Happy Mediums: 10 North Texas Artists to Watch in 2024

Like all things in life, the North Texas art world is endlessly cyclical. For one year that overflows with local talent, there's another when artists on the rise seemingly flock to the coasts in droves.

In 2024, we are most definitely on an upswing, with fresh new spaces, brilliant curators and ambitious creators showing or making a wide range of innovative, thought-provoking work. Coming from wildly varied practices, aesthetics and career levels, these 10 artists are having a moment when their work deserves a deeper look.

Sheryl Anaya

From Catholicism to culinary pursuits, Fort Worth artist Sheryl Anaya takes on a smorgasbord of thematic delights in her work, most recently “Absurd Appetites (Table for Two)” at Cluley Projects.

A mix of pine, steel, thrifted work shirts, glazed ceramics, eggs and pastries (among other materials), the piece grew out of Anaya’s recent Texas Christian University thesis exhibition, Let Things Taste of What They Are, with a rather unusual jumping off point.

“The whole project came about when I heard the story of Saint Agatha and this byline in history of her breasts being removed simply because she didn’t want to be with this Roman governor,” she says. “Then I discovered that Sicilian pastry chefs were honoring her by baking this really delicate pastry that looked like boobs. It was just so bizarre to me, so I started doing all this research about all the ways she was depicted in paintings,”

This led to her concept of the consumption of women’s bodies and the laborious elements of women’s work. Anaya deconstructed men’s tailored shirts into a quilted patchwork tablecloth, crocheted darling dickies for fruit and crafted ceramic place settings and cutlery. She will use ceramic elements for collectors to replace the perishable food in the current installation.

Recalling the legendary Judy Chicago’s feminist “The Dinner Party,” the exhibition will be on view through Feb. 10, whetting viewer’s appetite for Anaya’s future work, including the larger tablescape’s reappearance at the Fort Worth Community Arts Center later in 2024.

Jon Ashcraft

His Insta handle may be @paintingisded, but in Jon Ashcraft’s hands, it’s anything but. Both surreal and instinctive, Ashcraft’s portraits are a little Schiele and a little Ren and Stimpy.

"A lot of things influence me, from cartoons I grew up on, like Sonic the Hedgehog," Ashcraft says. "I have other musical interests, like Skinny Puppy and Velvet Acid Christ — which is a weird dark electronic band — and watching horror movies. Then, I add my emotional state. When people hear that, they think the connotations are negative, but it's this whole idea being influenced by many outside forces and everything converging inside me. When it comes out on the canvas, it's visceral and raw."

Ashcraft imbues his thick layers of paint with the tonality of human flesh, whether his subject is kiddie TV host Mr. Peppermint’s puppet sidekick, Muffin, or an intense self-portrait. While developing his own “energetic, emotional take” on visual language, he may draw equally from Flemish painting and Looney Tunes. But ultimately, the source of true inspiration comes from inside. With participation in group shows at the MAC, Ro2 Gallery, PRP Galley and Forth Worth Contemporary Arts, Ashcraft's primary goal is to ensure that "portraiture is not dead."

He adds, “There are plenty of artists such as myself that find the psychological and ephemeral aspect of portraiture and the analog nature of it to be so interesting and so human and much more akin to how we explain the mythos and stories within humanity as opposed to how technology strips that away from us.”

Hannah Baskin

Evolving from figurative work to “random social experiments,” emerging interdisciplinary artist Hannah Baskin eventually discovered a passion for representing the depth of the human experience via performance art.

A graduate of the University of North Texas, she has already graced the halls of institutions such as the Dallas Contemporary and 500x with work that uses eggs, yarn, blood, mud, candles and fire. Although she is also adept in sculpture and painting, it is in her performances that Baskin is likely to find her most impactful and enduring legacy.

“I found it was easy to translate what was in my mind with performance art,” she says. “It felt raw, and it was more about expressing a deep emotion, and it doesn't matter if it made sense. I found it was easy to express certain complexities within myself in a way I was proud of. Sometimes they start as a joke, but then I realize I’m communicating something really deep.”

For example, this former pastor’s kid staged a moment where she walked through dark water in a pristine gallery clad in a white gown to reference the idea of “not know if your soul is good or bad, but know it’s still OK either way.”

Currently fundraising so she can attend the Royal College in London for her master's degree, Baskin is anticipating a 24-hour performance in a TBD Tin District building later this year.

Alicia Eggert

An associate professor of Studio Art at the University of North Texas, activist artist Alicia Eggert has exhibited her impactful neon sculptures everywhere, from the Smithsonian American Art Museum to the Nasher Sculpture Center.

Never one to shy away from a definitive statement, her pieces encourage introspection and reflection via texts repurposed from Plato, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and The Whole Earth Catalogue, among other disparate sources.

Trained in the craft program at Alfred University in upstate New York, Eggert was initially drawn to neon as a material because of its “magical properties.”

