Sterling Allen Backdrop & Blocker

In this solo presentation by Sterling Allen, the Austin-based artist creates a site-specific sculpture-based installation that activates sight lines, architectural relationships, hanging conventions, and spatial connections, all while celebrating pop, the handmade, function, failure, and the cheap illusion.

Sterling Allen holds an MFA in Sculpture from the Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts at Bard College and a BFA in Studio Art from the University of Texas in Austin. He is a co-founder and co-director of Okay Mountain, an artist collective and former gallery based in Austin, Texas. As a solo artist and in collaboration with the group, he has exhibited, organized, and completed projects at venues throughout the United States and received several residencies including the Artpace International Artist-In-Residence Program in San Antonio, Texas and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, Nebraska. He is currently an Assistant Professor in Studio Art at Texas State University in San Marcos, TX.

Betsy Huete is an artist and writer from Houston. She received her BFA from Rice in 2006 and her MFA in Sculpture from the University of Houston in 2014. Huete has had solo and two-person exhibitions at Art League Houston, Lawndale Art Center, Matchbox Gallery, and galleryHOMELAND, and participated in Houston’s Fringe Festival in 2012. She attended the artist residency Mildred’s Lane during the summers of 2012 and 2013, and was subsequently included in the residency’s exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the fall of 2012. A frequent contributor to Glasstire, Huete has also written for The Great God Pan is Dead, gulfcoastmag.org, and served as the assistant editor for the Art Lies section of Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts in 2013. Additionally, in 2012 she collaborated on Dis Manibus: A Taxonomy of Ghosts From Popular Forms published by Information as Material in the UK.