Untitled Houston 2025

Valadez is highly regarded for his groundbreaking realist pastels and paintings. He uniquely applies "high art" techniques to everyday, urban and working-class scenes of Los Angeles, portraying social commentary with remarkable dignity.

Evita Tezeno’s mixed-media collage paintings depict scenes of everyday life inspired by her family, friends, and childhood memories in South Texas, animating her vision of a Black America filled with humanity. Bringing together vibrantly colored, hand-painted, patterned papers and heirloom buttons, each canvas becomes a space where presence is not questioned but celebrated.

Luis Emilio Romero’s geometric abstract paintings are linked to traditions of Guatemalan woven textiles passed down through his family, employing spirituality and indigenous craft as the structural logic in his intricate compositions. His detailed oil paintings are vessels of process imbued with intention, energy, and devotion. Situated within a discussion of the history of abstract painting, his practice investigates the structures of organizing space through the optics of opacity, saturation, reflection, texture, and tone.

Part of a new generation of Latinx Abstraction, Francisco Masó employs geometric abstraction to explore the dynamics of power within state control mechanisms, while also fostering a dialogue on the militarization of Cuban civil society. His designs replicate the striped polo shirts worn by the Cuban secret police, documented in anonymous photographs that he finds on the dark web and which often accompany the paintings.

Phung Huynh's graphite drawings on pink donut boxes address the Cambodian American experience and her own Vietnamese-Cambodian family's assimilation. The boxes are common in independent donut shops in Southern California, most of which are owned and operated by Cambodian refugees and immigrants. This new series of drawings reflect on the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War (or American War, as it is known there) and take inspiration from her family’s archives of photographs and newspaper articles that document the early years of their resettlement.