For Immediate Release:
Contact: Vanessa Wodehouse
713.523.9530 or vanessa@artleaguehouston.org
Photos available on request
Art League Houston (ALH) proudly announced today the selections of Mary McCleary as the 2011 Texas Artist of the Year and Victoria and Marshal Lightman, as Texas Patrons of the Year. Each year, Art League Houston honors those whose work or patronage has had a significant and positive impact on contemporary visual art in Texas.
"We are so pleased and honored to have Mary McCleary as our Texas Artist of the Year and the Lightmans as our Patrons of the Year," said Cara Pauloski, Art League Houston President. "Mary is the real thing, born and raised in Houston, and an extraordinarily gifted artist, writer, and educator; Victoria and Marshal have done more to introduce and educate area audiences to artists and the arts than almost anyone else in the state of Texas. What more could we ask for?"
In 1983, Art League Houston created the Texas Artist of the Year award as a dynamic annual project documenting Texas art history. ALH was the first organization in the state to develop the award. To date, twenty-eight artists have been honored. Past recipients include Joseph Havel, Keith Carter, Melissa Miller, Dixie Friend Gay, Al Souza, Luis Jimenez, Lucas Johnson, Sharon Kopriva, Bert L. Long, Jr., Jesús Moroles, Dr. John Biggers, and Dorothy Hood, among others.
In 1989 Art League Houston expanded the award to include patrons with its Texas Patron of the Year award for extraordinary individuals whose efforts have helped advance the work of Texas artists. Past patron honorees include Leslie and Brad Bucher (2010), Karol Kreymer and Robert Card, M.D. (2009), Anne and James Harithas (2008), Gus Kopriva (2007), Clint Willour (2006), and Sue Rowan Pittman (1989). ALH 2011 honorees are Victoria and Marshal Lightman.
Mary McCleary was born in Houston in 1951, and now lives in Nacogdoches, Texas. She is Regent's Professor of Art Emeritus at Stephen F. Austin State University, where she taught from 1975 to 2005. She received her B.F.A., cum laude in printmaking/drawing at Texas Christian University and her M.F.A. in graphics from the University of Oklahoma. Since 1970 she has participated in over 250 solo and group exhibits in museums and galleries in 24 states, as well as Mexico and Russia. These venues include the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., MOBIA (Museum of Biblical Art) in New York City, the Grey Gallery at NYU, the Parrish Museum in New York, the Boston Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, the Blaffer Gallery at U. of Houston, the Galveston Arts Center, the San Antonio Museum of Art, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City. She is also a recipient of a Mid-American Arts Alliance/National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship. Her work has been regularly reviewed or featured in the Houston Post, Houston Chronicle, Austin American Statesman, Dallas Morning News, and other Texas newspapers, as well as national publications that include Art in America, Art News, Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion, Art Papers, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Art Week, Artspace, Texas Homes, New American Paintings, and Contemporanea International Arts Magazine. McCleary's work is in many public collections, including those of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas; the El Paso Museum of Art; the San Antonio Museum of Art; and the Art Museum of Southeast Texas in Beaumont. She is represented by Moody Gallery in Houston. McCleary's work will be featured in "An Act of Faith: The Art of Mary McCleary" at the Grace Museum in Abilene, Texas, January 20 - April 16, 2011.
Wayne Roosa, a professor of art at Bethel University in St. Paul, says this about Mary's work:
There is a fullness of vision in Mary McCleary's art. It is a particular and peculiar kind of fullness, one that is engorged with the fecundity of earth and the senses, and yet simultaneously inhabited by a silent and spiritual presence hovering, - both immanent and transcendent - amidst all that is sensuous and of the earth. Indeed, the viewer's experience of her work is one of being struck and mesmerized by so many ingredients that the sumptuous fabric of these collages dazzles and then seduces. (Image: A Journal of Art and Religion, Issue 23)
A printmaker throughout school, Mary began making collages in 1978. Over time her work evolved from abstract collages onto which she began gluing three dimensional items, to the mutli-layered, extremely complex and detailed figurative work that we now recognize as a style that is Mary's and Mary's alone. Using all matters of things (leather, lint, small plastic toys, glass, pencils and nails, sticks and mirrors), chosen not only for their texture and color, but also for their symbolic import, Mary attaches these items on heavy paper, as she says, "much in the way a painter builds layer upon layer of paint on canvas... My aim is that the obsessive images that result... convey an intensity which the viewer finds compelling... Drawing my subject matter from history and literature, I like the irony of using materials that are often trivial, foolish, and temporal to express ideas of what is significant, timeless, and transcendent."
