what he is feeling, so there is a lot of emotion in the work,” she said. “It’s also very whimsical and fun and at the same time very serious.”
McCormack-Whittemore said that while working with Valadez, she took on some of his practices and went “with the flow.”
“For me, it was beautiful to see a dialog and a clear message or messages he conveyed in an organic way, that just formed organically during our collaboration,” she said.
The MFA Exhibition by Karol Hernandez will run from March 18 to April 3 and it is a culmination of what she has been working on during the span of her master’s degree and using the media she is most comfortable with, which is stained glass.
“Out of all the time that I’ve been here, I think it’s been only once I’ve seen one stained glass piece in the art gallery, so it will be interesting to see how the stained glass interacts with the lighting around the space,” Maldonado said.
Hernandez works frequently with the themes of hummingbirds and flora and fauna, according to Maldonado.
Rusteberg Art Gallery
Timothy Gonchoroff, assistant professor in the School of Art and Design and a fiber and mixed-media artist, will showcase his work in a solo exhibit titled “Anthromordant” from Wednesday to March 8, and an artist talk on March 6.
Gonchoroff, having made most dyes and spun cotton he found on the side of the road, said the exhibit is one giant experiment.
“I’m extracting dyes from the plants that grow in what are called riparian areas,” he said. “They’re kind of things like roadsides [and] recent construction sites.”
Gonchoroff considers the piece of art as one, but is an installation of more than 400 dyes working together, extracted from various plants.
He said he wants to contribute to the history of the natural dye process and show how it is done.
“There’s not going to be a lot of sexy colors from this process,” Gonchoroff said. “And that’s because the process of natural dyes can be really frustrating and this is kind of taking that process and valuing the results for what they are rather than what I want them to be.”
Carl Vestweber, part-time lecturer in the School of Art and Design, will present his faculty solo exhibition from March 20 to April 10, showcasing art pieces worked on with pencil, color pencil, ink and collages.
Maldonado, who has not seen the finished products, expects his drawings to involve scenery and Vestweber’s surroundings, while his collages to be more colorful as it is usually what he focuses on.
“For his collage work, it is very colorful, very vibrant, a little bit of pop art,” Maldonado said. “Well, his collages, they have people bodies but their heads are cats. I haven’t even gotten a glimpse, at all, of what Carl is going to do.”
UTRGV Visual Arts Gallery
“Into the Voyage of Overwhelmingness,” an exhibit by School of Art and Design Lecturer Japheth Asiedu-Kwarteng, explores the process of immigrating to the United States and continues through Wednesday.
“This exhibit is talking about how even though you go through all this process to get to this unknown land, when you’ve been here for a couple of years … you are still considered an alien in this land,” Maldonado said about the meaning behind the exhibit.
She said Asiedu-Kwarteng talks about the story of his family’s journey to the U.S. through his art, highlighting the struggles they faced along the way.
One of the media for the exhibit is ceramic tiles, which are framed using wooden crates, symbolizing the feeling of “being shipped.”
The “Cross Connection 2024” exhibition will center on graphic design and visual communications, with works on animation, concept art, website, character, brand and logo design, event promotion and more, totaling 100 pieces, from March 4 to March 13.
The exhibition is a juried show between several universities from Mexico, Portugal, United States, Korea, Taiwan and China, involving pieces from both students and faculty.
The exhibit will begin at the UTRGV Visual Arts Gallery in Edinburg, travel to the Brownsville Museum of Fine Arts and end at the International Museum of Art & Science in McAllen, where it will hold its award ceremony.
