Congregate
featuring work by Skip Hill, Colby Deal, & Ángel Faz
June 4 thru July 30, 2022
In this first year, we aim for each of our projects to embody Kinfolk House’s core values. Our first project, Welcome, featuring works by founders Sedrick and Letitia Huckaby, served to ground the space in family, tradition, and legacy. Following in the spirit of Hallie Beatrice Carpenter, Kinfolk House is deeply committed to being a welcoming space for all and bringing people together. In Congregate, we aim to investigate the complexity of community, culture, and isolation.
In March 2020, the world was thrown into a global pandemic which resulted in the shutting down of workspaces and gathering places sending many into isolation as we hunkered down for an unknown amount of time to keep each other and ourselves safe. As the pandemic wore on, people stayed connected, reconnected, and made new connections through technology and social media. While COVID-19 still poses a threat, we are finding ways to safely be together in-person once more.
Congregate features work by Skip Hill, Colby Deal, and Ángel Faz. Reflecting on the last two years, some questions these artists consider through this project are:
What makes a community? Is it bound by physical borders, unique experiences, common values?
What happens when community is lost, removed, or abandoned?
What are the joys and the struggles of being a part of a community and/or trying to keep one together?
How might being a part of a community inform or change who we are as individuals?
Featured Artists:
Skip Hill is a mixed-media artist who was born on Padre Island, Texas and currently lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Hill’s art focuses on the beauty of composition, the exuberance of process, on positive and negative space, on contrasts of mood, colors and flowing line work. Some of the most captivating parts of his mixed-media drawings are in the peripheral details sourced from Art History, elements of folk art, tattoo-like expressive patterning, looping graphic lines, kinetic scribbling, Asian calligraphy, Pop culture references and African motifs.
Hill has participated in several museum group shows and curated and created an installation for the exhibition Casting Stones at the Fred Jones Museum of Art. He was commissioned by the Groot Hontschoten Gardens Foundation in The Netherlands to create murals. His art is found in public and private collections throughout the United States, in the U.K., France, The Netherlands, Colombia, and Brazil.
Colby Deal is a photographic artist born and raised in Houston, Texas. He received his Bachelors of Fine Arts in Photography from the University of Houston. Within his practice he explores the culmination of elements of the psychological environment as well as the physical. He shows the dynamic range of family, community and the individual by combining street photography and portraiture to capture vibrant communities.
Recently, he has incorporated the mediums of sculpture and public art as a means of preserving cultural characteristics that are being erased and positively influencing his community and others alike. Deal is an alumni of Project Row Houses residency, Red Line Contemporary Art Center residency in Denver, Colorado and in 2020, was awarded an exhibition at the Houston Museum of African American Culture.
Ángel Faz is a multi-disciplinary artist living in Dallas’ Oak Cliff neighborhood. Their work focuses on art interventions and the reclamation of public space. Their studio practice of focus has involved relief printmaking, monotypes, and silkscreen for over twenty years. In May 2018, they completed a six-week residency in Puebla, Mexico, where they spent time honing their printmaking technique, researching ancestral roots, colonization, and the stories accompanying them.
Faz has achieved international recognition for their Collective Care hand-carved print upon being selected for Amplifier’s 2020 Global Call for Art. They have exhibited nationally at the Rising Star 2018 showcase at the Turner House, Kirk Hopper Fine Art in Dallas, and other galleries. Collective Care was recently included in the Prints & Photographs Division Online Catalog at the Library of Congress to preserve this historic moment in our country. Recently, Faz was a part of the inaugural Women & Their Work exhibition curated by Vicki Meek.
