Dallas Contemporary highlights graduate student artists in inaugural ‘Open University'

Thirteen North Texas MFA students will get a chance to shine in the new year. Dallas Contemporary will  present Open University, the inaugural DC NTX Graduate Student Program exhibition, opening January 24, 2025.

Launched in August 2024, this annual initiative invites North Texas MFA students in their final year of graduate work to exhibit at Dallas Contemporary, after being selected by a visiting national curator. The program is aimed at advancing the early careers of emerging artists schooled in the region and fosters healthy interactions and connections between students and renowned curators. The DC NTX Graduate Student Program is funded with foundational five-year support from Ann and John McReynolds.

This year’s DC NTX Graduate Student Program curator is Matthew Higgs, Director and Chief Curator of White Columns in New York.

“In October, over three days, I visited the studios of almost thirty final-year MFA artists in the North Texas area. The students’ work was diverse in terms of their backgrounds and approaches. No single tendency predominated,” Higgs said. “Ultimately, I gravitated towards work that was idiosyncratic, work that spoke quietly, but confidently, to the artists’ respective ambitions and intentions. Some of the artists in the resulting exhibition Open University are represented by a single work, others by several, but when seen together I believe they provide a compelling account of art’s present and its potential futures.”

In addition to the exhibition and mentorship provided to the cohort, the DC NTX Graduate Student Program also offers an annual $8,000 award to one of the artists in the exhibition, selected by the McReynolds and Higgs, as well as a yearly curatorial fellowship to a student pursuing a Master’s degree in contemporary art history. This year, Higgs is joined by McReynolds Curatorial Fellow Abby Bryant.  Bryant completed her undergraduate degree in History of Art and Architectural History at the University of Edinburgh in 2022 and is currently in her final year as a Master’s Art History student at Texas Christian University. Her research focuses on Contemporary Indigenous art in North America, with a concentration on issues of visual sovereignty, resurgence, and dispossession. Alongside her studies, Bryant works at the Kimbell Art Museum as a Museum Educator.

“We are so proud to present this first cohort of NTX graduate student work at Dallas Contemporary, and are exceedingly grateful to Matthew Higgs for his thoughtful selections for this inaugural exhibition,” said Lucia Simek, Interim Executive Director of Dallas Contemporary. “While the program will cultivate substantive relationships and institutional experience for these students, at the heart of it, this initiative promises to empower these emerging artists, instilling a lasting confidence and fortifying their ambition as they enter into this next pivotal chapter of their careers.”

MEET THE INAUGURAL DC NTX GRADUATE STUDENT PROGRAM COHORT

Courtney Broussard’s (University of North Texas) interdisciplinary practice spans installation, sculpture, and functional pottery, exploring shared experiences within the domestic sphere by crafting humorous narratives. Her anthropomorphic approach integrates textile and organic material into porcelain to highlight the tension between the permanence of objects and the fragility of memory. The duality of hard and soft, ephemeral and everlasting, bring the objects to life, sparking emotions and memories in both familiar and unexpected ways.

Christina Childress (The University of Texas at Arlington) explores the parallels between human and botanical familial relationships, focusing on how personal, cultural, and geographic histories shape individuals and influence broader societal structures. This investigation is rooted in Childress’s experiences of motherhood, as both a mother and a daughter. Inspired by the life cycles of plants and ecological discoveries pointing to the similarities between plant and human family systems, Childress develops an installation-based visual language using organic materials such as soil, rocks, plants, and fungi alongside photographs, cultural ephemera, painting, and ceramic sculpture. In blending human and botanical life, she articulates the shared dynamics of growth, connection, and the life-death-regeneration cycle across species and generations.

Lisa Clayton (The University of Texas at Arlington) is guided by current events and views her artwork as reactions to societal injustices. Using readymade and found objects, fabric, wool, yarn, paper, and wood and interspersing feminine objects, Clayton seeks information, understanding, and solutions through an intersectional lens. The result is a visual language that centers subversive discourse, dialogue, disobedience, and debate.

Courtesy of the artist

Taylor Cleveland (Southern Methodist University) is driven by a fascination with technological systems that shape realities, from artificial intelligence (AI) to digital media, the internet, and social technologies like culture, language, and politics. Drawn to vibrant materiality—the idea that matter possesses the ability to change and influence human and nonhuman actors—Cleveland’s practice challenges reality by exploiting systems and leaning into humor and absurdity. Through video sculpture, AI renderings, installation, traditional media, and collaboration, her provocatively playful art acts as a means to reveal, question, create, and play with reality.

