Special Exhibition Honors Decade Of Art At Wright Gallery
In honor of a decade of art, a special exhibition titled “10 Years 10 Artists” is on display through March 5 at Wright Gallery in the Langford Architecture Center, Building A.
Hosted by the Texas A&M School of Performance, Visualization and Fine Arts and the School of Architecture, the exhibit features work from the gallery’s first decade, with additional artists featured digitally.
Solo and group exhibitions and student works have been featured in the gallery, showcasing the work of more than 100 professional artists, according to Rebecca Pugh, Wright Gallery curator and instructional assistant professor in Visualization.
“It’s been an interesting process to organize this show and go through past gallery records,” Pugh said. “Students in internships and part-time employment positions have been a great help to organize files over the years, including arranging the photographs of all our past shows featured on a digital monitor inside the gallery.”
Felice House, associate professor in the Visualization program, was featured alongside her husband, Dana Younger, in the gallery’s first exhibit in 2014 titled “ReWestern.” House has been a member of the gallery’s curatorial committee since it began, and said a wide range of prominent artists have showcased their work.
“Including exceptional artists brings more than notoriety to our exhibitions. It gives these well-networked professionals exposure to our university,” she said. “One of the artists we brought to campus went on to work with our faculty and the city of Bryan. Another donated construction materials to our architecture students through his company. Their inclusion in our exhibits forged long-lasting partnerships which continue to benefit Texas A&M and our students.”
Lisa Woods, a conceptual media-artist, and Brian Piana, a digital-media artist, are featured in the exhibition along with Catherine Allen, Jennifer Chenoweth, Tommy Fitzpatrick, Bryan Florentin, Jenn Hassin, Mayuko Ono Gray, Ann Johnson and Beili Liu.
Woods’ initial exhibit “Gathering” was featured at Wright Gallery in 2018. She is a full-time artist living in Austin, and said she is grateful to be invited back to Texas A&M.
“It is an honor to be selected,” Woods said. “The caliber of the other artists and artwork in this new group exhibition is phenomenal. In 2018, I was still relatively new at making artwork, and the opportunity to show a relatively complex and large-scale interactive piece at the Wright Gallery was a challenge and a wonderful opportunity.”
Two of her sculpture works are included in the exhibition, titled “Beneath the Surface I and II.” Woods selected satellite images from Google Earth of the Texas Panhandle’s thousands of irrigated agricultural fields. From that high vantage point, the fields look like patterns of giant circles, but what’s not visible is what is beneath the surface.
“These circular fields are drawing water from an aquifer that runs under eight states in middle of the U.S.,” Woods said. “And these irrigated fields produce a significant percentage of our food. I poked straws and wooden stakes through the satellite images to bring attention to the fact that we only see the surface is when we are flying over things. But the more interesting story is the one you can’t see, which is the fossil water we are rapidly depleting.”
Piana is a Houston native and Texas A&M graduate who now works as a digital-media artist. Two of his works currently on view include paintings titled “Biden’s First Day in Office” from 2022 and “Obama’s Last Night in Office” from 2017.
Piana worked with a programmer to develop an algorithm that searches the X (formerly Twitter) timeline for references of the words red, green, blue and yellow at a specific time of day. The paintings he created showcase different colored vertical bars with those four colors.
The context of the tweets are not related to Obama or Biden, Piana said, but rather the generative use of a certain color. On those two specific days, Piana took a screenshot of the findings and focused the paintings on a few seconds of someone mentioning those colors at that time.
“If someone typed ‘I am eating a red apple,’ my algorithm would pick that up and it would generate a vertical-colored bar in real time,” he said. “For the pieces in the show, when you see a red bar next to a blue bar, that means someone wrote about something red, and then the very next time wrote about something blue.”
Piana graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Environmental Design in 1997, and earned a master’s degree in Visualization in 2000. His first solo show was featured at the gallery in 2017.
“When most people think of Texas A&M, they don’t jump to art or animation — which is what the Viz Lab is,” Piana said. “The Viz Lab introduced me to HTML, and I really dove into websites and web designs. And then to have the opportunity to show work that is created from websites, in the same building that I started learning about these things, was really great.”
To view a video of the 10 featured artists as they discuss their work, and the impact of their initial exhibitions, visit the Wright Gallery on YouTube.
Top photo: “かわいい子には旅をさせよ_Let your precious child explore” by Mayuko Ono Gray. Graphite on paper, 2023.
