The second part of the Visual Arts Programming takes place at the gallery spaces themselves through an Art Cruise. Join us as we hop from space to space, enjoying signature cocktails at each stop to take in the work and learn more about the galleries and the exhibitions. You will need to provide your own transportation (bike, car, ride share). Carpooling is encouraged!
A limited edition set of collectable cards will be available at each stop. Collect them all!
Some artists being shown include: Mónica Vega at Big Medium, Ezra Masch at Co-Lab Projects, Soomin Jung at grayDUCK Gallery, Sarah Sudhoff and Cruz Ortiz at Ivester Contemporary, Silky Shoemaker, Michelle Devereaux and Tailgate Projects at MASS Gallery, and Mai Gutierrez and Erin Cunningham at ICOSA.
Maps and gallery hour schedules provided below for those wishing to visit the sites outside of the official Art Cruise itself.
Free Admission (walk ups encouraged!)
Art Cruise Schedule & Stops
2:00 1A – Big Medium – Mónica Vega
2:22 2 – MASS Gallery – Silky Shoemaker, Michelle Devereaux & Kale Roberts
2:44 3 – grayDUCK Gallery – Soomin Jung
3:06 1B – ICOSA – Erin Cunningham, Andrea De Leon, Mai Gutierrez, Deanna Pastel
3:28 1C – Ivester Contemporary – Sarah Sudhoff and Cruz Ortiz
*Evening 4 – Co-Lab – Ezra Masch (https://fuseboxlive.com/project/volumes/)
About Our Art Cruise Artists:
Erin Cunningham Erin Cunningham (b. 1979 Honolulu, HI) is an artist living and working in Austin, Texas. She received her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003 and an MFA in studio art from The University of Texas at Austin in 2007. With a focus in sculpture, her work utilizes material combinations, such as cast metals, and the female figure to explore dualities of masculine and feminine, disposable and precious, fragility and strength. She has shown both nationally and internationally, including The Metropolitan Art Museum in Tokyo and at Mönchskirche Salzwedel, in Salzwedel, Germany. Artist residencies including BAER Art Center in Hofsos, Iceland as well as Atelierhaus Residency Hilmsen in Hilmsen, Germany. Cunningham is one of the founding members of the ICOSA Collective, an artist-run exhibition space in Austin TX. She currently holds a position as an Assistant Professor of Practice in the Department of Art and Art History at The University of Texas at Austin.
Soomin Jung was born in Seoul, South Korea, and relocated in San Antonio, Texas where she earned an MFA from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 2008. In 2007, Jung did a residency at the Santa Reparata International School of Art, Florence, Italy. Jung is a full-time lecturer at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. Recent exhibitions include: McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX (2022), Conduit Gallery, Dallas, TX (2021) Southwest School of Art, San Antonio, TX (2021); Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum, San Antonio, TX (2020); Swedish Institute, Minneapolis, MN (2020); Hopkins Arts Center, Hopkins, MN (2020); Brea Gallery, Brea, CA (2019); Culture Commons Gallery, San Antonio, TX (2019); the Bridgeport Art Center, Chicago, IL (2018).
Michelle Deveraux is an artist born and raised in Dallas, Texas and has been living and working in Austin since 2005. She received her Bachelor of Arts Degree from Bard College in 2004. She currently works at an Austin-based chainstitch company known as Fort Lonesome. Her performances, installations, videos, and drawings have been shown locally at Monofonus Press, Mass Gallery, Arthouse at the Jones Center, Co-Lab, Domy Books, Okay Mountain, El Cosmico, and Museum of Human Achievement. Other notable shows include a two person show with Matt Furie at New Image Art Gallery in Los Angeles, in addition to a pizza themed group show at Marlborough Gallery in Chelsea. Her recent body of work centers mostly on the media of colored pencil drawings mixed airbrush.
