FY 2018 – 19
Human Kind
September – October, 2018
The Oak Cliff Cultural Center presented Human Kind, an exhibition featuring local artists, Sedrick Huckaby, Jose Canepa, and Kelsey Anne Heimerman. These artists exhibited large, lucious concepts of identity, through portraiture in painting. Their unique interpretations vibrantly displayed an ephemeral passion for humankind. The inclusive subject matter covered all races and genders of people creating a provoking atmosphere of unity.
This exhibition as a whole played to the rhythms of painting as a fiercely, elegant medium with the ability to captivate and move the viewer into moments of pure immersion in color, texture and bouquets of traditional painting, as well as new innovations in contemporary painting.
Artists
Sedrick Huckaby, Jose Canepa, and Kelsey Anne Heimerman
Curator
Gerardo Robles
Identified
July – August, 2018
The Oak Cliff Cultural Center presents OC3: Identified, a selective retrospective exhibition of artists featured in previous years (2013 – 2017).
Oak Cliff Cultural Center has provided gallery space for several individual artists (local/regional) and organizations which has resulted in furthering the evolving Dallas art scene. OC3: Identified is a celebration of the relationships that have been built and an opportunity for our community to see the growth and development of the artists’ work.
Artists
Bumin Kim, Sarita Westrup, Analise Minjarez, Giovanni Valderas, Kristina Smith, Tina Medina, James Behan, Jose Vargas, Peter Hiatt, Pedro Perez Jr, Chesley Williams, Carlos Donjuan, Emily Riggert, Rachel Rushing, Jean-Sebastien Boncy, Emmanuel Gillespie, Valerie Gillespie, Matt Manalo, Isabel Cuenca, Eden Soto and Abebe Zelelew
Curator
Gerardo Robles
Exhumed
January – February, 2018
The Oak Cliff Cultural Center presents a solo exhibition by Art Garcia. EXHUMED lures viewers with beautiful, seductive wood sculptures and installations, exposing a microcosm of society’s senseless violence. Thus, opening the conversation of social responsibilities.
Art Garcia is an artist whose practice includes public art sculpture and site-specific installations informed by history and the social environment. Garcia’s forms focus on surface, materiality and multiplicity to compliment the sensibility of the physical object. His works are more about how seriality exists in our human condition. With more than 30 years of experience, Garcia has been published in journals and annuals in the United States and Europe. He has produced works for The City of Dallas, El Paso, Georgetown, Southlake, New Orleans, The Meadows School of Art, The University of Texas at Dallas, The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and the US Census. Most recently he completed Frolic for Fire Station 32 in Dallas, and Zarape for Victory Forest Community Center in Fort Worth, Texas. Originally from West Texas his forms and objects are influenced by the desert mountains in their openness, simplicity and authenticity. Garcia received his M.A. from the University of Dallas.
Artist
Art Garcia
Curator
Gerardo Robles
22nd Annual ‘La Virgen de Guadalupe’ Art Exhibit
December 1, 2018 – January 4, 2019
Participating Artist
Tina Medina, Sal Barron, Juliet Rivera-Schwabe, Kelly Schwabe, Willie Sanchez, Jacinta Hernandez, Raul Servin, Nelson Diaz, Brenda L. Ciardeiello, Jim Chupa, Eva Azul, Jessica Trevizo, Lourdes Osorio, Mary Ann Turner, Jose Vargas, Lores Osorio, Oscar Contreras, Delia Palacios, LizMarck, Jessica Bell, Marci Chrismon, Carlos DonJuan, Monica Moody, Erin Frisch, Lindsay Brennan, Mirtha Aertker, Annalise Minjarez, Alfredo Calderón, Dennis González, and Maria Ruenes
Curator
Jose Vargas
Rudolph Castro’s “Sixty-two hours of Travel, fifty-nine years in the south.”
January 12, 2019 – February 15, 2019
“Sixty-two hours of travel, fifty-nine years in the south,” is part of a project by the Peruvian artist Rudolph Castro, where Castro toured three South American countries: Argentina, Chile and Paraguay, in search of the stories of the protagonists and families who experienced in their own flesh the violence unleashed against civil society by the military regimes between the 70’s and 80’s in the Latin American panorama.
