Way Way Out West
 
Featuring the works of
 
Bennie Flores Ansell
Terry Hagiwara
Sandria Hu
Rahul Mitra
 

April 9 - May 1, 2009
In celebration of Asian Heritage Month
 

Reception: Thursday, April 9, 5:30 - 7:30 p.m.

 
JPMorgan Chase
Heritage Hall
712 Main Street
Houston, Texas 77002
 


For Immediate Release
Contact: Michael Lynch
713-523-9530 or alh@artleaguehouston.org
Photos and complete biographies available on request

 

HOUSTON (March 10, 2009) - Art League Houston, in partnership with JPMorgan Chase, is pleased to announce the opening of Way Way Out West, which takes place at Heritage Hall in the JPMorgan Chase Building in Downtown Houston, and runs from April 9 - May 1, 2009 as a celebration of Asian Heritage Month.  This exhibition features the work of Bennie Flores Ansell, Terry Hagiwara, Sandria Hu, and Rahul Mitra.  The opening reception for the exhibition is Thursday  April 9, 5:30 - 7:30 p.m. at Heritage Hall in the JPMorgan Chase building located at 712 Main Street in downtown Houston.  The entrance to the building is on Travis.
 
Way Way Out West  is the third in a series of four visual art exhibitions that focus on cultural heritage month celebrations.  Celebrating Diversity Through Art is a unique collaboration of JPMorgan Chase and Art League Houston, which highlights established and emerging artists representative of diverse communities. This program is supported in full by the JPMorgan Chase Foundation.
 
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Bennie Flores Ansell is a Texas artist who exhibits her photography based installations and art nationally. born in 1967 in Manila, Philippines, she moved to Connecticut as a child and then to Tampa, Florida where she attended The University of South Florida.  Here she received a B.A. in Photography. Her M.F.A. was completed in 1999 at The University of Houston.  
 
Flores Ansell's photography based installations and artwork explore fashion, beauty, identity, science classification and photography's transformation to digital. Her work has been exhibited at The International Center for Photography, NYC; Seattle Art Museum; San Diego Museum of Art and The Houston Center for Photography. She was included in the group show Inside Outside: Texas Women Photographers curated by Anne Tucker, Curator of Photography at The Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Other notable exhibitions include  Bug Out of the Box: A New Look at the Contemporary Art, History, and Science of Bugs at The Berkshire Museum of Art, Crossroads at Galveston Art Center and Silver Houston Center for Photography's 25 year retrospective exhibition.  She is the recipient of many awards including:  The Houston Center for Photography Fellowship, 1998, The American Photography Institute National Graduate NYU Fellowship, 1999, 2000 and The Cultural Arts Council of Houston Artist Grant, 2002.
 
Teruhiko (Terry) Hagiwara is a ceramicist, as well as a research physicist in the petroleum industry.  Born in Japan and moving to the United States in 1969, Hagiwara came to Houston in 1981.  In 1989 he began taking ceramic classes from William Dennard at the Glassell School of Art, MFAH, where he remained as a student until 2003.  He served as Dennard's studio assistant from 1991-1998. 
 
Hagiwara's  work is influenced by many things, including Japanese clay works, Southwest pueblo pottery, his travels to Brazil, architecture, painting, landscapes, flowers, and his own scientific research.  Represented by Goldesberry Gallery in Houston, the artist  has exhibited through out Houston, with additional exhibitions at the Beeville Art Museum in Beeville, Texas, and Artist Unlimited, Inc. in Tampa, Florida.  As a research physicist, Hagiwara has gained worldwide recognition for his work on electrical anisotropy and is a recognized authority on electromagnetic modeling.
 
Sandria Hu was born in 1946 in San Francisco, California, where she was also raised.  Contrary to the advice of her chemist father and C.P.A. mother, she studied art, completing a B.A. and M.A. at San Diego State University, and then going on to earn an M.F. A. at Stanford University. 
 
For more than  twenty years, Sandria Hu has been constructing artworks that reference her experience of living in places as varied as Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Austria, Belgium, France, Spain, the Ukraine, Mexico, the Pacific Northwest, and Texas, where she has taught art at the University of Houston-Clear Lake for more than three decades. (Clint Willour, Clay and Ash: New Work by Sandria Hu)  Over the years she has received a number of prestigious grants and awards, including a 1974 Guggenheim Fellowship to study printmaking at Atelier 17, an N.E.A. grant to complete the work begun in Paris, three Senior Fulbright Scholarships to teach and study in Czechoslovakia and Mexico, and two Senior Fulbright Specialist awards, sending her to Mexico and Belgrade, Serbia.  Hu has exhibited her work in galleries and museums all over the world, and her work can be found in the permanent collections of places that include the Oakland Museum of Art, Fort Worth Art Museum, Brooklyn Museum of Fine Arts and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.  A professor at the University of Houston - Clear Lake, Ms. Hue's work is represented by McClain Gallery in Houston.
 
Rahul Mitra is a self-taught art and printmaker, writer, and entrepreneur, as well as Associate Director at the Kleberg Center for Molecular Markers, UT MD Anderson Cancer Center. Born in Hyderabad, India, he has a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. 
 
Mitra's current linocuts, whose subjects are poverty, ennui, custom, love and strangeness, employ the graphic quality of the medium to bring out the starkness of social and  cultural differences, capturing the moment of life in urban spaces.  He has exhibited his work in both Houston, Texas and Mumbai and Hyderabad, India.   Mitra has published over thirty articles in scientific journals, along with literary works - two novels, including True Blue Sea and Sin of Rama, and short stories, such as Sea of Glitter (Gowanus, 2008) and Cycle Chain Acid, which appeared in an anthology of short stories, sponsored by BBC and the British Council for the Arts, and published by Peepal Press.  In addition to all of this, Mitra holds a patent on a novel method of DNA microarray fabrication and is the founder of Genomics USA, Inc., a microarray manufacturing company.  Press accolades for his first solo exhibition in Hyderabad in August, 2008 were high, with reviews appearing in the Urbanscape Artist, the Hyderabad Times, and the Times of India, as well as news coverage and interviews on NaaTV, eTV, NDTV, TV9 and ZeeTV in both India and the United States.

   
Art League Houston is one of Houston's longest operating non-profit visual arts organizations and was the first alternative art space in Texas.  Founded in 1948 and incorporated as a non-profit organization in 1953, Art League Houston (ALH) was created to promote the public appreciation of and interest in the visual arts.  For over sixty years, ALH has provided over 775 exhibitions to the Houston community, showcased the work of nearly 22,300 artists, and instructed over 37,000 students through the Art League School and Outreach Program.   
 
Our Mission
The mission of Art League Houston is to cultivate awareness, appreciation, and accessibility of contemporary visual art within the community for its cultural enrichment.  Art League Houston provides an opportunity for all members of the community to experience the contemporary visual arts.  We achieve our mission through exhibitions, education and outreach programs.