Mai Gutierrez (1987, Monterrey, MX) is a multi-disciplinary architectural designer and artist living in Austin, TX. She earned her BFA and Masters in Architecture from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2010. Born and raised in Monterrey, Mexico, she sources her inspiration from architecture and nature by using natural elements in her work such as stone, wood and metal labored to display an architectural aesthetic. Her work has been exhibited in the United States and Mexico. Gutierrez’ current practice consists of architectural and interior design services, as well as sculpture and public art.
Kale Roberts explores queer potentialities through community, material, body and performance. As a southern queer, failure and resilience is expanded through explorations of sports culture, community ritual, energy exchange, and the unexpected. With an art as life outlook, Roberts work is heavily seated in materiality as language. Even though these objects and performances can be precarious, they lead with joyful intentions and willful discomfort.
Silky Shoemaker is a performer, visual artist, and community organizer based in the Bay Area. She makes work that explores the absurdity and profundity of queer life thru painting, curation, and slapstick melodrama. Her work has been seen in such illustrious venues as ArtHouse Austin, the Warhol Museum, The Sculpture Center (Queens) and punk houses throughout the USA. She is one third of the performance collective Shaboom! and also dances across the world with notorious post gender punk Christeene. Silky is the founder of GAYBIGAYGAY Music Fest and once curated the world’s first Gay Wax Museum.
Sarah Sudhoff is a Cuban-American interdisciplinary artist based in Houston, Tx. whose work interweaves themes of gender, science, and personal experience through photographs, performance, sculpture, video, animation, and sound. All of her works are, in some way, socially engaged and inherently participatory. The way these methods and materials are utilized vary from project to project and take advantage of the media, site, and participants involved. Sudhoff’s works can be categorized into one or more of the following three areas of concern: Ethics of Care, Social Practice, and the Visualization of Data. By using creative practice as a mediator between subjective and objective experiences, her work engages in conversations that address bodies and communities as shared and yet, ultimately, distinct.
Sudhoff’s most recent performances produced during the pandemic, “El Recuerdo,” “60 Pounds of Pressure,” “Will You Hug Me Forever ,” “Siloed,” and “Focusing Screen” explore inherited memories, the anxiety of isolation, survivorship, familial relationships, and the body as data and material. All feature the female figure as a unifying form.
Sudhoff has participated in artist residencies at Artpace, San Antonio, the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction, Bloomington, Indiana, and The DoSeum in San Antonio, Texas. She will be in residence this summer at the McColl Center for Art and Innovation in Charolette, North Carolina. Artist grants from Houston Arts Alliance (2020, 2019 & 2017) and The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation (2013) have furthered her career.
Sudhoff has given recent artist talks to RMIT University in Melbourne, Rhode Island School of Design, Rice University, El Paso Community College, Austin Community College, Blaffer Art Museum Art and she will speaking about her recent exhibition this week at Nancy Littlejohn Gallery and presented her performance during the Culture, Health & Wellbeing International Conference in Oxford, England.
Sudhoff’s recent and forthcoming exhibitions and performances include; Ivester Contemporary, Austin, ICOSA Collective, Austin; Texas; Collar Works, Troy, New York; Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, Louisiana; Houston Health Museum, Houston, Texas; Nancy Littlejohn Fine Art, Houston, Texas; Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, Texas; The DoSeum, San Antonio, Texas; Stay Home Gallery, Paris, Tennessee; Filter Photo, Chicago, Illinois; PhotoPlace Gallery, Middlebury, Vermont; grayDuck Gallery, Austin, Texas; Center for Fine Art Photography, Fort Collins, Colorado; Colorado Photographic Arts Center, Denver; Colorado. Sudhoff is a former photo editor for Texas Monthly and Time magazines. She recently served asExecutive Director and Curator for the Texas Photographic Society and the Houston Center for Photography. Sudhoff taught photography at Stephen F. Austin State University, Nacogdoches, TrinityUniversity, San Antonio, and the Art Institute of San Antonio. And is currently on faculty at St. Edwards,University in Austin and the University of Houston.
