Gallery hours
Saturday, July 13, 11am-3pm
Saturday, July 20, 11am-3pm
Saturday, July 27, 11am-3pm
Friday, August 2, 6–9pm – Artist’s Reception
Saturday, August 3, 11am-3pm – Last Look
Artist’s Statement
In DIY Dungeon, his third exhibition with the gallery, Barreto presents three portraits of youth made between 2022 and 2023. Barreto’s portraits hold fact and fiction, the real and the confected, in tension. The portraits are charged with yearning and desire, clouded by melancholia, angst, and anachronism, and contoured by melodrama and affect.
About the Artist
Mauro Antonio Barreto has presented his work in solo exhibitions at The Java Project (Brooklyn, NY), Künstlerhaus Dortmund (Dortmund, DE), the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and Spellerberg Projects. In May 2024, he participated in the Biennale for Visual and Sonic Media düsseldorf photo+. His work is in the permeant collection of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
Barreto directs the gallery / project space Neue Welt and is a member of the artist collective Tiger Strikes Asteroid. Barreto lives in Nashville, Tennessee.
Gallery Hours
Saturday June 15, 11am-3pm
Saturday June 22, 11am-3pm
Saturday June 29, 11am-3pm
Closing Reception Friday, July 5, 6-9pm
Saturday July 6, 11am-3pm
The studio show is a yearly exhibition of all the artists who practice and work at Spellerberg Projects. This year with the opening of the new studios, our numbers have grown and the show is a two part exhibition! Here are the artists participating in Studio Show 2024, Part 1:
Avery M. Michel is a queer artist who through painting discusses the changing prescience of identity. Allusions to queer culture, graphic novels, and mythology/ religion are tools used by Michel in order to discuss their relationship with self and others. Michel received their AA from Blinn College, and BFA from Texas State University(pending).
“I am a painter who works with figurative subjects and self-portraiture. My work discuses introspection through the synthesis of queer identity, pop culture, and religion.
The ever-changing sense of self and exploration of my experiences are riddled with allusions to media that discusses what it means to be human. I like to play with juxtaposing references from comics and pulp with the vibrance of queer culture and the ancient sense of longing that comes from religious imagery.
The work has allusions to the various references I previously mentioned and is focused on using them to depict myself and others at various stages of my life. My work expresses the internal dialogues I have as a queer person. I through my work can express ideas like sexuality, objectification and feelings of being rejected by religion and biological family.”
Laurel Coyle is a multi-disciplinary artist who has called Lockhart her home for the past eight years. She celebrates the richness of Lockhart embraces the growth of the special and unique community.
She picked up her first camera, a 110 instamatic, at age eight, and became fascinated by the possibilities of image making. She still has a box full of exposed film from her childhood that she is slowly processing. She continued photographing through middle and high school. Laurel has a history as a dressmaker and, at 24, purchased her first digital camera. Using an auto timer, she made self portraits while wearing the dresses she created and began to understand the inner workings of digital photography.
The images creates are not of a specific region but are anchored in experience, each image tied to a specific memory. Laurel believes that artistic expression begins with the heart and that art is the physical manifestation of our individual passion.
Ryan Thayer Davis received his BFA in Studio Art from the University of Texas at Austin in 2006. He lives and works in Lockhart, TX, working as an architectural interior photographer to support his painting practice. He has attended residencies in Tennessee, Texas, Wyoming, and Iceland.
Ryan works with printmaker-style layers to create sonorous, formal paintings that revel in structure. He’s interested in compositions that push and pull the eyeball brain, juxtaposing and alternating elements that recede and advance relative to the viewer. Seeking paradoxical relationships in space and color, his work allows many avenues of interpretation, from the feeling of landscape and dreamscape, to the pleasures of structural richness and texture, to the melodious nature of line. Generous up front, but deep enough to stay a while.
