2026: Buffalo AKG group show
Super excited & honored to be included in this show alongside so many artists I have long admired-
Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way , curated by Andrea Alvarez, explores contemporary Latinx artists’ innovations and interventions within established traditions of painting, inviting discussion on a variety of themes and revealing the diversity and expansiveness present within the field. The fifty-eight artists in the exhibition—and those in the Latinx field more broadly—encourage us to interrogate the continued relevance of boundaries, from political borders to disciplinary confines. This exhibition therefore celebrates artists whose expressions are first and foremost personal and subjective, but whose heterogeneous and culturally specific interventions enrich one another and the history of American and contemporary art, two fields from which such artists have been historically excluded. Inspired by former U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera’s poem “[Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way],” the show celebrates abundance and presents a vision of Latinx art that is, like the diaspora itself, infinitely complex.
ABOVE: “Hyphenated Nature: Northern Florida-Cuban Painting Relations (after Carta)”, 30” x 78”. (left & right are on-site , oil on canvas paintings & middle is acrylic & handmade Cuban soil-pigment on canvas (2020) and is my contribution to the “Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way” exhibition.
For years I have been searching for ways to hyphenate my perceptually based on-site painting practice with my conceptually based interest in connecting with the Cuban landscape and with the history of the Cuban artists who painted it. This triptych is composed of two Northern Florida paintings made “en plein-air” over the course an entire day at St Mark‘s Nature Preserve, which bookend an Albers-based square work that has an image of a Cuban landscape painted by using Cuban soil pigment. This middle piece is based on a famous painting “Las Malangas” by Valentin Sanz Carta that is in El Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana. I originally saw this painting on my first visit to Cuba in 1999 and was immediately drawn to it. I chose to use this piece as the hyphenation for my two on-site works because I saw elements in the Carta painting in each of my works. - The painting on the left was of a creek with tannic waters surrounded by dense vegetation and trunks leading over it. The work on the right had a sable palm that was similar to the ones in the Carta painting.
I created my Albers Square grid foundation by pulling colors from my on-site paintings and then repainted a section of the Carta work using actual Cuban soil, which I ground-up by hand into pigment. By literally superimposing “Cuba” (in the form of soil/pigment) on Western Bauhausian modernism, I embraced the modernist grid while simultaneously bursting out of it and rejecting it with the Cuban vernacular landscape, and in so doing found a new culturally and pictorially hyphenated space to paint.
The show’s intergenerational and regionally broad dialogue is reflected in seven thematic groupings: (New) Histories, offering new perspectives on personal, cultural, and global histories; Bodies & Figures, representations of and by marginalized people, considering the importance of the body, and who is or isn’t seen in an image; Identity/Place, a consideration of how identity and place shape each other with a diasporic lens; Land/tierra, varied approaches to land and the built environment, from the material to the imaginary; Community, highlighting various communities—artistic, blood, and chosen—and their importance to populations within the diaspora; Pinturx, contemporary Latinx approaches to traditional painting genres like still life and portraiture; and Abstractions, exploring centuries-long Indigenous and European abstract traditions still in use by artists today.
Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way is organized by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and curated by Curator Andrea Alvarez. It will be followed by a national tour including presentations at the Des Moines Art Center, the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, the Phoenix Art Museum, and the Frye Art Museum, Seattle.
In Nature’s Studio: Two Centuries of American Landscape Painting
This core show is organized by the Reading Public Museum, Reading Pennsylvania and augmented by landscape-themed works from the permanent collection of the Art Museum of South Texas. It runs January 22- May 3, 2026.
Works in the Reading collection combine early depictions of bucolic North American vistas—intimate forest interiors, sweeping panoramic views of natural wonders, and dramatic images of the untamed land and sea—with scenes of Europe, the Near East, and South America.
In addition to works by nineteenth-century landscape artists such as Thomas Birch, Frederic Church, Jasper Francis Cropsey, Worthington Whittredge, William Trost Richards, Hermann Herzog, and Aaron Draper Shattuck, the exhibition also examines the late-nineteenth century shift to Impressionism and Tonalism at the turn of the century by painters including George Inness, N. C. Wyeth, Childe Hassam, Edward Willis Redfield, John Fulton Folinsbee, John Mulhaupt and Robert Spencer. These movements captured the fleeting effects of light and atmosphere by employing new and innovative techniques including painting out-of-doors, en plein air.
Cumulative Nature: Layered View (WA) , 48” x 36”, oil on canvas, 2008 (in the permanent collection of the Art Museum of South Texas)
The expanded exhibition explores the progression from naturalistic depictions of pastoral landscapes to the stylized and individual impressions of time and place reflect the sensibilities of visual culture in the United States over the course of two centuries. The on-site (en plein air) painting above is my piece in this show.
Twenty-One Distinguished Artists of the 21st Century
is a showcase of 21 Cuban contemporary artists from rising mid-career to international masters.
This event highlights over 75 works, including paintings, sculptures and assemblages by the most exciting voices in today’s global art scene.
