Artist Reception: Friday March. 6th,
Join us every first Friday of every month from 6 -10 PM and enjoy art works by local and international artists beginning September through May.
The Art House is always open to the public Mondays through Fridays from 12:30 to 4:30 PM, and by appointment. (956) 688-6461
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Beverly Ruth KeysAs a baby boomer growing up near the Chicago Stockyards, Beverly developed an interest in art at a young age, due to her parents creative endeavors. She earned Bachelor Degrees in Art and Psychology from Illinois State University, and later an MBA in Human Resource Management from the Illinois Institute of Technology.
She supported herself by working in educational, clinical, and business settings for many years while also pursuing her artwork, and is an active member of Expressions Graphics of Oak Park, IL. She has recently begun to devote all her time to her art career and has curated her first international political print portfolio: "Pipelines and Borderlines".
Ruth Patzloff is a teacher with specialization in art and PE. Has taught art in public school in
Denmark for 7 years and 3 years in a private school in Nepal. Worked 3 years with immigrants in Denmark. Went to art school in Norway with emphasis on drawing and painting. Came to the US in 2000 and joined Expressions Graphics in 2002. Worked with Janet Schill on a fish print collaboration in 2005, where printing on fabric was explored. Works with young children in a Montessori pre-school.
Jill KramerA native of Cleveland, Ohio, Jill Kramer received her BFA in printmaking from Kent State University. Jill produces hand colored block prints that depict landscape scenery observed from her travels. She teaches various print workshops and classes in her area to both adults and children. Jill is a member of Expressions Graphics, The Illinois Artisan Program and the Chicago Printmakers Collaborative. She currently lives and works from her home studio in Oak Park, Illinois. More of Jill's work can be seen on her website: www.jillkramerstudio.com
Carlos Barberena was born in Granada, Nicaragua. (1972).
A self-taught artist, he currently lives in Oak Park, IL, USA. He has had solo shows in Costa Rica, Mexico, Nicaragua and United States of America, and his work has been shown in various Art Fairs, Art Biennials, Museums and Galleries in many places including Argentina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Costa Rica, Germany, Italy, Spain, USA, Mexico, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic and Venezuela. He has created many installations in public spaces in Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Venezuela. His work is included in private and public collections, among them the Lia Bermudez Museum in Venezuela, The Printmaking Workshop (Taller de Formación y Producción Gráfica), in Patzcuaro, Mexico, the National Gallery (Galeria Nacional) of Costa Rica, the Cultural Museum of the Caribbean (Museo Cultural del Caribe) in Venezuela, the Praxis Gallery in Nicaragua.
Artist statement.
Since 1990, art has given me the freedom to travel over the ocean of my memories, permitting me to express my sentiments and through this, dig deeply into the vastness of human knowledge, knowledge which has helped me to better understand the world that surrounds us. With my work, I seek to be a vector of change, collecting images that pertain to our collective memory and that, in certain form, make reference to painful events in the history of my country and of the world. I have never become inactive or esthetically dead before the period in which we are living, I have reacted without fear in order to say what needs to be said in the moment in needs to be said, although because of this, some, related to the infrastructures that make art a business, have tried to curtail my freedom by censuring my work.
RENÉ HUGO ARCEOBorn in Cojumatlan, Michoacan, Mexico in 1959, Arceo moved to Chicago in 1979. Studied fine arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1981-85). Participated in dozens of group and solo exhibitions in the United States, Mexico, Canada, Poland, France, Nicaragua and Spain. Some of his solo exhibitions include: México: Museo de Arte Francisco Goitia, Zacatecas and Galería Gabriel Flores of the Universidad de Guadalajara (1990), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Alfredo Zalce, Morelia and Museo José Guadalupe Posada, Aguascalientes (1991), Palacio de la Cultura, Tlaxcala (1992), Palacio de Gobierno de Morelia (2004).