“It’s just this tube of glass filled with gas that glows when electrified,” she says. "It's very much a combination of science and art, which is underlying all the work I do — that intersection between science, art and philosophy."

Collaborating with contractors, she draws the pattern for what she wants to communicate before having a bender craft her text. Afterward, she handles the remaining fabrication, electrical work and installation herself.

Although Eggert's pieces are never less than thought-provoking, they can also be whimsical and sweet, such as “You Are Magic,” an inflatable sculpture commissioned for Virginia’s Arlington Art Truck program. Activated when two people touch the piece's sensors and hold hands, the piece inspires wonder wherever it travels.

By focusing on site-specific pieces in her practice, Eggert says she is "about thinking about my place in the world and the role I play in it. My work is still very much existential, but more and more of my practice is tackling societal questions, social justice and climate change. I think we’re having a societal-level existential crisis, and collectively, we have a lot of anxiety around time and our existence. But naturally, I’m a very optimistic person, and my work takes this optimistic viewpoint.”

Next up for Eggert is a solo show in April at the Art Museum of Southwest Texas, a three-person show during the Art Fair at Site 131 in Dallas and her installation of “Ours” (in collaboration with the Planned Parenthood Federation of America), which will travel to the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft this fall.

Rachael Henson

Material is the method in the hands of Rachael Henson, who indulges most of the five senses to craft her Cronenbergian sculptures. Her most recent site-specific piece for last fall’s independent Chateau show at the historic Aldredge House on Swiss Avenue featured a silicone spine perched on a radiator in the upstairs bathroom, adorned with a fragrance blend reminiscent of clean cotton, iron, milk and fungus to recall the smell of an elderly care facility or morgue.

In other words, Henson is NOT afraid to get weird, and her embrace of everything from silicone to scent to saliva as material reinforces the inherent humanity of the artist and the viewer in all its body horror glory.

“When I make these works, I like things that mimic the body but aren’t,” she says. “It makes me feel a little bit human if that makes sense, so I think that’s where it comes from. In this modern world, everything is very transient. Images pop up, and they disappear, so it’s good to be present in our bodies to feel things and sit with them,”

A graduate of the University of Texas Austin’s fine arts program, Henson is looking into grad schools as she shows in community spaces such as the MAC and Arts Fort Worth. Her investigation of the underlying rot beneath a glamorous surface assures this 27-year-old will have a bright (if occasionally grody) body of work worth paying attention to.

Doug Land

Many artists pay lip service to humanity’s abandonment of the natural world, but the multidisciplinary Doug Land puts his money where his mouth is. As a gardener and artist, Land creates installations inside and outside the gallery walls that highlight natural materials (and the occasional insect).

The painter and sculptor, who proclaims on his website that he was "bitten by a gnome and turned into a tree," grew up in Cedar Hill before attending the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). His time working as a museum guard at the Dallas Museum of Art and for gallerist Cris Worley gave him a 360-degree view of the art industry.

Once Land returned to Cedar Hill, he spent time exploring the adjacent state park, which gave him the idea of “this heavy environmental look or looking at the world through the lens of gardening and trying to protect it through that lens.”

He makes his finishes and materials with his husband, including growing cotton, flax and indigo for future projects. As he became successful enough in his side hustle as a gardener, he has also shown work at the University of Texas at Dallas' SP/N Gallery and Cluley Projects without troubling himself with sales.

“It changed my perspective of why and who I make art for,” he says. “At SCAD, they trained us to make very commercial art, so it’s been nice to unpack making art for myself and ask, ‘What does that mean?’ It allows me to get more philosophical with stuff.”

Next up on his artistic wish list? Designing an entire park environment that blends landscape and sculptural design.

Danié Gómez Ortigoza

There’s more than hair apparent in the work of Danie Gomez Ortigoza. The Miami- and Dallas-based artist has built a thought-provoking body of performances based on her Latin heritage under the name Journey of a Braid. This entrepreneur had been a Disney TV host, a marketing director and Glamour Mexico correspondent when she landed on the methodology that referenced one of her tenderest childhood memories.

“My grandmother was a very empowered woman and had her own business, but she gave that up when she married and cut her hair,” Gomez Ortigoza says. “She saved her braid and had it in this velvet textile and cherished it as something precious.”

Raised by an indigenous nanny in Mexico, Gómez Ortigoza was fascinated by her braiding skills, even though “most people would look down on [the traditional hairstyle], which was strange to me because the woman who braided my hair opened her heart to me.”

While living in Stockholm as an adult, she was asked to assemble a delegation of Mexican women for a conference. During the experience, she was asked to braid the women's hair; in the process, she learned about their hopes and struggles. By the time she moved to Miami, she was organizing performances that created circles via ribbons and hair, turning a private ritual into a decisive healing moment that she documented through photography.

