ARTrepreneurship Workshop Series
ARTrepreneurship Workshop Series is a program within the Community Artists' Collective Entrepreneurship Program designed to spotlight professional artists who will share their artistic journey and career path and describe what helped develop them into professional artists. The overall goal of the ARTrepreneurship Workshop Series is to provide insight into what it takes to achieve the level of a professional artist and how to prepare for the journey. H-E-B sponsors the workshops.
Ricardo Osmondo Francis headlined the first Community Artists’ Collective’s ARTrepreneurship Workshop Series October 17, 2020, via ZOOM.
Francis is a native of Houston. He is a visual artist/curator and is the Gallery Director of LeonidesArts NY, an artist run multimedia visual arts organization dedicated to presenting contemporary art exhibitions and public art projects that reflect a variety of distinct themes, disciplines and cultural experiences outside of the conventional art gallery tenet. Francis shared critical aspects of his personal artistic journey to help guide emerging artists in their career paths and development.
Rafael Cuello, visual artist, curator and digital design virtuoso, moderating the workshop. Jean Sonderand, New York City based filmmaker and Director of Archive Culture, served as videographer for this event.
Francis grew up in the Third Ward area of Houston and developed his artistic roots at The Collective and Houston’s High School for the Performing and Visual Arts before receiving a BFA in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. He is a founding member of BLAFTCO, an alternative visual art group where he first began conceptualizing and developing large scaled art projects and art exhibits. Inspired by classical art, multi-ethnic antiquity, and present-day advertisement imagery, Francis’ vivid pictorial works present a torrent of imagery culled from every possible corner of the visual culture.
Artist/photographer/graphic designer Gail Patrice Mallory presented the second workshop Saturday, January 16, via ZOOM.
“Art and creativity come naturally to me,” Mallory said. “It’s a way to express how I view the community and its effect on my own self-perception.”
Her artwork began as a visual representation of herself, desperately searching for the beauty within, she admitted. She describes how she suffered for many years from insecurities, long before she realized she was an artist. Her insecurities were based on her appearance, which is one of the reasons that lips and noses were exaggerated in many of her earlier pieces. Art was more than art for Gail; art was an escape, a therapist and an unconditional friend.
She eventually began to realize that she was no longer looking for herself in the artwork. With each piece she created the artwork became an instrument to uplift her culture, community and other women with similar challenges. Over time her creations began to take on a life of their own, and each piece seemed to never conceptually end the way it started.
Mallory, who is originally from Indianapolis, Ind., received a bachelor of science degree in computer graphics and multimedia development from the Purdue School of Engineering and Technology and an MBA from Prairie View A & M University.
Delita Martin is an artist currently based in Huffman, Texas. She received a BFA in drawing from Texas Southern University and a MFA in printmaking from Purdue University. Formally a member of the fine arts faculty at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Martin is currently working as a full-time artist in her studio, Black Box Press.
Primarily working from oral traditions, along with vintage and family photographs as a source of inspiration; Martin’s work explores the power of the narrative impulse.
Her finished works combine collaging, drawing, painting, printmaking, and sewing techniques, placing her figures amid patterns to visually represent what it looks like when we become the spiritual other: when we pray or meditate … we enter the veilscape.” Martin's layering of technique and material, as well as her use of pattern and color, signifies a liminal space – the space between the waking life and the spirit life. By fusing this visual language with oral storytelling in this different space she offers other identities and other narratives for women of color.
Martin’s work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally. Most recently Martin’s work was shown at the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington, DC and welcomed into the Library of Congress. She served has as 2021 Keynote speaker for the Mid America Print Council.
The workshop was presented May 8, 2021 via ZOOM.