Sam Foster is originally from Lawrence KS, Sam Foster got his BFA from The Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design (MIAD) IN 2012, Studying Painting and Experimental Film. Sam currently resides in Lockhart Tx and is getting his MFA along with his partner and co studio mate Jennifer Moore at Maharishi International University in Fairfield IA in the Low Residency program. Sam has been a part of Spellerberg Projects for the past several years and loves living so close to the studio.
“My painting process is one of construction where I incorporate material processes that are based on chance and the unknown. Dipping fabric into plaster to make hardened compositions as templates to paint on and through my process “clean up” or control. I’m interested in chaos vs control, especially within one’s own life. I also incorporate biographical imagery that has been abstracted by being processed through different photographic / printing techniques. Taken out of context, these images serve as a mysterious symbol to create a new meaning, one that I believe is more truthful or telling.”
Ursula Rogers was born and raised in Lockhart, Texas. She received a Bachelor of Science in Psychology from the University of Pittsburgh and an MScE in Intelligence Studies and International Development from Aberystwyth University in Wales. A self-taught photographer, Rogers is fascinated by using mundane subjects to explore memory and storytelling.
Ursula is also a photo journalist who regularly contributes to the Caldwell/Hays Examiner.
“Eli Zapata, pictured with his son Elmo at the family’s body shop in Lockhart, successfully fought for the teen’s freedom when a disgraced detective at Hays County Sheriff’s Office falsely accused him of murdering his mother. Photograph by Ursula Rogers, taken for the June cover story in the Caldwell/Hays Examiner.” Description written by Jordan Buckley
Gallery hours
Saturday, May 11, 11am-3pm
Saturday, May 18, 11am-3pm
Saturday, May 25, 11am-3pm
Saturday, June 1, 11am-3pm
Friday, June 7, 6–9pm – Artist’s Reception
Saturday, June 8, 11am-3pm – Last Look
Artist’s Statement
I live on the Gulf coastal plains of Texas on the outskirts of a small town near Houston called Sugarland. It was established as a company town in the nineteenth century to produce sugar cane. As an adult, I learned that the town’s enormous success was made possible by the secret exploitation of black labor used during the Reconstruction era. With this information, it became imperative for me to speak about my heritage as a black Texan. Therefore, I decided to use my knowledge of black history in Texas to create artwork about our experiences since we were historically excluded from the American dream.
My subjects are black people I grew up with on the Gulf Coast engaging in outdoor activities or within a calm domestic interior. Their poses range from casual to art historic and as part of my creative process, I use oil paint to create imaginative color schemes while still having the ability to capture realistic effects of the atmosphere. This invites the viewer into a unique private space where light and color guide the overall mood of each painting.
I became interested in how black contemporary artist reclaim their racial identity and ethnic image to challenge the history of racial stereotypes that have contributed to the inequalities in our current society and my goal is to have my paintings coexist within this modern wave of black American storytelling. Likewise, my artwork questions how society can expand its understanding of black youth. And how the effects of living within an American subculture have caused each generation of African Americans to disassociate from the larger society.
About the Artist
Morgan Grigsby (b. 2001) lives and works in Texas, and is known for his contemporary realist oil paintings that are inspired by his personal experiences growing up on the Gulf Coast as a black Texan. He has exhibited in solo exhibitions such as The Spellerberg Project gallery in Lockhart, Texas (2024) and at The Calaboose African American History Museum in San Marcos, Texas (2023). His numerous group exhibitions include The Big Show, at Lawndale Art Center in Houston, Texas (2023), Assemblage, at The University of Houston Clear Lake Art Gallery in Houston, Texas (2023) and, the student juried exhibition at Texas State Galleries in San Marcos, Texas (2021- 2023). Grigsby was also honored with the Best in Show award in the student juried exhibition (2023) and The Special Merit award at The Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo (2018).