“I don’t know if you’ve braided another woman’s hair, but there’s this point of communication of the vulnerability for someone to touch that part of your body,” she says. “Our hair is like our antenna. We decided at some point to use it as an aesthetic element, but I’ve discovered there’s so much more meaning.”

Having already performed at Art Basel, the Dallas Contemporary and Vignette Art Fair, Gomez Ortigoza is involved with a 2024 workshop for the executive leadership community YPO, as well as providing creative consulting for the opening of the “Surrealism and Us” exhibit in March at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

By continuing to braid elements of the "past, present, the future, the ego, the id and the superego, the mind, and body and spirit, every performance is different," she says of her work. "There are a lot of things that divide us, but we need things to tie us together. There's always a space for hope, and we need that so desperately. It's the invisible thread that binds us together."

Kris Pierce

The future and the past both interest multimedia artist Kris Pierce, who traffics in envelope-pushing “metahuman” work alongside paintings that draw heavily on Mad Men-era iconography.

Going from live data streams to sculptures and canvases that look like they were created in the 1950s is an intense throughline, but for Pierce, it's just a way for him to reclaim history via the archetypes of individualism.

“A lot of my work includes things related to tech coding or game engines or anything that feels new and fresh,” Pierce says. “I’m using a lot of generative tech and artificial intelligence, taking these different types of media and collapsing them into single works of art to explore what do these things mean from our past and how do we bring in our own bias?”

Pierce prefers imagery from "blue" comics of the '60s and '70s for their "heavy chauvinistic" context, taking classical cartoons of the successful businessman archetype and ornamenting them with affirmational stickers with messages like "Job Well Done." By connecting constructions for power from the past to the future, Pierce creates a pleasing aesthetic that pings the viewer's nostalgia centers while engaging our modern short-attention-span imaginations.

Pierce has shown everywhere from the Dallas Museum of Art to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and is pouring “everything” into his solo show, Applause, opening Feb. 17 at Keijsers Koning Gallery in Dallas. To paraphrase David Bowie, wherever he’s going from here, it certainly won’t be boring.

Alex Revier

Visitors to Meow Wolf’s newest portal at Grapevine Mills Mall can’t help but be enchanted by Alex Revier’s maximalist mural, “The Tropic of Prancer.” With floating phone books framed by his signature quirky human/animal hybrids, the piece comments on dying technology in the most colorful, optimistic way.

The artist's daily walk through the Grapevine Mills parking lot also inspired the jumping-off point for a recent Ro2 solo show titled Gentle Persuasion: A Study of Splatter. Revier's cast of characters cavort and scrap across his splashy canvases, if only to make the viewer long for an animated show that builds on their exploits.

Revier is a fan of synchronicity and absurdity alike. According to him, “a lot of things just fall into my lap,” from getting a call from a Meow curator as he was driving through the organization’s home state of New Mexico to being able to fit into a vintage suit he discovered when it was time to dress up for his artist talk.

This spring, he is planning “3-D in a weird way, with work based on cutout panels” while also executing a mural for a wall of Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studios in Denton. All of which will undoubtedly portray more of the quirky creatures that possess the artist's lanky form.

“I think I paint or draw things that remind me of myself,” he says with a laugh.

Caroline Zurmely

Sometimes, it’s the materials an artist uses that blow your mind. To wit — Caroline Zurmely’s delicate portraits, which are intricately painted with glossy, glorious nail polish.

What started as a “COVID project” that drew on Zurmely’s childhood love of enamel paint pens soon became polished canvases that “would bubble and bleed, but also have this weird bathroom thing going on,” she says.

The artist’s “aha moment” turned into a serious Essie addiction, a brand she chose for its “great range of neutrals and colors that can be used for skin tones” (and its easy availability in CVS, Target or Walgreens). Zurmely found that her source materials also assured each painting would look shiny and polished when photographed, yet perfectly imperfect with bubbles and textures when viewed up close.

Leaning into recognizable people such as Princess Diana, Sharon Tate and Marilyn Monroe, among others, Zurmely focused on tabloid photography or famous faces to “help the viewer understand what they’re looking at.”

“Hopefully, you like just the way it looks or if it brings back a memory or you have some kind of past or story connected to it,” she says. “But it’s not dependent on you having to know [what the image is], and if you don’t know it doesn't matter. I’ll mix in my own photos and things I’ve saved from my camera roll.”

As she perfected her process during the pandemic, the artist also found she no longer needed to be in New York, Los Angeles or London to sell her work. This year will bring a solo exhibition in Rome.

Zurmely may not currently exhibit work in her hometown, but her practice is so enchanting that the art world will undoubtedly come to her. Her saturated paintings give the same dreamy, girlie vibes as a Sofia Coppola film, assuring that she'll be stocking up on plenty of bottles of "Bare With Me" and "Forever Yummy" for years to come.