Art League Houston will celebrate its 2011 selection for Texas Artist of the Year, Mary McCleary, with an exhibit that will span 15 years of the artist's career and encompass 26 collages next month.
In a release, ALH director Vanessa Wodehouse said McCleary "is long-deserving of this title. Her work is brilliantly complex and executed in an extraordinary manner."
McCleary was born in Houston and focused on printmaking as a student and began making collages in 1978, developing a style of multilayered artwork using all manner of media: leather, lint, small plastic toys, glass, pencils, nails, sticks and mirrors.
"I like the irony of using materials that are often trivial, foolish, and temporal to express ideas of what is significant, timeless, and transcendent," McCleary says in the release.
McCleary is the 28th Texas Artist of the Year. The exhibit will open with a reception on September 9, and the exhibit runs through November 12. For information, call 713-523-9530 or visit www.artleaguehouston.org.