Gallery hours
Saturday, April 13, 11am-3pm
Saturday, April 20, 11am-3pm
Saturday, April 27, 11am-3pm
Friday, May 3, 6–9pm – Artist’s Reception
Saturday, May 4, 11am-3pm – Last Look
Artist’s Statement
In Soul Sequencing: Unveiling Ancestral Topography, Narong Tintamusik reimagines medical documentation through etched and painted wood panels, capturing human health’s physiological and spiritual dimensions. Inspired by Cameroonian theorist Achille Mbembe’s insights into necropolitics and Victorian physicist Oliver Lodge’s empirical pursuit of the “soul,” Tintamusik’s work delves into the survival of the spirit within the context of mortality, cultural preservation, and the inherent will to endure.
The exploitation of the body and mind for labor while neglecting essential resources is prevalent in today’s societies. This stark reality breeds inequality across sectors like nutrition, healthcare, and education, creating a populace akin to the living dead. Through an exploration of symbols from Thai heritage, Tintamusik’s paintings serve as resistance against these societal constraints, affirming the sovereignty of the body. Despite adversity, the artworks illuminate the resilience and sanctity inherent in each individual’s internal landscape, challenging prevailing narratives of detachment with compassion and radiance.
About the Artist
Narong Tintamusik (ณรงค์ ตินตมุสิก) is an artist and curator based in Dallas, TX. His work is autobiographical, mining elements from his 2nd-Generation Thai-American upbringing, Queer identity, Buddhist spirituality, and previous career in the biological sciences. Through painting and its iterations, he finds alternative survival modes as a form of resistance against the current biopolitics of society.
Born in Dallas, TX, he lived in Bangkok, Thailand, for ten years. In 2014, he obtained his undergraduate biology degree from the University of Texas at Dallas with a minor in visual arts. He is currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts degree in Painting and Drawing from the University of North Texas. Before entering graduate school, he worked in the environmental science industry for seven years.
He has exhibited in group shows locally in Dallas, TX, and beyond, including Chicago, New York, Canada, and Germany. Solo exhibitions include Daisha Board Gallery (Dallas, TX), 500X (Dallas, TX), Plush Gallery (Dallas, TX), Tarleton State University (Stephenville, TX), and Angelina College (Lufkin, TX). He is the recipient of the DeGoyler Memorial Fund (Dallas Museum of Art 2015), Art Walk West Microgrant (West Dallas Chamber of Commerce 2021), and the Puffin Foundation Grant (Puffin Foundation 2022). He was a part of the artist-run gallery 500X from 2019-2022.
Gallery hours
Saturday, March 9, 11am-3pm
Saturday, March 16, 11am-3pm
Saturday, March 23, 11am-3pm
Saturday, March 30, 11am-3pm
Friday, April 5, 6–9pm – First Friday
Saturday, April 6, 11am-9pm
Sunday, April 7, 12-6pm
Artist’s Reception
Saturday, April 6, 6–9pm
Artist’s Statement
The domestic images I’m attracted to contain evidence of extreme care and energy put into an environment. Care of the domestic space has historically been designated as women’s work and the labor and aesthetics of decorating a home undervalued. I relate to the inherent attention to detail in the arrangement of a shadowbox tableaux or the pyramid of lace-trimmed pillows atop a made bed and wonder if they are a method to cache feelings, an expression of personal history, or a compulsion to comfort and protect. Care and consideration manifest as ruffles. What do the objects we fill our homes with have to do with survival? Why do obsolete tools become decor? Each absurd idiosyncratic, aesthetic decision becomes a presentation of self-value.
Though my sculptures are not explicitly household objects they reference textiles, furniture and frosted, edible surfaces, placing them in the domestic realm as possible tools, devices and nicknacks.
About the Artist
Jennifer Moore is an artist living and working in Lockhart, Texas. Before starting an art practice, she toured as a musician across North America, Europe and Australia, playing anywhere from traditional venues, community art spaces, generator shows underneath freeway overpasses, and museums like the Fort Worth Modern and Whitney Museum of American Art. During this extended time spent away from home she discovered the generosity and ingenuity of people trying to make art and music within a variety of ecosystems and was inspired by the DIY culture which influenced the development of venues, homes, handmade instruments, and playing styles. Her preferred materials are household objects, thrifted textiles, broken electronics and papier-mâché which she applies to her work centering around themes of body and home.