In this exhibition, stories of objects of great symbolic content become materials that take relevance in the light of the memories they evoke. This is how the stories of the victims speak through their objects, collected, donated and carefully chosen by Castro to know and recognize the words, stories and memories that they contain.
The result will be a reflective and exploratory experience of the limits of societies and their capacity to survive.
Written and Witnessed
February 23 – March 29, 2019
The Oak Cliff Cultural Center presents “Written Witness”, an exhibition featuring, Fabric Artist-Poet, Jas. Mardis and Calligrapher, Andrea Tosten. Fabric Artist-Poet, Jas. Mardis and Calligrapher, Andrea Tosten exhibit small-to-large work in paper and fabric exploring responses to race, injustice and identity through fabric portraiture, symbolism, leather & wood burning and hand lettered explorations of select, reflective classic literature. Their cultural “telling and scribing” explore humanity through aesthetic interpretations and expressions that herald validating experiences inherent to their African-American and Jamaican-American cultures. The unique interpretations of these subjects, in these very different artists’ crafts, displays their want for a responsive mankind. Mardis’ expansive use of poetic and narrative text is alongside his deliberate use of family and found portraits in fabric, leather and wood. The exhibition as a whole plays to the rhythms of reflection, hence, “witnessing” and honoring through reflection. The hand lettered literary selections are familiar from educated explorations across the racial spectrum. However, racial strife and cruelty or receptivity of generational female grooming or the injustice of wrongful incarceration and community devolution seep out of reflective reach. “Witness(ing),” the African-American cultural experience of speaking truth to power, and a religious declaration, is a timely, provocative and poignant statement on our shared humanity. For this exhibition the subject matter is a timely political and societal exploration.
ART214: Oak Cliff Cultural Center
April 27 – May 24, 2019
Five cultural centers of the City of Dallas Office of Cultural Affairs (Bath House Cultural Center, Latino Cultural Center, Moody Performance Hall, South Dallas Cultural Center,and Oak Cliff Cultural Center) present the 2nd annual ART214 Juried Exhibition, a multi-venue visual arts project that showcases the works of artists who live in Dallas and the greater North Texas region.
Through this exhibition the Office of Cultural Affairs hopes to discover and develop relationships with new artists, provide space for artists to exhibit their work for in one of our cultural centers, and cross pollinate artists who have previously exhibited at one cultural center by exhibiting their work at a different center.
Participating Artist
Ruda Anderson, Linka Behn, Jacqueline Blanco, Elaina Brown-Spence, Maya Desai, Norm Diamond, Jeanet Dreskin-Haig, Inyang Essien, Mckee Frazior, Lin Hampton, Chunyu Han, Warren Paul Harris, Deborah Hartigan Viestenz, Kevin Hoare, Steve James, Doug Land, Ginny Marsh, Donald Matheson, Michael McKenzie, Julia McLain, Lin Medlin, Cynthia Ann Miró, Karla Mora Mora, Alaa Nasser, Kenda North, Ximena Peryea, Jeanne Rintelmann, Raul Rodriguez, T Stone, Carroll Swenson-Roberts, Anita Thurmond, Michael Tichansky, Julie Wardner, and Jo Ashely Edwinna Mignon Wilson.
FY 2019 – 20
Safe Place
Works by Ari Brielle
July 27 – August 30, 2019
Safe Place explores the politicization of the Black feminine body and identity. Ideas of ownership, self care, community, and agency of one’s body and experience are examined and questioned. This exhibition works with the ways in which black femmes adorn our bodies (which are often not safe from scrutiny, appropriation or violence) and our connection to each other and the natural world, bees, in particular—a species not native to this land, but brought here for the benefit of colonizers.
