"Giovanni Valderas"

“I try to create a piece of work that can be the piece of work of others. It's not done. People will finish whatever I'm trying to share with them.”

“I go back to the first-ever art form that I made, which is drawing.”

"You allow yourself to respond to things as they come. You allow chance to enter into the process in a really serious way."

“The thing that I cannot say through art — I relieve those feelings through boxing.”

“I think of the legacy I’m going to leave behind, and the narratives I want to put forth into the world.”

“I fell in love with art a long time ago. With photography specifically. Love is an essentially irrational thing.”

"Art for me is living, is surviving, is love, is communication; it's the way that I can live every day.”

“At a certain point you can get caught up in your own work and not take the time to invest in your local community... . But it's really important to me that I do both, and to remain active locally.”

"If you give something time, and you focus on it — almost anything — you'll find something interesting about it." 

“People can forget what certain micro-aggressions can look like. Words are very, very, very powerful.”

“The real impetus for me is something I just can’t out of my head, and I just keep thinking: I need to make this; I have to make this.”

"Oak Cliff really pushed me into understanding that this is my neighborhood, this is me, these are the things I'm seeing — these things are worthy of being shown. That neighborhood as transformed me." 

"That you can make something that can express an idea without using any words, and someone can see it and formulate their own language around it seems like unifying and gratifying thing to do."

“It’s important for somebody to see their reflection in any way possible. But it’s better when it’s a positive reflection and not a negative.”

Notable past recipients include current Glasstire Digital Artist Resident Carolyn Sortor (2018) and recent Nasher Public artists Giovanni Valderas (2017) and Bernardo Vallarino (2020).

Meek's exhibition follows other successful installations in the series, including works from Bernardo Vallerino, Giovanni Valderas, and most recently, Nyugen E. Smith.

From The Houston Museum of African American Culture (HMAAC). To read more about this event, read Glasstire’s news post here. To view the exhibition online, go here. “The Houston Museum…

“Perhaps more than others in the Houston cultural community, HMAAC is sensitive to the need for spaces where people of color control their narrative and are not interpreted by others."

Christopher Blay and William Sarradet on a show about Black hair, an artist creating voids in space, and another artist's take on the grit and grind of the working class.

From artists we can all recognize to some favorite Texas artists to artists who labor in obscurity, here are  a few images that offer a glimpse behind the curtain.