Jennifer has shown her work at ICOSA(Austin, TX), Spellerberg Projects(Lockhart, TX), Collection RERT(Austin, TX), and Wege Center for the Arts(Fairfield, IA). She received a BFA from Texas State University in 2018 and an MFA from Maharishi International University in 2024.
Gallery hours
Saturday, February 10, 11am-3pm
Saturday, February 17, 11am-3pm
Saturday, February 24, 11am-3pm
Friday, March 1, 6–9pm – Artist’s Reception
Saturday, March 2, 11am-3pm – Last Look
Artist’s Statement
I work between sculpture and painting, using various materials to navigate the play of an interior landscape with a language of form.
Conditions of working – space, tools, materials, and a visual vocabulary – fluctuate to become an extension of who I am at the moment. Discovery comes at different rates and with uneven timing. Associations arise and squirm, hinting at meaning – contradictions wrestle with one another. These conditions dictate a cycle of expansion and contraction that is, in itself, an interactive relationship of knowing and not knowing.
I think of these events as driven by the process of drawing. I find myself pulled into a process of looking and not looking, which could be correlated with covering and revealing, destroying and creating – things come apart and cohere at the same time. Largeness is compressed into small spaces.
Out of that situation emerges new events and possible narratives that help me grow. It’s a good reason to continue.
Jim Shrosbree, Jan 2024
About the Artist
Jim Shrosbree’s work has been exhibited widely in North America. Public collections with his work include the Detroit Institute of Art, Los Angeles County Museum, Edythe and Ely Broad Museum, Des Moines Art Center, University of Iowa Museum of Art, Mint Museum, and Daum Museum ofContemporary Art.
Shrosbree has been a visiting artist at numerous universities and art institutions including Cranbrook Academy of Art, NYU, UC-Davis, Bard College, University of Washington, University of Minnesota, Penn State University, Alberta University of the Arts, Drake University and the University of Iowa.
He has received residency fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell and Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts. Residencies also include time as a scholar at the American Academy in Rome. Awards include a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, the National Endowment for the Arts(Midwest Fellowship) among others.
Jim Shrosbree received an MFA in Ceramics from the University of Montana, Missoula. He is Professor of Art at Maharishi International University, Fairfield, Iowa where he lives and works.
Gallery hours
Saturday, January 13, 11am-3pm
Saturday, January 20, 11am-3pm
Saturday, January 27, 11am-3pm
Friday, February 2, 6–9pm – Artist’s Reception
Saturday, February 3, 11am-3pm – Last Look
Artist’s Statement
I create multi-dimensional drawings of the almost and the not-yet-made. Emphasizing mark-making and process, I make paintings, installations, and sculptures inspired by piles of rubble and construction debris. My works re-imagine their often invisible subjects as icons and objects of potential. Paused between destruction and resurrection, they have a wholeness that cannot exist in a realized state. Blending the figurative with the abstract, my drawings contrast believable and impossible renderings of space and depth. Often visually or physically ephemeral, they visually break down, expand and rebuild their surfaces, subjects, and sites. By dissolving the boundary between the made and unmade, my works create accessible and tangible bridges between the real and imagined. Working with abstraction and obscuration, my drawings are depictions of simultaneously dissolving and reforming marks, colors, and spaces. They are invitations to navigate the unknown (and unknowable) as immersive spaces of possibility.
Curator’s Statement
Daydream is an exhibition of interdisciplinary drawings about the almost and not-yet made. It is a site-specific and multi-dimensional installation created for Spellerberg Projects. The exhibition combines vibrant sculptural forms and plaster casts with small, layered drawings on paper. Highlighting the reflections and distance created by the gallery’s encompassing windows, clearly visible three-dimensional elements are interspersed with soft two-dimensional works that embrace the intimacy of the space. Drawn in grayscale to emphasize breath and distance, the drawings on paper are obscured and almost invisible. Visually and physically ephemeral, the exhibition explores how to make the impossible more real. Daydream is an invitation to navigate the unknown and unknowable as immersive spaces of possibility.
