Making Their “MARK” 

“MARK” at Women & Their Work offers a fairly straightforward premise: a group exhibition oriented around drawing as a “central mode of expression.” It acts as a continuation of the series launched with 2023’s “Clay Matters” and replicated for 2025’s “Form Works” – both also were group exhibitions that found anchor points in a specific medium, both expressed verbatim and extrapolated beyond the understood form. For audiences familiar with those previous exhibitions, a precedent has certainly been set. But for those new to the space, or anyone perhaps simply looking to better acquaint themselves with contemporary Texas-based artists, “MARK” enjoyably stands alone. 

Artists were selected from an open call that netted thousands of submissions that were whittled down to 27. In discussion with Gallery Director Jordan Nelsen, she remarked that the curatorial conversations extended well beyond many artists’ submitted pieces, leading several contributors to bring in additional or previously shown works to better complement the show’s mark-making focus. In her words, the overall size of the exhibition was “ambitious.” 

And ambitious it is. The defined gallery spaces are flanked by two large installations while also containing 34 additional pieces and also two site-specific installations. On first glance, it’s abundantly evident that the curatorial lens for the show is reliant on traditional pen or pencil markings, and that literal interpretation can be found throughout, like the delicate looping strokes of graphite on porcelain tiles for Jo Kim’s Soft Sound I and Soft Sound II or the recontextualized calligraphy-meets-Möbius-sculpture in A Sadness I Can’t Escape from Han Zhang. But when the tool leaves the page, the effect feels jarring and upends the theme so strikingly, and so often, that it begs the audience to ask: Is this a new interpretation of mark-making or art that is bending to meet a motif? 

While viewing “MARK,” I was lucky enough to have the gallery to myself, short of a few small groups trickling in and out on a Thursday morning. And it’s in the details – minute or overt as they may be – that the exhibition excels. Studying the richly intricate process of Han Zhang’s 象 Xiàng is a delight. Ink dollops, in varying heights, spread throughout 625 ceramic bowls arranged in a grid on the gallery’s floor come together to form the Chinese character for 象 (Xiàng). This can translate into several meanings, including “elephant,” “image,” and “imagination,” and its multiple definitions are linked to the migration of elephants from central China over the centuries. Contemporary Chinese populations were forced to piece together – often quite literally, through bone artifacts – their understanding of these majestic, but no longer physically present, creatures. Drawing from both pointillism and digital pixel art, 象 Xiàng is an exposition not just in sculpture, but in language, pressing audiences to consider communication beyond symbols but laden with the context of stories, history, and memory. 

Mery Godigna Collet’s One Line a Day creates a similar distortion of the exhibition’s theme. The piece portrays a singular line drawn on 365 individual pages, bundled in twelve stacks (each representing a calendar month in chronological order), and affixed to the wall with a nail. The lines correspond with a matrix defined by the artist, cataloging the length and intimacy of her social interactions across a year. Hazy shadows of lines from days deeper into the month peek through the primary page, and the artist’s dedication offers its own source of interest alongside the physical manifestation of the work.

There are obvious standouts among the artists who were selected for their more overt relationship with mark-making, like Ami Mehta’s Like Breath Held and Until It Lets Me Go. Mehta works in mixed media, melding hand-carved block prints with fabrics, stitching, and embroidery, set against dreamy colored pencil sketches. Both pieces in this series were crafted in response to her father’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis, and each piece depicts vignettes of everyday life, designed to serve as both wayfinding and preservation for her father, as memory becomes more elusive. Dan Jian’s From the Flower to the Footfall embraces a similar sense of surrealism, collaging images in liquid graphite to depict fractured pastoral landscapes, suspended limbs, and disoriented structures. 

Within “MARK,” audiences can find riveting discussions on parenthood, identity, memory, and immigration – not as a result of their shared medium, but because of their shared vibrancy. The exhibit is at its strongest when it eschews its curatorial obligation to form, and sidesteps its need for cohesion. What audiences should instead take from it is an appreciation for the vast richness of talent in the Lone Star State, and a better understanding of the dynamic, conflicting complexities of contemporary life.

This article appears in June 5 • 2026.