Low-key Fuchs named 2018 Texas Artist of the Year
Francesca Fuchs, the low-key but high-powered talent who heads the painting department at the Glassell School of Art, has been named Art League Houston’s 2018 Texas Artist of the Year.
The League also will honor George Smith with its 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award in the Visual Arts. Jereann Chaney was named the 2018 Texas Patron of the Year. The prestigious annual awards acknowledge people who have had a significant and positive impact on contemporary visual art in Texas.
With a career spanning almost three decades, Fuchs draws from art historical and personal references, evoking a strong sense of narrative around themes of memory, family and home, and how they define our sense of place and self. Her most widely seen recent work fills the north wall of Lawndale Art Center’s building in the Museum District through this year.
Drawing inspiration from personal references — including motherhood, friends, familial traditions and domestic objects and spaces — her work portrays moments of emotional and intellectual intimacy and selfreflection, translated through a sober subjectivity. Fuchs has produced an extraordinary body of work that is a testament to the meaning and potency of painting, ranging from small- to large-scale works and characterized by an expansive vocabulary of soft lines, gestural brushwork and a subdued, muted palette.
Smith is a significant American contemporary artist who lives and works in Houston. He is known for his steel sculpture and oil on paper works, which reference the Dogon aesthetic and the expressive power of African geometry. For the past 40 years, he has created works in metal, steel and paper that evoke a powerful and spiritual quality, grounded in the very essence of the material itself. Smith’s use of steel references the Buffalo Steel Industry, where his father worked in a local mill. The personal significance of this material, combined with the primordial qualities of steel and fire, produce a lingering source of strength and endurance in the work that not only speaks to the contemporary experience but also acknowledges a symbolic vocabulary of the past.
As is tradition, Fuchs, Smith and Chaney will be honored at the League’s gala and be featured in exhibitions in the fall.
Executive director Jennie Ash noted that Fuchs and Smith continue to influence generations of younger artists through their art-making and teaching practices, and that Chaney has been a major supporter of artists and art organizations for more than 20 years.
“All three honorees are much loved by the community in which they live and work,” Ash said. “We feel honored to have the opportunity to recognize their contributions.”