Artists include:
Alfredo Sosabravo, Manuel Mendive, Julio Larraz, Clara Morera, Humberto Calzada, Tomás Sánchez, Roberto Fabelo, DEMI, José Bedia, Lilian Garcia-Roig, Belkis Ayón, Joel Besmar, Juan Roberto Diago, Vicente Hernández, Giosvany Echevarría, Jorge Luis Santos, Enrique Casas, Irina Elén González, Miguel Florido, Yasiel Elizagaray and Danuel Méndez.
Show opens March 6 at Cernuda Arte, 3155 Ponce de Leon Blvd. Coral Gables, FL 33134
M-F: 10-6pm & Sat: 12-5. 305-461-1063
2012: Roger Winter and the line.
I was one of five students (John Alexander, David Bates, Brian Cobble and Dan Rizzie were the others) who was interviewed about our experience working with Roger and the subsequent influence on our work. Art Matters and Quin Mathews Films produced this documentary called "Roger Winter and the Line". For 25 years they have been filming the art and artists that shaped their community and world. A "Gift of History" celebrates the donation of more than 2,000 audio and film interviews from Art Matters and Quin Mathews Films to the Dallas Museum of Art’s digital archive(s).
2012: Autumn Seen
The director of Blue Spiral 1 in Asheville, NC saw my works in New American Paintings #88 and asked if he could represent me. He included me in three person show in 2011 called New X 3 and then offered me a solo show in Oct-Dec. of 2012 which I titled Autumn Seen. Again, given the nature of my work, I had asked him if he knew of any local places that he thought I could work at to to able to produce some more local site-specific work for the show....especially given how beautiful their local surroundings were. He mentioned the Hambidge Center for the Arts Residency and I applied...and made the fall-colored works in 2011 that would be shown in fall 2012 at the gallery.
2012: Solid Fluidity
SOLID FLUIDITYis a title that is both descriptive and suggestive of the two main bodies of work in the exhibition: woods and water. This title underscores the solidity in the way I paint fluid water and the fluidity in the way I paint solid trees and rocks. I was essentially trying to make paintings of flowing, clear fluid waters that seemed solid while simultaneously trying to make solid trees and rocks that looked fluid...even though they aren't & don't normally do so....while the light and reflections changed throughout the course of the day AND the water streamed rapidly down the river. I love challenges for sure! This was my seventh solo show with Valley House Gallery since they started representing me in 1994. They produced a 28 page catalog with an interview by the gallery director, Cheryl Vogel. Richard Shift's essay "Catching Up with the Instant" is also reproduced here. A small (3MB) pdf of the catalog can be download below:2012VHcatalog
2012: From Nature
In 2010 I had been invited to exhibit my paintings in a group show called Introductions at Thomas Deans Fine Art in Atlanta, GA. he really liked the my paintings so asked me to have a duo solo show in his new large gallery in 2012. I shows a few GA works and some FL & WA paintings.
2012: Under the Influence
Roger Winter was my undergraduate drawing and painting professor at Southern Methodist University (SMU in Dallas) from1984-1988. He was in fact, VERY Influential. The span of influence covered by the artists in the exhibit is three generations (staring with Mozely who taught at UT Austin where Roger Winter studied, then Roger taught at SMU where I studied and then I ended up teaching at UT Austin influencing the next generation of Texas painters) so my UT connection as a professor there makes the connections and influences come full circle: Loren Mozely, Winters & Me. This show opened at the Grace Museum in Abilene, TX and then traveled to the MAC in Dallas. Below is a small pdf version that gives more background on the show that the Grace Museum produced.2012UnderInfluenceGrace
2012: Chopo Museum in Mexico City
In a show titled “Medios y ambientes” at Museo del Chopo in Mexico City, I exhibited my most massive work to date; a 12’H X 29’W pyramidal shaped installation (Hyperbolic Nature: La Florida) that was comprised of nine 5’ X 4’ on-site Florida paintings. My painting seemed very popular and I was one of two artists interviewed for several Spanish TV and radio stations. My installation was often described in the then popular, (well meaning but sexist descriptive) vernacular slang term "Padrisimo".
Articulo Noroeste copyABOVE is a small pdf link to a review in Noroeste Magazine and BELOW is a link to a review that shows some of the other works in the show (both are in Spanish). You can also see some of the other works on my "Gallery Views" link under "Painting Series" tab on my web page.http://bangbangbang.com.mx/medios-y-ambientes/
Super excited and honored to be in this amazing group show of Latinx artists-
Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way explores contemporary Latinx artists’ innovations and interventions within established traditions of painting, inviting discussion on a variety of themes and revealing the diversity and expansiveness present within the field. The fifty-eight artists in the exhibition—and those in the Latinx field more broadly—encourage us to interrogate the continued relevance of boundaries, from political borders to disciplinary confines. This exhibition therefore celebrates artists whose expressions are first and foremost personal and subjective, but whose heterogeneous and culturally specific interventions enrich one another and the history of American and contemporary art, two fields from which such artists have been historically excluded. Inspired by former U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera’s poem “[Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way],” the show celebrates abundance and presents a vision of Latinx art that is, like the diaspora itself, infinitely complex.
