Some of the venues for work exhibited include The Royal College of Art London, Corpus Christie Art Museum, Art League Houston, Smithtown Township Arts Council, New York, Proteus Gowanus, New York, University of Texas at San Antonio, Islip Art Museum, Siena Art Institute, Italy, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Museum of Printing History, Houston, and the Masur Museum of Art, Monroe, Louisiana. Cobley’s work has been featured in juried publications including ‘Images 20 by The Association of Illustrators’ in the UK and selected by Terrie Sultan Director of the Parrish Museum New York for ‘New American Painting Issue #84’. Most recently she was included in a publication called Texas Abstract: Modern and Contemporary written by Michael Paglia and Jim Edwards. Currently, two site-specific installations by Cobley are on view at the Plains Art Museum in Fargo North Dakota, in a large scale exhibition called Bakken Boom! curated by Becky Dunham.

Cobley’s paintings in the exhibition entitled ‘Gray Area’, are predominately white. She references a treatise called ‘White’ by Kenya Hara, a Japanese writer and designer, to help explain her interest.

“White can be attained by blending all the colors of the spectrum together, or through the subtraction of ink and all other pigments. In short, it is “all colors” and “no color” at the same time. This identity as a color that can “escape color” makes white very special. Not only does white’s texture powerfully evoke the materiality of objects; white can also contain temporal and spatial principals like ma (an interval of space and time) and yohaku (empty margin), or abstract concepts such as nonexistence or zero.”

Michael Crowder is a mixed media sculptor who exhibits across the US and internationally. Originally from New Orleans, he is currently based in Houston, Texas. His conceptually-driven sculpture often incorporates museum “art/ifacts” made of glass particles fused together in a variation of the ancient pâte de verre technique. Exploring ideas of fragility and impermanence, his work is sometimes cast using very ephemeral materials—from sugar or chocolate to marble dust or cigarette ashes. He was recently an Artist-in-Residence at the Dora Maar House in Ménerbes, France and he was one of only two Americans invited to participate in an international sculpture park project involving 30 artists from 15 countries held in Bodh Gaya, India in 2024. His MFA from Kent State University with a concentration in Glass followed a BFA from Louisiana State University with a concentration in Sculpture. Museum collections include the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and Gandhi Maidan Museum, Patna, India.

Crowder writes:
“My artwork often explores contemporary and historical museum practices by presenting objects in a convincing museum display context. Using strategies of museological display, I will re-present “art/ifacts” in a manner that re-contextualizes them as historically important museum objects. The museum artifact—which demands and receives respect by virtue of its perceived significance—is generally privileged to a different sort of gaze than a contemporary artwork, which stares back at the viewer in the present. By co-opting this privilege, I am interested in subverting the authoritativeness of both the object and its history-making institution, the museum.

For example, in Machina Respiratio, a found bellows is taxidermized in an elaborate shadow box display where it is made to inhale and exhale every ten seconds through a convoluted clockworks of barely visible cast glass pulleys. This functions as both a representation of the unseen history-constructing machinations of the museum and the equally unseen yet ever-present autonomic system of the body which is causing the viewer to draw a breath every ten seconds whether one is aware of it or not…”

More details on the artists can be found at www.LucindaCobley.com and www.MichaelCrowderArt.com