United States: Expressions Graphics Gallery, Oak Park, IL (2007), La Llorona Art Gallery, Chicago, IL (2001 & 2007), Indiana University Southeast, New Albany, IN (2002), Casa Michoacan Gallery, Chicago, IL (2007), Concordia University’s Art Gallery, River Forest, IL (2007).
Poland: Galería BWA, in Zamosc (2002) and Academickie Centrum Kultury, in Lublin (2002).
France: Association Pour L’Estampe et L’Art Polulaire Gallery, Paris, France (2006).
Arceo has received acquisition prizes and scholarship grants from the city of Chicago, the state of Illinois and Arts Midwest Foundation to promote and show his artworks in Mexico, the USA, France and Poland. His artworks are in private and public art collections including:
México: Museo Nacional de la Estampa, Ciudad de México; Universidad Autónoma de Tlaxcala, Tlaxcala; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Alfredo Zalce, Morelia. United States The Illinois State Museum, Springfield, IL.; Laumeier Sculpture Park, Saint Louis, MO; Purdue University Galleries, Lafayette, IN; University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, WI; Western Illinois University-Macomb, IL; Greater Lafayette Museum of Art, Lafayette, IN; Western Michigan University-Kalamazoo, MI; National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago, IL; Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ; Concordia University, River Forest, IL; El Paso Art Museum, El Paso, TX; Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL.
Poland Galería BWA, Zamosc and Academickie Centrum Kultury, Lublin.
Janet Schill started her print making as an undergraduate at Southern Illinois University. She continued her studies and received her MFA from Northern Illinois University in 1996. Her experience in printmaking includes woodblock, linoleum, etching, and screen printing. She starting working with Expressions Graphics in 1991. There she helps artists run editions, and teaches print making to children and adults and also designs and prints her own work. One things she loves to do is work with Expressions Graphics outreach program. Janet demonstrates printmaking techniques to special needs kids and adults. She takes great pride in her work as a teacher helping other people learn about printmaking. In her current capacity, she is in charge of special projects including art education outreach programs and guest artists. She is also a board member, and past president.
GABRIEL ( Rodriguez ) TRINIDADNace en la comunidad de Cuanacaxtitlan en la costa chica de Guerrero, Mèxico .Comunidad indìgena Mixteca , hace 27 años. Aunque estudiò de manera informal con algunos maestros de pintura , èl se considera autodidacta , ya que tuvo solo algunos perìodos de aprendizaje de tècnicas con maestros en Tixtla Gro. y en la cd. de Ometepec Gro. A partir de 2006 empieza a darse a conocer su obra , cuando decide salir de su regiòn a probar suerte a la ciudad . Obteniendo ese año el premio estatal de la juventud , en la categoria de artes en el Estado de Guerrero . Participando tambièn en diferentes proyectos en Chicago , como son en IV encuentro cultural guerrerense en Chicago . Y participaciòn en el portafolio BESTIARIOS Y NAHUALES , coordinado por Renè Arceo . En Mèxico ha participado en las comunidades indìgenas en las protestas sociales a travès del muralismo , al mismo tiempo que ha impartido cursos a los niños en diferentes comunidades.
NICOLAS DE JESUSNace Indio en la comunidad Nahua de Ameyaltepec Gro. Mèxico . 1960
De formaciòn autodidacta , solo con la herencia aprendida de sus padres en su comunidad de pintores y alfareros . En 1980 llega a Cuernavaca y empieza a mostrar su obra en exposiciones , llegando a participaren diferentes exposiciones en diferentes partes del mundo tratando de llevar el mensaje heredado de su herencia y cosmovisiòn prehispànica hacia otras culturas .
Actualmente continùa en las comunidades involucradas en conflictos sociales a reflejar a travès del arte la lucha que permita penetrar en las conciencias de los seres humanos para llegar a una liberaciòn de un sistema inmisericorde con los màs desvalidos.