Victoria Lightman has a B.A. in English Literature from CUNY in New York. She is the co-founder and principle director of Looking at Art, a program that promotes and encourages art education, collecting, and appreciation through scheduled art tours to artists' studios, galleries, collectors' homes, museums, and alternative spaces. Founded in 1989, Looking at Art has introduced thousands of people to the arts in Houston, the state of Texas, the United States and beyond, with tours to venues that have included Turrell's Roden Crater in Arizona, and Documenta in Kassel, Germany. As an arts writer, Victoria's work has been included in exhibition catalogues, and in publications, that include among others Artlies, Sculpture Magazine, Artnews, Museum and Arts Magazine, the Houston Chronicle, and houston.sidewalk.com.
Her direct involvement in the Houston arts community is considerable; she has taught classes, served on boards, chaired fundraising committees, juried and curated shows. She currently is on the boards of the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, of which she is chair of its exhibitions committee, and the Glassell School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where she serves on the Core Fellow Committee. Other board and fundraising involvement has been with organizations that include Lawndale Arts Center, DIFFA, Texas Accountants and Lawyers for the Arts, Child Advocates, UT Health Science Center's Art Council Committee, Rice Design Alliance, DiverseWorks, SOAP (School of Art, University of Houston), Cultural Arts Council Houston/Harris County, Art on the Avenue, and the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts. During her last two years of her tenure on the Texas Commission on the Arts (2002 - 2007), she was appointed by Governor Perry to chair the Commission.
Marshal Lightman is vice president and regional controller for Gilbane Building Company's Southwest Office, an organization that he began his career with over 40 years ago. Active in the Houston arts scene for over 20 years, Marshal has been an advocate, collector, and fundraiser in the community. Along side his wife Victoria, he co-founded Looking At Art, which he describes as a 'non-profitable' project that fosters dialogue about contemporary art in Texas. Like Victoria, he has been active in a number of organizations over the years. As a board member of Lawndale Art Center (1989 - 1999), of which he is currently emeritus, he and Victoria conceived and chaired the first two Hair Balls for Lawndale Art Center in 1993 and 1994. He has also worked with Art League Houston, Rice Design Alliance, the Menil Collection, Child Advocates and DIFFA, and has spoken to a number of groups about the visual arts in Texas, including the Houston Leadership Forum and the Texas Lyceum. He currently serves as president of the board for the Houston Arts Alliance, and is on the boards of the Core Fellow Committee at the Glassell School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and DiverseWorks.
"Art League Houston's tradition of honoring outstanding Texas artists and patrons is a commitment of which I am most proud," says ALH Executive Director Vanessa Wodehouse, " The 2011 Texas Artist of the Year, Mary McCleary, is long-deserving of this title. Her work is brilliantly complex and executed in an extraordinary manner. Mary's work will fill both Art League galleries this fall, and the staff is looking forward to being surrounded by so many of her incredible pieces. I am equally excited about working with Victoria and Marshal. They have done so much for the visual art community and truly exemplify the generous spirit of past honored patrons."
As Texas Artist of the Year, Mary McCleary will be featured in an exhibition at Art League Houston, which opens on September 9 and runs through October 21, 2011. All three awardees will be celebrated at the annual gala which will be held in their honor on November 11, 2011 at the Omni Houston Hotel.