Pablo Cruz (University of North Texas) reflects on his hyphenated identity as a Mexican-American and the in-between space that bridges both cultures, particularly through the history of photography that has shaped the Chicano experience. As a tool of documentation and portrayal during the Mexican Revolution, photography contributed to a sense of national identity to an emerging republic that still resonates today. Cruz’s photography practice—across photojournalism, studio lighting, and alternative processes—is informed by this history of mechanical reproduction and its importance to both Mexican and Chicano cultures to reconcile the gap between cultural and racial identity and reflect the tapestry of the Mexican-American experience.

Veronica Ibargüengoitia Tena (University of North Texas) creates installations as spaces for questioning systems of migration and mental adaptation processes, delving into the human capacity for resilience and adaptation in conditions of displacement. Interested in the transformation and reconstruction of one’s identity in a new dwelling and how this is influenced by landscape, language, belonging, culture, physical risk, and disorientation. Using non-precious materials like cardboard, sand, paper, and eggshells to create barriers, paths, and surfaces, Ibargüengoitia Tena evokes the emotional stress, grief, and disruption of the migratory reality and encourages tactile, conjunctive relationships between bodies to build spaces for understanding and empathy.

Austin Lewis (Texas Christian University) makes structures and compositions from items and materials found in everyday life, collected over extended periods of time. Often these are common household items or discarded materials like cardboard, wood, plastic packaging, assembled into three-dimensional form. This process of collecting extends to Lewis’s text-based work, in which he gathers words and phrases from media and popular culture and arranges them into colorful compositions. Across these structures and objects, Lewis encourages a reconsideration of oddity and wonder in the mundane.

Katherine Pinkham’s (Texas Woman’s University) work is centered around the coverage of beauty and disgust, exploring femininity, domestic craft, and gender roles. Through mixed media processes like weaving, ceramics, and found object assemblage, Pinkham evokes a unique sensory experience that questions and disrupts embedded social hierarchies. In pairing symbols of womanhood with grotesque motifs and eliciting disgust—a powerful emotion that is both instinctual and guided by cultural norms—she inverts traditional aesthetic values and expectations, critiquing how such conventions promote harmful outcomes for women.

Sarah Rainey (Texas Woman’s University) is a mixed media artist examining spirituality, faith, and hope through personal memory and shared everyday experiences. Her collages, installations, and artist books combine inherited fabrics, found objects, and cut paper with watercolor, acrylic, and graphite renderings. In arranging fragments of realism with ethereal elements in pastel palettes, Rainey walks the border between the physical and the spiritual, exploring the concurrence of the mundane and the sacred. In doing so, she celebrates the small graces of everyday life and creates contemplative and safe spaces for pause and engagement with one’s own spirituality.

Elijah Ruhala (Texas Christian University) examines interior spaces and how they subtly affect the body across painting and installation using the figure and familiar domestic motifs. In playfully abstracting construction industry standards, Ruhala challenges architecture’s traditional utilitarian purpose and emphasizes its malleability and creative potential. In combining construction processes and materials like stud walls with formal elements like line, value, and texture, he investigates alternative ways of building that echo human scale and experience.

Narong Tintamusik’s (University of North Texas) research explores contemporary living through a speculative ancestral future, imagining a return to cultural traditions as a survival strategy to a dystopian world shaped by human-induced environmental devastation. Using Thai food as her central medium—across paintings, sculptures, and wearable art—Tintamusik explores the movement of food through bodies and landscapes: small-scale paintings depicts internal digestion and absorption processes, while edible pendants and altar-like structures act as support and guides in climate-driven nomadic migrations. Together, they serve as a warning and inspire new ideas to rethink and revise a collective future.

Sharmeen Uqaili (Southern Methodist University), trained in both secular and Islamic artistic styles, develops a distinctive technique that combines various elements of Islamic geometric patterns connected to her Pakistani identity with contemporary forms to conceive works that are individual yet similar. Uqaili’s practice evokes depth of meaning, rhythm, and movement to draw the eye to move along each piece, capturing the path from the Earthly realm to the unseen.

Courtesy of the artist

Vajihe Zamaniderkani (The University of Texas at Dallas) uses painting and installation to explore the beauty of rootlessness and the complexity of belonging, inviting viewers to immerse themselves in her narrative and fostering a shared sense of understanding and empathy. Zamaniderkani merges paintings with living foliage to reflect on displacement, adaptation and the innate human desire to belong. While some plants adapt, assimilate, and survive and others struggle to endure, she creates a portrait of the resilience and fragility inherent in the immigrant experience.

Learn more: Dallas Contemporary