Note: the following is part of Glasstire’s series of short videos, Five-Minute Tours, for which commercial galleries, museums, nonprofits and artist-run spaces across the state of Texas send us video walk-throughs of their current exhibitions. This will continue while the coronavirus situation hinders public access to exhibitions. Let’s get your show in front of an audience.
See other Five-Minute Tours here.
Richard “Ricky” Armendariz: Set the Woods on Fire at Nicole Longnecker Gallery, Houston. Dates: January 29 – March 19, 2022.
Via the gallery:
“Nicole Longnecker Gallery announces their first 2022 exhibit, Set the Woods on Fire, from San Antonio artist, Ricky Armendariz.
‘We are excited to welcome Ricky Armendariz back to Houston to open the 2022 season,’ said gallery owner Nicole Longnecker ‘Collectors will want to see Ricky’s mystical paintings and wood carvings.’ About the exhibit Armendariz says, ‘A lot of things have happened since the start of the pandemic. It affected us personally, strained family and work relationships. My artistic practice has changed as well. I’m spending more time dwelling on current events, politics and the general state of the country we live in. The laws that govern us and the human cost of action and inaction to those policies. I don’t consider myself an overtly political artist but these new works have their roots in the power dynamics of the present.’
About Ricky Armendariz:
Richard ‘Ricky’ Armendariz was born in El Paso and currently resides in San Antonio, Texas. Romanticism for the American landscape and the hybridization of Mexican, American and indigenous cultures have always informed the content of his work. Images that have cultural, biographical and art historical references are carved and burned into the surfaces of his artwork. He uses traditional painting and printmaking techniques in combination with non-tradition methods of drawing to achieve his esthetic.
The content found in classic novels, poems and song lyrics are physically carved into the work, or added to the titles, to elevate and reinforce the conceptual link between the nuanced meanings of words and the imagery. Themes involving power dynamics, destiny, and the role chance plays in our lives, make up the conceptual backbone of his work.
He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from The University of Texas at San Antonio (1995), and his Master of Fine Arts from the University of Colorado at Boulder (1999). Armendariz is currently a Full Professor of Art at The University of Texas at San Antonio. In 2008, he received the Artpace Supplemental Travel Grant for travel to Mexico City, Mexico. In 2013 was an artist in residence at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin Germany, and in 2018 Anderson Ranch in Snowmass Village, CO. In 2017 he was the first artist in residence at the DoSeum in San Antonio, TX.
He has exhibited at the Denver Art Museum, The Dallas Contemporary, The Blue Star Art Center in San Antonio, and Mexic-Arte Museum in Austin. International exhibitions include: Liminal Space, DMZ Museum, South Korea (2018), Common Wounds, Bethlehem and Tel Aviv (2005), and New Prints Kunstlerhaus Bethanien , Berlin Germany (2013), Texas Contemporary Art, Lalit Kala Academy, National Academy of Art, New Delhi, India (2015).
Armendariz is in the permanent collections of the San Antonio Museum of Art, McNay Art Museum, Denver Art Museum, Davis Museum, Wellesley College, Massachusetts and the Bush International Airport Houston Art Collection, and The Cheech Marin Collection, Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, CA.”