Sudhoff completed an MFA in Photography and Related Media from Parsons School of Design, New York, and a BA in Journalism and Photography from the University of Texas at Austin
Ezra Masch is a visual artist and musician from Philadelphia. He creates immersive and interactive installations that break down barriers between sonic and visual artforms. His work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at The Mattress Factory, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Icebox Project Space, MASS Gallery, Tiger Strikes Asteroid Philadelphia, TSA NY, IPCNY, Whitebox (NYC), The Visual Art Center (Austin, TX), and Galleria L’Acquario (Rome, Italy). He received a BFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design (2004) and an MFA in Studio Art from the University of Texas at Austin (2012). Masch also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2011). He currently lives and works in Austin, TX.
Cruz Ortiz is an American Contemporary Artist who uses multiple mediums examining connections to nature, hope, healing, beauty, endurance, and the cosmos. He uses bold graphic screen prints, figurative abstract portraiture, dream-like landscape paintings, temporal guerrilla installations, utilitarian machines, hand carved wood sculptures, large scale public art, video, and performance art. He is interested in the exhausting narratives searching for love and the sense of home land. Ortiz is constantly working in the studio, jumping from traditional studio methods such as painting and sculpture to commercial printmaking and print design projects. Most of his works are created with a sense of exigency, only so he can keep up with the ever evolving ideas and visual manifestos eager to be revealed. Early in his career he would thrash through photography, screen prints and video projects in a very punk skater rasquache manner, which involved staged performances and make-shift projection art parties.
Currently, Ortiz has been exclusively working on painting as a romantic art historical form of documentation. It is through the use of this archaic form that he is taking risks of institutionalizing subject matter. In a time where everything is now digital and virtual, Ortiz is mixing oil paintings and painting from direct observation, while detecting the importance of painting for the future. He is also very interested in how painting pushes the critical contextualization of social political issues. His artistic projects aim to center the periphery to capture moments in history, especially the settler state that has tried, over and over, to erase from collective memory. With a great sense of urgency to record, preserve, and disseminate, he paints.
Ortiz has committed himself to creatively collaborating with cultural arts organizations and social justice organizations for most of his career. He was also a public high school instructor for 15 years, working with diverse urban students. Cruz Ortiz has had solo exhibitions at: ARTPACE in San Antonio, Texas; the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston, Texas; the University of Texas in Austin; The Museum of Contemporary Art in Santa Barbara, in Santa Barbara, California; and the Judd Foundation, in Marfa, Texas. He has been invited to participate in many major international exhibitions and institutions such as: the Louvre in Paris, France; EV-A in Limerick, Ireland; the traveling exhibition Phantom Sightings with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California; the San Juan Triennial in San Juan, Puerto Rico; and at The Blue Coat Museum, in Liverpool, England. His work is in the permanent collections of Ruby City, the San Antonio Museum of Art, the University of Texas at San Antonio Library Special Collections, the Arizona State University Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery.
Mónica Vega graduated from the school of architecture in 2008 in Monterrey, Mexico. In 2015 founded her lighting practice LumLum in México City, where she develops residential, hospitality, retail and cultural lighting projects.
In 2016 she won the research contest The Light Symposium Paper Competition, organized by Wismar University of Applied Sciences Technology, Business and Design. Since then, she mixes her professional practice with teaching and collaborating mainly with Centro de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey and as guest teacher at universities as Universidad Anáhuac, ITESM, Universidad de Monterrey, CENTRO.
She has been a speaker at Illuminating Engineering Society and International Association of Lighting Designers
In 2018, she exhibited There is no Place Like Home in La Cresta, Monterrey, México. In 2019 this piece was selected as a finalist in the Lamp Awards in Barcelona, Spain. In 2020 she presented a new work called This is the Now at the Contemporary Art Museum Juan Soriano in Cuernavaca, México.
Mónica works in lighting installations mixing natural and artificial light. Her main purpose is to share how light interacts with all materials and matter, how light travels through space and crashes with surfaces as well as how these materials reflect, contain and mold the light.
We are subject and object
Surface and observers