Portrayals of motherhood, paintings of the female gaze and video installations of fragility. Women artists across Texas shared the complex and joyous moments of womanhood at the Texas Vignette Art Fair.
“Texas Vignette has been more than an art fair for the last three days,” said Claudia Maysen, a mixed media artist from Keller. “It’s a community that is forming and extending its arms to the whole area.”
From Nov. 3 to Nov. 4, 89 artworks exclusively by Texas women were on display at the Dallas Market Hall as part of the fifth edition of the Texas Vignette Art Fair. Founded in 2017, Texas Vignette works to close the gender gap in the visual arts.
“Our mission is to support, promote and connect women in the Texas art scene across the entire state,” president and founder Jessica Ingle said. “In art fairs, which have become a marketplace nowadays for artists to sell their work, it’s almost worse for Texas women artists and there are so few represented in these fairs, so we wanted to remedy that by starting a fair”
Each year, the Texas Vignette Art Fair is curated by a different woman juror. The juror chooses the artwork and the layout of the show. This year, Emily Edwards, the associate curator at Dallas Contemporary, was the juror. She reviewed 216 applicants this year, which is more than the art fair has ever received. Ultimately, 47 women artists across 23 Texas cities were selected to participate.
“I submitted artwork and was very excited to get to share it, not only in the space but to be around these other female artists,” Laura Briseno, a costume designer from Ennis, said. “It’s such a privilege.”
Edwards said some artists in the art fair were chosen for their work’s power to expose the public to new and challenging perspectives. Others were chosen for their ability to push forward the boundaries of a medium and its presentation.
Felicia Jordan, a mixed media artist from Dallas, had two of her mixed media pieces in the show. One was a double-sided, king-sized quilt titled Atlas Shrugged … And Walked Away. On one side, a fabric silhouette of women with long, dark braids is carrying the world on her shoulders. On the other side, she’s walking away from it. Cursive words are stitched throughout the quilt. They were taken from a journal belonging to a woman Jordan considers her adoptive mother. The passages are in her handwriting and share her stresses of taking care of her family’s mental and physical health.
“I’m currently on this journey to document Blackness, healing and trauma,” Jordan said. “What happens if we as women, who carry this burden of life and of keeping everyone together, what happens if we put that down and walk away?”
While there wasn’t a specific theme for the festival, many of the artworks selected depicted contemporary womanhood and were grouped by subthemes. One corner had abstract art that explored color and movement. In another area, the artwork focused on the body and what it represents. Other artworks dived into motherhood and memories of loved ones.
“It was all speaking to what it means to be a woman and a woman artist [today] and specifically in Texas,” Ingle said.
Some of the art responded to current events and sociopolitical issues.
Maysen’s piece titled Three B’s was inspired by the book bans in Texas. She created a tower of books and added strips of black tape down the sides. Next to the tower of books was an engraved wooden cutout of a child that was anchored on a metal stool. The child, whose gender isn’t revealed, is looking up at the books but their eyes are covered by felt fabric.
“Books banned by the blind, they don’t want to see, they don’t want others to see,” Maysen said.
All sales from the fair go to artists. Victoria Brill, a painter in Dallas, said she likes that Texas Vignette allows artists to participate in the art fairs more than once. Like other artists this year, this was Brill’s second time at Texas Vignette Art Fair.
“Even though a lot of work has been done to show female artists and represent women artists prominently, I still think it’s really important to push that and Texas Vignette just does an amazing service for women in Texas,” Brill said.
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