About the Artist
Ari Brielle is an emerging visual artist based in Dallas, Texas. She completed her BA at the University of North Texas in 2016 where she cultivated her studio practice and studied interdisciplinary Art and Design. The intersections between race, gender, class, and other identities greatly inform her experience, politics, and artwork. Brielle’s work deals with the nuances and inequities that come with her intersecting identities as a young black woman, while exploring and employing various formal disciplines
Un Medley of Memorias September 7 – October 11 This exhibition highlights artwork by Tejana artist Wendi Ruth Valladares. The exhibition Un Medley of Memorias encompasses prints, drawings and sculptural works focused on the artist’s fascination with the everyday, childhood memory, and Chicano culture. Subjects such as Spanglish language and text, children’s toys, Aztec designs, and domestic spaces and design bring attention and focus to the ever evolving and expanding Spanglish culture. About the Artist
Works by Wendi Ruth Valladares
Wendi Ruth Valladares is an artist from the Lone Star State of Texas. She earned a Master of Fine Arts in Print Media from Wichita State University in Wichita, Kansas and a Bachelor of Arts in Printmaking from the University of Dallas in Irving, Texas. She has shown her work in various solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and in Canada. Presently, Wendi Ruth resides close to her family in Dallas, Texas and she is an Adjunct Professor of Art at Cedar Valley College in Lancaster, Texas. Valladares’ art practice aims to recall, question, and redefine how dual cultural identity can reveal individual and social similarities and differences, that enhance our understanding of ourselves and others.
Lucha Libre Art Exhibition 2020 January 11 – February 14 Lucha libre is one of the most popular spectator sports and entertainment of Mexico. This form of sport is known for its fast paced, high flying, and acrobatic style of wrestling. In a lucha libre match, fans can see luchadores or luchadoras (male or female wrestlers) whirling around the ring, tumbling, tossing, and tormenting each other. This exhibition is curated by Jose Vargas, an artist and curator who has organized art shows for over twenty five years including the La Virgen de Guadalupe Art Exhibit, El Corazón. Artists: Nick Glenn, Jacque Forsher, L. Marciano, Olga Arredondo Brock, Samuel Garcia, Manuel Guerra, Stacy Xilom, Barbara Armstrong, Cesar Aguayo, Jep Otter, Jose Gaston Barriga, Erin Curry, Kelly Morris, Jose Cruz, House of Lunit, Loretta Gonzalez, Tim Pattison, Ramiro Ordonez, Chicle Zine, Genaro Hernandez, Rocio Ramirez, Jose Vargas, Jim Chupa, Ana Karen Allende, Karen Jacobi, Juan de Dios Mora, Juan J. Hernandez, Raul Rodriguez, Julie Zarate, Raul Monarrez, Martha Samaniego Calderon, Eva Azul, and Art Garcia.
Works by Various Artists | Curated by Jose Vargas
The Crit. Room February 22 – March 27 A critique room is a space where artists present work and receive constructive criticism from their peers. Through the installations we get a glimpse of the creative spaces in which their work is born. The work presented is a visual journey that inspires them as individuals. The experience taps into their subconscious to unearth the building blocks of their work. Personal experiences, emotion, research, exploration and experimentation are a few of the components that are presented. Artists featured: Sammy Maddela, Hallee Turner, Adam Warner, Kendra Wiggins and Enrique Nevarez.
Works by Various Artists | Curated by Carlos Donjuan
FY 2020 – 21
ART214 at Oak Cliff Cultural Center April 3 – May 8 ART214 showcases the works of artists who live in Dallas and the greater North Texas region. ART214 gives the citizens of Dallas an opportunity to discover and enjoy the work of talented local and regional visual artists. Each of the partnering cultural centers brings its own audiences, artists, communities and history. By scheduling connected dates to display a different section of the show at each center, the ART214 exhibition creates a unique opportunity for the public to visit all the centers during Dallas Arts Month, and it also promotes collaboration and cross-pollination of artists and audiences.
Works by Various Artists | Curated by Susan Lecky
GHOST CHROMATIC ALCHEMIST
Artist: Ray Albarez | Curated by Hatziel Flores
May 21 – July 3
Ray Albarez’s new creative process and art style have explosively birthed from the pandemic. As the world shifted to a halt and living online, remotely became the norm, it created a unique opportunity to make art. It sparked ideas of utilizing digital tools to order supplies, organize color schemes, and plan murals.
Murals were being canceled so Ray quickly began to order large canvas rolls, paint, and other supplies. His time also grew as there were fewer distractions and spent all of it creating. Color schemes were automatically created using a custom algorithm he created with the information he researched and gathered from a wide variety of paint suppliers. The planning process was formed from web meetings and paint apps. Creating artwork on canvas and documenting murals the artist was biding his time knowing that an opportunity would arise in the future.
As vaccines are made available, so will these works on canvas and walls be open for everyone to view, construe, debate, and repute.
