Women & Their Work Announces 2024-25 Solo Exhibition Artists

Women & Their Work (W&TW), an Austin-based visual and performing arts organization, has announced the artists selected for its 2024-25 solo exhibition series.

This fall W&TW launched a call for exhibition proposals that was open to Texas-based women artists who had not exhibited with the space within the past decade. According to a press release from the organization, nearly 350 artists submitted proposals. A panel, comprised of W&TW alumnae artists Joey Fauerso, Aryel René Jackson, and Ann Johnson, chose eight artists to have solo exhibitions in the coming season.

The selected artists are Hiba Ali, Ranran Fan, Barbara Felix, Aisha Asim Imdad, Maria Cristina Jadick, Jessica Mallios, Irene Antonia Diane Reece, and Hannah Spector. Each artist will create a new body of work for their exhibition. In support of the shows, W&TW will provide each artist with a $2,000 honorarium, as well as a small honorarium for a curatorial advisor of the artist’s choosing. Also, for each exhibition, the organization will produce a color catalog, a six-minute video of the artist discussing their work, and will host a public program.

Learn more about the selected artists below, via descriptions provided by W&TW.

Hiba Ali
Austin

Using virtual reality, 3D animation, augmented reality, and installation, Hiba Ali creates immersive worlds of sound, smell, and enhanced experiences of the visual. These environments serve as portals that slow down time and connect us to our ancestors, descendants, and communities creating access to a network of calmness, solace, and care.

Ranran Fan
Denton

In interactive installations that feature elaborate mechanical devices, Ranran Fan creates encrypted devices that rely on AI to facilitate conversations that many find difficult. With a goal of visualizing and transforming trauma, Mx. Fan translates personal experience into an encrypted experience that invites the audience to actively engage with and decipher. While addressing xenophobia, racism, and violence against the female and queer community, Mx. Fan’s work showcases AI’s role as a powerful mediator. 

Barbara Felix
San Antonio

Honoring dynamic women of color in the community, Barbara Felix paints large-scale murals that capture the multi-faceted nature of her subjects. These full body, multi-image portraits are accompanied with audio that depicts and celebrates their backgrounds and beliefs. A recurring theme is the role that dance and movement play in navigating their lives. Ms. Felix’s goal is to make installations that uplift and connect us to our personal and shared joy.

Aisha Asim Imdad
Sugar Land

Inspired by Indian, Mughal and Persian miniatures and frescos historically prized in her birthplace of Pakistan, Aisha Asim Imdad creates work that reflects traditional and contemporary approaches to painting. Based in research, Ms. Imdad’s work relies on historical texts as well as existing art for its conceptual underpinning. Reflecting on our relationship with the natural world, Imdad is currently exploring gardens as an important aspect of spiritual and mental wellbeing.

Maria Cristina Jadick
Houston

Maria Cristina Jadick’s conceptually based art addresses suffering and redemption. Through a variety of media—photography, video, painting, print making and performance—she articulates and responds to the trauma and devastation of the present moment. Her work valorizes an appreciation for the genuine (as represented by experience and the acceptance of imperfection) over the more traditional aesthetic of beauty. It is through this focus that viewers can connect to the work and to each other.

Jessica Mallios
San Marcos

An abiding interest in the physicality of light and space as captured in photographic, time-based, and installation practices informs Jessica Mallios’ work. Photographs depend on chance, the unpredictable behavior of light, and subsequent chemical transformations which illustrate photography’s potential as active and unfixed. That photography is both malleable yet tenacious inspires the conceptual framework of her work. New film-work explores the notion of light through yet another perspective as Ms. Mallios investigates the history and significance of women lighthouse keepers.

Irene Antonia Diane Reece
Houston

Irene Antonia Diane Reece creates image-based, multimedia installations that engage viewers in conversations about racial identity, African diaspora, social injustice, family histories, re-memory, mental and community health. While lens-based, Ms. Reece’s work has become increasingly critical of the very tools she uses as she seeks to decentralize whiteness, engage/deconstruct the violence of the camera, protect Black archives, and centralize/celebrate the complexities of Black identities.

Hannah Spector
Austin

Hannah Spector uses humor, play, and the creation of novel domestic cosmologies to form new connections between text, movement, voice and image. She creates images that queer objects to undo the expected and routine of our daily habits to project a new future. This future is rooted in the disruption of gender norms, power systems within language, and limiting notions of self-expression. In videos examining the myths of the old West, Ms. Spector utilizes absurdity and object theater to offer a way to form new frameworks of interpretation to move through our inherited landscape.