The Artist | J. Todd Allison

J. Todd Allison studied art and art history at the University of Texas at Austin where he received a B.F.A. He then went on to study painting at the University of Wyoming where he earned an M.A. From there he moved on to the University of Illinois where he earned an M.F.A. in Art and Design. He grew up in southeastern Kansas until he was a teen then moved to Florida and Indiana, before landing in Texas. He has lived and regularly exhibited in the Houston area for the last twenty-two years. His work has been exhibited across Texas in venues such as the Arlington Museum of Art, the Cardozier Gallery at the University of Texas Permian Basin, Blue Star Contemporary Arts Center, the Old Fort Russell Building in Marfa and the Jones Center for the Arts in Austin. He has exhibited across the country in venues such as I-Space Chicago, the Kauffman Gallery in Pennsylvania, RPS Gallery in Asbury Park, New Jersey, Shift Gallery in Seattle and the Krannert Art Museum in Illinois. Additionally, his work has been included in exhibitions at the MadisMad Gallery in Madrid, Spain, the Museo de Arte Moderno in Trujillo, Peru, and Muse Gallery in Hyderabad, India. 

Mary Lawton

For more than three decades Mary Lawton’s cartoons have appeared in a wide variety of publications including The New Yorker magazine, Reader’s Digest, Ms., The San Francisco Chronicle, Funny Times, Narrative, and The American Bystander. She appears weekly in the King Features syndicated strip Six Chix.

Her cartoons and paintings have been exhibited in Houston, Boston, Berkeley, the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco, and The Society of Illustrators in New York City.

marylawton@att.net
Instagram #marstoonz

Please note that this is the SECOND Saturday of the month at Red Bud Gallery.

Wayne Gilbert (b1946) is a true Texas original having been active in the Houston area since the wild and wooly 80s curating, dealing, organizing spaces and creating his own extraordinary artworks. He creates stunning meditations of the primal stuff of life and death using human ash as his primary artistic medium.

When I arrived as museum professional to Houston in 2009 my museum’s senior curator Toby Kamps knew of my alternative-art lineage. Unlike most museum officials I had a tendency to favor works that would upset sensitive souls. He alerted me to Houston-based Wayne Gilbert’s importance. During an introductory lunch with Gilbert I met a confident artist who knew himself to be a brave and unique visual practitioner engaging the biggest human concerns. Gilbert asked almost innocently if the reason he had remained obscure outside of Texas was because he had chosen to remain based in Houston or because he used dead people as an art medium. I was sure it was a little of both I decided he was due to receive a serious consideration not only outside Texas, but globally.

Wayne has a relationship with a funeral home that gives him unclaimed left behind boxes of ash. He mixes the ash with a gel medium and uses a palette knife to spread the material into its form and shape. It is important to know that each of the various earth tone colors is unique to the person in the box. It appears that each of us have our own earth tone color. He then decides on the image, always focused on his iconography or mortality, which one can argue is always the substance of great art. From the painted word “Intercourse” the act that starts the process that leads to being born and therefore inevitably dying. He depicted the symbols of the world religions interlocked, the mental constructs that help us mitigate the fear of the inevitable. Several works also remind us of the Whitmanesque poetry of having one’s own human remains become the stuff of new plants, essentially allowing us to be reborn into new life.

Wayne Gilbert, midway through his 70s is active curating, running a gallery in Houston Heights called G Spot and constantly painting. There have been scores of articles about him and one documentary film. He has written a detailed statement about why human remains attracted him.

He has no illusions about his path in art knowing that most people would not choose to live with them in their homes he felt compelled to return repeatedly to the most primal material, life and death as substance and content of his art. Gilbert’s art is not for everyone and I have been rebuffed by many with whom I have tried to share my enthusiasm for this extraordinary work, but for those with a healthy understanding of the inexorable interwoven nature of death within and throughout life few artists have ever matched his extraordinary achievements.

Bill Arning  |  bill@billarning.com

My journey with photography began with a Pentax K1000 that my father gave me at the age of eighteen. He was a musician for Harry Belafonte and would often say, “We are the songs we sing.” I believe that I am the images I create. I use the visual arts as an instrument for understanding the world I live in, self-reflection and self-expression. My artistic practice is informed by a wide range of influences, from Hendrik Kerstens, Annie Leibovitz to Bruce Jackson, Barbara Kruger, Cara Romero, and filmmaker Chris Smith.

 Because I’m a Tribal member of the Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan Tribe of Chippewas, Native American issues have had a profound impact on my work. Beginning with the Dann Sisters as they fought for their land in 2000. I followed them to DC, photographing them and their legal team. Furthermore, I attended law school for Tribal law and photographed our debate team as we traveled the country, competing against other Native students. This summer I’ll be photographing two Tribal communities in Louisiana.

But back to “Portraits of My Mother” — In my family’s culture taking care of your elders is very important. Accordingly, my mom lives with me, and during COVID, I began taking studio portraits of her, mostly because she almost died from COVID. I felt our time was precious and needed a way to engage. This new body of work, “Portraits of My Mother” explores notions of beauty, ageism and our flawed medical system. 

Brendan Flores is a Houston-based sculpture artist creating free-standing and wall-hanging 3D works. An engineer by professional background, his work is infused with a desire for detail, precision, and constraint. In his practice, Brendan is focused on the process of creating obsessively finished representations of his experiences using cubes hand crafted from exotic and domestic hardwoods as both his medium and his palette.

Most recently, his work has been shown at the 2023 Visual Arts Alliance Juried Annual Exhibition, juried by Heidi Vaughn of Heidi Vaughn Fine Art, and was selected as the winner of the Giesey Award at the 2023 Rising Eyes of Texas show at the Rockport Center for the Arts, juried by Tanja Peterson of the Redbud Arts Center.

Brendan has a B.S. in Petroleum Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and is currently pursuing his MFA at Houston Christian University (formerly HBU), class of 2025.

Collection Profile

I appreciate straight lines, symmetry, and precision. However, I find my inspiration in the things I see and the situations I experience, where such qualities are generally sparse. Life, nature, and experiences are all messy concepts. My work is the way I assuage my inner desire to smooth the messy into the precise.

Each cube is a box that stores my thoughts, emotions, and ideas, and once that cube is placed into a work, that is where those feelings live. These emotions are not locked away in some part of me, rather, they are placed in the open to be considered by myself and my audience. Through this open dialogue, I am creating my own abstract language to represent subjective organic themes through rigid and exacting forms.