Laura MynttiBorn in Minnesota, USA
Lives and works in Chicago and Ely, Minnesota Board of trustees for UNICEF, Women's board for the Adler Planetarium
Education :1984 Bachelor of Fine Arts, University of Idaho; Moscow, Idaho
1985 University of Paris - Sorbonne; Paris, France
MYNTTI ON HER OWN by Douglas Davis
Monsieur Manet has never wished to protect. On the contrary, the protest, which he never expected, has been directed against himself: this is because those who have been brought up in these /traditional/ principles will admit no others…
Before we seek the essential Myntti we need to consult the very history of art that she herself has consulted, as she has grown up or worked in a ring of cities and regions that stretches across most of the Western world. Though born in Minnesota, her formative years as student and artist unfolded in Moscow (Idaho), Boston, Paris, London, Helsinki, and New York. Along the way she moved precipitously from a commitment to architecture to drawing to painting. If at first she was captivated by figuration, she soon changed. She read and studied voraciously, focusing on Matisse and Van Gogh, on Kandinsky, Man Ray, and Max Beckmann. In Paris at the Sorbonne she studied French culture in its most advanced and contemporary phases and its existentialist theater. In New York and in London she touched contemporaneity, studying closely Roy Lichtenstein, Alice Neel, David Hockney, Joseph Cornell, and Helen Frankenthaler. In Helsinki she returned to her Finnish roots by investigating the softly soaring curves and nestled of the great Finnish builder, Alvar Aalto.
What emerged from all this was an acute self-consciousness, evident in every stroke she reveals to the public, that can only be called "Post-Modern." Myntti’s painterly passion for her subjects and her methods is always filtered through a clear awareness of who has come before her. Every time she addresses a nude body, a landscape, an arc of wallpaper, she has in her mind the artist who has visited here before, wielding some of the same skills, firing at some of the same targets. Undoubtedly she acknowledges them often in a comic vein. Often her surfaces are so flat, her patches of thick paint piled up so high, her cartoon characters so bold that they act as parody rather than feality. The originality she wrings out of this critical, skeptical awareness at once the glory and the burden of painting at the end of this century is an acutely seasoned originality. Perhaps post-modernism is modernism’s last, highly spiced afterthought.
Benjamin Varela (b. 1955 Brooklyn, New York, USA) is a Puerto Rican artist who has exhibited in Texas, Wisconsin, Illinois, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Spain, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City. Benjamin has shown his artwork in the Bronx Museum in New York, Byron Roche Gallery in Chicago, the Mexican Printmaking Workshop in Chicago, and Coronado Studios in Austin. In addition, his work is in many public collections including the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio, Texas, the Romo Collection of Mexican American Art Prints at UT Austin, Texas, the Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi, Texas and the Bronx Museum in New York, City. In 2007, he was San Antonio’s Tejano Conjunto Festival Poster winner. Moreover, he received a public art commission in Harlingen, Texas in which he completed in the summer of 2007. Currently, he is exhibiting in a theme group show called El Paso Museum of Fine Arts in El Paso, Texas. Other upcoming exhibitions are the Chicago’s group art show and exhibition with Pilsen Artists at Casa Michuacan and upcoming exhibition at the Art house in McAllen, Texas with printmakers from Expression Graphics in Oak Park, Chicago where he was once a former member invited to exhibit.
Reynaldo Santiago was born in 1956 on “Noche de San Juan”, A Puerto Rican holiday tradition, in Munchweiler, Germany. He was attracted to art in his early years and continues with the passion of art making in a variety of mediums, printmaking being his base in the development of other art forms. Rey has made the Valley his home and is one of the founding members of the McAllen Art Walk and the McAllen Art House. He is currently the Master of Fine Arts Director at the University of Texas – Pan American and teaches a variety of graduate and undergraduate courses including printmaking. He has an exhibition record that includes solo and group shows in Australia, Italy, Japan, France, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Canada, Mexico, Bulgaria, and the USA. His screen print posters can be found throughout Central and South American institutions of higher education. The most recent projects allude to immigration (legal or illegal), bird migration-freedom, and thresholds & windowpanes in Latin America.