About the Artist
Sarah DePetris is a Dallas-based artist whose practice integrates painting, installation, and sculpture. She makes multi-dimensional drawings that capture the energy and potential of the almost and the not-yet-made. Abstracting imagery of found piles of rubble and construction debris, her works are bridges between the real and imagined. DePetris presents her work nationally and is excited to be exhibiting with Spellerberg Projects in Lockhart, Texas. She has had numerous recent solo exhibitions, and was honored to receive a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant in support of her summer ’23 exhibition at Box 13 ArtSpace. DePetris recently created a large public art installation for Art Tooth’s ArtSouth Box at SOMA while participating in their studio residency at Muse in Fort Worths. DePetris received an MFA from the College of Visual Arts and Design (’23) and her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (’09). Her works are included in the permanent collections of Capital One and the University of Texas at Tyler.
Gallery hours
Saturday, December 9, 11am-3pm
Saturday, December 16, 11am-3pm
Saturday, December 23, 11am-3pm
Saturday, December 30, 11am-3pm
Friday, January 5, 6–9pm – Artist’s Reception
Saturday, January 6, 11am-3pm – Last Look
Artist’s Statement
Detroit Cousin Randy (DCR) is a selection of images from Enoch Rios’ on going collection of hundreds of found photographs. The term found photography can be used as a synonym for found photos: photographs, usually anonymous, that were not originally intended as art but have been reappropriated and given renewed aesthetic meaning.
DCR consists of non-artist informed found photographs obtained from various community resources. They illustrate a curated, photographic vernacular that saturates snapshots in shoeboxes, cellphones, and family photo albums. DCR brings forth themes of nostalgia, wonder, humor, and earnestness. They are a type of visual anthropology that explores the mundane, discarded, and uncovered moments of other people to challenge the notion of authorship, quality, and originality in photography and image making.
About the Artist
Enoch Rios was born in Corpus Christi, TX and received his BFA in photography from Texas State University in 2015. He lives and works in San Marcos, TX waiting for nothing to happen. His work comes from a process of observing situations that seem out of place or unusually incongruent within a pattern of common occurrences. His photography reframes a larger picture of the mundane to highlight areas that feel dreamlike, bazaar and transitory. Sometimes the images appear idiosyncratic and quirky, at other times they seem to become a container for loss and hope.
Gallery hours
Saturday, November 11, 11am-3pm
Saturday, November 18, 11am-3pm
Saturday, November 25, 11am-3pm
Friday, December 1, 6–9pm – Artist’s Reception
Saturday, December 2, 11am-3pm – Last Look
Artist’s Statement
“With veins rolling roughly over quick hands, they have many clean words to say.
My grandmothers were strong. Why am I not as they?”
– Margaret Walker “Lineage”, 1942
Exploring significant instances of black and African American history, culture, and experiences within the United States, Theresa Newsome examines how these events and historical narratives have had long-lasting effects on her own culture and identity, both from a personal and universal perspective. Throughout history, black women and their bodies have been experimented upon, stereotyped, judged, and discriminated against. Her photographic works, What my Mother Told Me, What my Grandmother Refused to Say, Sims, Objects, and her most recent series Peace I Leave with You, My Peace I Give You and Teaching Myself Manners investigates her own journey through womanhood; referencing instances from childhood, historical perspectives of femininity, and concepts of home. Newsome’s work incorporates traditional and interdisciplinary artistic practices including textile, historical photographic processes, solvent transfers, and bookmaking.
