Chuck Ramirez
1962-2010
Chuck Ramirez was an artist and designer who lived and worked in San Antonio, Texas. His large-scale photographic portraits and installations of banal objects are humorous, yet poignant metaphors for the transient nature of consumer culture and the frailty of life.

Trash Bag Series: Black Sack I (Image: Courtesy Blue Star Art Center)

Diana Kersey is a visual artist who works in clay, creating both studio pottery and architectural ceramics. Her work possesses a raw, textural quality, with the clay encompassed in a translucent, earthy glaze. The birds, insects, fish, and flowers present in her work suggest a primordial narrative, while the underlying decorative grids and motifs capture the relentless energy, complexity, and contradictions that pulse through our contemporary society.

Larry Graeber: Captivated early on by the postimpressionists, I was struck by their dynamic expressive attempts at redefining  their subjects, the figure and landscape.  Early in my career I emulated these artists and their subjects. Seeking to grow and develop my work I turned to nonobjective motifs, expressive gestural configurations,  primary patterns, grids, circles and ovals. Configuring them into patterns of two dimensional flat fields or applying an aspect of perspective to achieve some illusionary  semblances. While developing these subjects and in an effort to affirm one of the great pleasures I have always gotten from great painting, that being their physicality and handcrafted quality, I use brushes and frequently incorporate such tools as trowels, squeegees and sticks to help delineate and invigorate my process of painting. Together with these tools and my quest for orders and structures, I seek to emulate my fondness for nature and phenomena.