The Caulk Artist

Nicole Durham is a Contemporary Neo-Expressionist artist living in Houston, TX, who utilizes caulk as her primary medium. Durham’s exploration into the nontraditional medium has awarded her multiple exhibition opportunities, including “best in show” at The Ardest Gallery in Houston, Texas. She is also a founding member of Tenacious Artists, an all-women’s artist collective, who just completed their first group show, Elements of Contrast.

Creating textured artworks with caulk began as an experimental journey to explore Durham’s neglected cultural and domesticated identities. The nontraditional medium is an industrial, and far more obstinate, material than traditional acrylic products, reconnecting her with ambitious emotions of endurance and sacrifice. The porous material draws out the ambiguity of privileged creating, awarding the viewer with dramatic relief and multi-level linear experiences. 

Caulk has challenged Durham to incorporate and try other mediums including collaging and assemblage practices.  Collaging and assemblage allow Durham to create with objects that represent, honor, and preserve her cultures.

Brittany Ellis

Brittany lives and works in Houston, Texas where she was born and raised. She obtained her BFA in 2021 from the Academy of Art University. Her background as a painter, photographer, and innovator inspires her multifaceted compositions. Combining painting, unconventional objects, and sculpture she creates celestial 3D relief narratives that explore concepts in space.

Mixing 2D and 3D concepts create a juxtaposition of the nostalgic past of youth hood and the reality of the present. Brittany’s work has been featured in West Elm (2019-2024), showcased on the Today Show (2025), and displayed on the Times Square Billboard in collaboration with Visual Art Journal (2025). With Exhibitions including The Contemporary Art Museum Houston: Contents under pressure exhibit (2009), The De Young Museum: New Generations Matter Exhibit (2012), Art Museum of South Texas (2020).

La’Toya Smith

In life, we often find ourselves simply reacting to joy, to pain, to noise and to silence. We hear words without digesting their meaning. We see life unfolding before us, yet too often forget to truly live it.

I hear you. I see you. I feel you. And everything around us carries a depth and worth far greater than we usually or even care to recognize. That truth is what inspires me.

My art is my soul’s way of communicating. Translating what it sees and feels into something tangible, without limits or boundaries. Each piece begins as a quiet conversation between myself and the canvas, and the final work is the echo of that exchange.

Lizzy Maye

Lizzy Maye is a Houston-based Chicana painter whose vivid, culturally infused work is a celebration of identity, resilience, and feminine strength. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Lizzy followed in her father’s artistic footsteps but stepped away from painting for 20 years. After breaking both legs, she returned to her canvas with a renewed purpose: to be a voice for silenced women, to challenge the status quo, and to use art as a tool for education and liberation in underserved communities.

Known for her extreme attention to detail and bold use of color, Lizzy’s work spans contemporary realism, surrealism, and pop art-always rooted in her Chicana spirit.

She paints powerful portraits that speak to heritage and struggle, as well as colorful landscapes of the Houston skyline and everyday objects like shoes, re-imagining the ordinary through a lens of cultural storytelling and artistic rebellion.

Her pieces are more than art-they are declarations of cultural pride, human strength, and creative freedom. Whether capturing the soul of a city or the quiet symbolism of an object, Lizzy Maye invites viewers to see beauty through her lens of Lived experience.

jade

Growing up in a small-town, Jade Weird has always sought outlets for her creativity through number of ways. She acquired her Associates of Fine Arts degree at Alvin Community College and obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in studio art at the University of Houston-Clear Lake in Houston, Texas.

Jade creates in multiple mediums such as digital and film photography, darkroom printing, ceramics, and a variety of sculpture mediums are her strongest and most concentrated forms of art. Her most recent shows include the Kicks Art Exhibition and Sneaker Ball in May 2025 as well as the Frame By Frame photo exhibition in May 2025. Jade finds capturing life from a unique perspective and submerging deep into her imagination to be fulfilling and loves creating just for the sake of creation. By having a wide range of interests when it comes to the arts, Jade is willing to push herself out of her comfort zone to further grow as a practicing artist.

Wyntress X’ion

Wyntress X’ion is a native Houston visual artist, designer, and storyteller whose work centers around reclamation, identity, and transformation. As a self-taught painter , she uses bold color palettes, repurposed materials, and layered symbolism to explore the intersections of identity , resilience, and cultural memory.

Wyntress’s practice spans wearable art, digital design, filmmaking, and community-centered
projects. Her journey marked by 19 years of competitive basketball, the loss of early
opportunities, and a radical reclamation of her voice through art is the foundation of her
multidisciplinary work. She is known for turning struggle into texture and spirituality into form.Through collections like” Ebony Love Letter” & “When the Ask,” Wyntress invites viewers into intimate conversations with the unseen her work acting as both mirror and portal. Whether she’s painting, designing for sports teams, or building digital toolkits for other brands , her art is
always in dialogue with the soul.

Sharon

Sharon McLaurin is an artist and art jewelry designer whose work explores peace, clarity, and inner confidence through intentional form and material.

Her handcrafted DESIGNS AND CREATIONS function as wearable art, each piece thoughtfully created as a tactile meditation on presence, balance, and feminine strength.

Rooted in ritual and meaning, Sharon’s practice extends beyond adornment into storytelling, healing, and connection, inviting viewers and wearers alike into spaces of refle

Myeshia Babers

As a curator and maker, is especially attentive to how images hold intimacy and power simultaneously, designing encounters that invite viewers to slow down and read closely.

Her contribution to The Feminine Universe, titled Question for Eve, engages the exhibition’s celebration of womanhood as power, presence, and possibility by examining how women are positioned as both origin and answer in cultural memory. Myeshia treats femininity not as fixed identity but as lived archive, exploring how women are asked to carry—family history, community memory, responsibility, beauty, grief, silence, joy—while honoring that labor and interrogating its cost. What happens when the body becomes both container and evidence? When femininity read as softness but functions as strategy? When is the first woman’s story told by everyone except herself?

Myeshia describes her approach as research-creation: making is not separate from analysis but part of it. Her curatorial sensibility makes room for the infinite dimensions of feminine experience—complexity, contradiction, tenderness, rage, devotion, refusal, resilience.

Amy Straley

Amy is a self taught figurative artist From Southern California, she spent years as a ballet dancer, eventually turning to painting.

In her work you’ll see a play of delicacy and strength, ethereal femininity, and resilient power. A nod to the seasons are represented as a symbol of our growth and shifts throughout the seasons of life. As women, we travel through many stages of life while still being expected to carry on in silent strength.

She incorporates colorful dreamlands subliminally connecting women to nature and the shifts of the earth. An environment of colorful mountains, deep oceans, and endless skies.

In her figures you’ll see confidence, joy, sadness, and sarcasm. An expression paused to reflect on. Women who seem to be allowing you into their thoughts for a moment in time before returning to the expectations of the world.

Tara Hughes

Human, creator, a little witchy and a desire to connect without conforming.

Taking “trash” and giving it a new life is fulfilling and allows me to communicate with others and engage in activism.