This photographic project is a documentation of my grandmother, Doris Arnita’s homecoming trip which took place in the summer of 2022. Throughout that summer we were able to visit her former stomping grounds, reconnecting with her friends, former church members, her last living sister, and finding her mother’s grave. This was a place where my grandmother grew up, my mother spent her formative years, and where I as a child would spend every summer while visiting my grandparents. Colonial Heights and Petersburg, Virginia are both deeply historical locations, steeped with memory both positive and negative. It was a unique experience being able to revisit these locations with my grandmother after over 15 years away, seeing how the town’s landscapes have changed. Coming back to my grandparent’s house where I had once spent so many summers and holidays, now painted and fenced in with a new family. Spending hours with my aunt and grandmother trying to find my great grandmother’s grave in a sea of unkept, unmarked headstones so she could finally lay her flowers. Witnessing my grandmother revert back to girlhood after holding her sister’s hand.
Each image throughout this series is intended to be viewed as a homage to these moments, bringing recollection to the memories that I and the matriarchal members of my family have shared over several generations within this small community.
About the Artist
Theresa Newsome is a fine art photographer who explores the intricate yet delicate relationship between identity, femininity, and race within her creative practice. Drawing inspiration from her own personal experiences and observations, Newsome creates images utilizing a variety of photographic techniques including digital, historical, and alternative image-making. Through her work, she is interested in shedding light onto the nuances of the black female experience, referencing historical events, familial oral narratives, and contemporary experiences.
Theresa graduated from Texas Woman’s University where she received her MFA in Photography and Art History in 2019. She graduated from the University of the Incarnate Word with a BFA in Studio Art and minor in Psychology, with a concentration in drawing in 2015. She currently resides in San Antonio, TX as an instructor and artist.
Gallery hours
Saturday, October 14, 11am-3pm
Saturday, October 21, 11am-3pm
Saturday, October 28, 11am-3pm
Friday, November 3, 6–9pm – Artist’s Reception
Saturday, November 4, 11am-3pm – Last Look
Artist’s Statement
“Into the Middle Distance” is an ongoing body of photographic prints and arrangements that began with a personal collection of images of the American west taken in 2013 and rediscovered during months at home in 2020. Newer images join the archive and become opportunities to measure and address the distance between my feelings and beliefs—those I held dear to then and those I try to affirm now—about what happens when I attempt to photograph the American landscape, its nature, and the content of its built environment.
In trying to make sense of all these images—each of which I had only narrowly understood as individual moments where I tried to exploit photography’s capacity to aestheticize vastness, emptiness, and ruin in order to explore personal feelings of estrangement and belonging as a first generation immigrant in the United States—I found that the pain and limitation of any one picture could be refracted, reduced, and reshaped when placed in community with others.
This process has resulted in a newfound commitment to modestly-sized photographic prints that I can make at home; a movement away from singular images towards diptychs, triptychs, and larger formal arrangements to build works; and most consequentially, to thinking about how such arrangements and connected visual affinities might help me access more expansive and collectively oriented meanings.
Sometimes photographic images, when theories of seeing and understanding are applied to them, are structured to feel like the experience of looking at a view through a window, onto the world, or as a reflection seen in a mirror, onto the self. I think photography is constructed more like a wall than a window. A wall is always an obstruction, always aggregated and opaque, and so a thing that can periodically give shade. Resting in the coolness of that shadow, I have time to wonder if this wall might also be a balm and bulwark against loneliness and isolation.
About the Artist
Sherwin Rivera Tibayan (Philippines, 1982) is a photographer based in Austin, Texas, who uses formal strategies of repetition, multiplicity, and obstruction in order to make the infrastructures (material, institutional, psychological) that support the ever accumulating ways we are asked to make, interpret, experience, and use photography, the subjects of his works.
His projects have gained recognition from Photolucida, the Magenta Foundation, and the Houston Center for Photography. He has participated in artist residencies with the Center for Photography at Woodstock, Triple Canopy, and A.C.R.E. In 2021 he exhibited two bodies of work in Austin: a solo show at the City of Austin’s Asian American Cultural Resource Center (“Filipino American Navy”) and as part of the The Contemporary Austin’s “Crit Group Reunion” (“Balikbayan”).