As a means of showcasing Austin’s vibrant art scene and connecting it to the more performance-based core of the festival, guest curator Michael Anthony García presents this year’s visual arts programming.
Ride along on the Art Bus Cruise and the Almost Real Things team will take you from gallery to gallery while you enjoy libations and groove to music. At each stop you’ll take in the art work and learn more about the galleries, exhibitions, and artists.
You can either join us on our bus cruise or take the tour via your own transportation (bike, car, ride share). Carpooling is encouraged!
The artists being shown include: Steve Parker at Co-Lab Projects, Rachel Starbuck at MASS Gallery, Shawn Smith at grayDUCK Gallery, Michelle Marchesseault at Northern-Southern, Alex McAdoo & Loc Huynh at Martha’s Contemporary, and Alexis Hunter, Elizabeth Hudson, Elisha Luckett at The Carver Museum. Scroll down for more artist info.
To ride on the Art Bus Cruise tickets are required.
Tickets are on sale now, BUY YOUR TICKETS HERE!
Art Cruise Schedule & Stops:
About Our Art Cruise Artists:
Alex McAdoo is a painter from Bellingham, Washington and is currently living and working in Los Angeles. He received his BFA in graphic design from University of Utah in 2013 and his MFA in painting from Rhode Island School of Design in 2019.
Alexis Hunter is an identity-based, multidisciplinary artist currently living and working in Austin, TX. She earned a BFA from Texas State University in Studio Art, with a concentration in painting, graduating summa cum laude (2022). Recent solo and group exhibitions include BINARY (Who Do You Belong To?), ICOSA Collective Gallery, Austin, TX (2021); Own it, examine it, and confront it head on, DORF, Austin, TX (2021); Collective Thoughts, Antenna Gallery, New Orleans, LA (2023); and SBMRPVII, the Carver Museum, Austin, TX (2023). She was selected for the third edition of Big Medium’s LINE Residency (2022) and vol. 2 of the George Washington Carver Museum’s Small Black Museum Residency (2022). She is also a member of the artist-run collective, ICOSA, and the newest painting instructor at The Contemporary Austin’s Art School at Laguna Gloria. Alexis is the founder of Others, an ongoing publication project documenting the faces and stories of biracial individuals in central Texas. Her work explores self-image through racial identity, mental health, the female body, and the male gaze.
Elizabeth Hudson (b. 1989, Los Angeles) is a mixed-media surrealist painter from Dallas, Texas. She studied studio art at Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, and art history at the University of Texas at Austin. After leaving college, she created 30 commissioned murals for homeowners and businesses in Dallas, Scottsdale, and Culver City, before eventually returning to Austin to pursue painting as a professional career. She currently has a studio at Canopy artist studios in Austin.
Elisha Luckett is a photographer, filmmaker and poet, born in New Orleans, Louisiana and raised in Houston, Texas. His work, including his first exhibition, [solomon//thecircleUNBROKEN], explores the unified transience of place, as well as the shadow, sound and movement of Black spiritual life—using time, opacity, and community as a bedrock by which to bring Black people into new temporal & spatial relationships with each other and themselves.
Loc Huynh (b. 1992 Austin, TX) earned his BFA from Texas State University in 2016. He did some graduate work at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and received his MFA from the University of North Texas in 2020.
“Through painting, I use materiality to reaffirm the material world and invent new ones. My personal aesthetic evolved from nostalgically bright colors that hearken back to sensibilities of my youth. Because of this persistent interest, I purposefully adopt palettes and compositions from cartoons and other visual graphics. The vocabulary of images I use are idiosyncratic, but also serve as evidence of my biography. Growing up in a Vietnamese-American household, I was exposed to both East Asian, as well as Western kitsch. My paintings utilize the language from both visual cultures, and this hybridization is emblematic of my identity.”
Michelle Marchesseault is a mutli-disciplinary artist and designer, formerly based in Austin, and now NYC.
Rachael Starbuck is an artist, educator and organizer who lives and works in Austin, TX. Her work operates with tactile erotics— thin skins and fluid bodies negotiating the space between distance and proximity and pressing against porous boundaries. They are feeling forms and sensitive objects that live in a space of in-betweenness. In her practice Starbuck navigates how a body moves through space, is defined or indistinct, present or absent, solid or yielding. Starbuck is a co-founder of the nomadic curatorial collective Partial Shade and a founding member of MATERIAL GIRLS. She has been a resident at ACRE Projects, The Contemporary Artists Center at Woodside, The Wassaic Project and The Vermont Studio Center and has shown work in Richmond, VA; Providence, RI; Chicago, IL; Austin, TX; Houston, TX; New York, NY; and London, UK. She received her MFA in Studio Art from the University of Texas at Austin in 2017 and her BFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2011.
Shawn Smith was born in 1972 in Dallas, TX where he attended Arts Magnet High School and Brookhaven College before graduating from Washington University in St. Louis, MO with a BFA in Printmaking in 1995. Smith received his MFA in Sculpture from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2005. He has received artist-in-residencies from the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, CA and the Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris, France. In 1996, Smith was a recipient of the Clare Hart DeGolyer grant from the Dallas Museum of Art.
In 2006, Smith was commissioned to create Doppel Fountain, a monumental public sculpture in San Francisco, CA. In 2017, he was commissioned to create Convergence, consisting of 100 sculptures for the new NYPL Westchester Square Library in the Bronx, for which he received a 2018 NYC Excellence in Design Award from the New York Public Design Commission. In July 2019, he installed Burning Bright, a 71 foot long powder-coated steel panther at Fire Station 42 in Fort Worth, Texas. Also in 2019, he created Tower, an 18 foot tall pixelated giraffe commissioned by the US Department of State for their Art in Embassies Program to be installed in Niamey, Niger.
Steve Parker is an artist, musician, and curator based in Austin, TX. He is the recipient of the Rome Prize, the Ashurst Prize (UK), the Tito’s Prize, a Fulbright, along with multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Parker works with salvaged musical instruments, amateur choirs, marching bands, urban bat colonies, flocks of grackles, and pedicab fleets to investigate systems of control, interspecies behavior, and forgotten histories. His projects include elaborate civic rituals for humans, animals, and machines; listening sculptures modeled after obsolete surveillance tools; and cathartic transportation symphonies for operators of cars, pedicabs, and bicycles.
Parker has exhibited and performed at institutions, public spaces, and festivals internationally. Highlights include the the American Academy in Rome (Italy), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Arkansas), CUE Art Foundation (NY), the Fusebox Festival (Austin), Gwangju Media Art Festival (Korea), the Guggenheim Museum (NY), the Lincoln Center Festival (NY), Los Angeles Philharmonic inSIGHT (LA), the Lucerne Festival (Switzerland), MASS MoCA (Massachusetts), the McNay Art Museum (San Antonio), Rich Mix (London), SXSW, and Tanglewood. As a soloist and as an artist of NYC-based “new music dream team” Ensemble Signal, he has premiered 200+ new works.