When Laura Lit squeezes her eyes shut, a familiar yet whimsically strange world springs out of darkness. With a squiggle or a pop, her colorful abstractions hatch into existence – first in the artist’s head, and eventually in her East Austin studio. Some take wavy forms dotted with smooth bumps; others twist into optical illusions emphasized by shifting colors. As the internal designs become external works, Lit coaxes them to bloom flat on canvas, or wiggle their hairy way onto the floor.
“It’s like little beams with a little paint: A little thing will come in,” Lit says simply, closing her eyes briefly in demonstration as we walk through her studio. “What if you’re this color?” she asks the fledgling sculptural idea floating in her brain’s personal primordial goo. “What if you’re that size? What if you go like this instead of that?” She moves her hands to help me envision an S-shaped “this” or a more pretzel-esque “that.”
The polyglot artist couldn’t have envisioned this imaginative creation process when she was making photorealistic paintings. Over the past seven years, her practice has expanded into two- and three-dimensional forms, growing with the at once unexpected and assured essence of her work, which first resonated in the Austin art scene’s gallery spaces and now fills the walls and gardens of the city’s premier contemporary museum.
Four precisely strange architectural sculptures of Lit’s have lived at the Contemporary – Laguna Gloria since April, when the commissioned creations joined the outdoor sculpture garden as its first-ever multiwork exhibition through its HOST program. A few singular sculptures have joined the garden’s permanent collection on a temporary basis before, but this is the first time a series of works from one artist have become a part of its display. On Friday, Sept. 18, the museum’s second outpost, the Jones Center, will expand upon the exhibit with a series of large drawings and additional sculptures on display through Jan. 17.
On a platform in the center of Lit’s studio, a freestanding bench with the mystical poise of a horse-sized cat in repose hunches, nearly ready for its maiden voyage Downtown to the first-floor gallery space. All around it, surging out of the walls, the beings of the artist’s mind trace a practice of constant experimentation and incorporation of new materials. On the room’s southeastern corner, an early foray into three-dimensional work, titled Transfusion, draws viewers’ eyes into its lung-like shape, which seems to be in constant breath thanks to crisscrossing lines of colorful ombre. Moving clockwise around the room, the pieces take on more speculative elements and bolder forms, crawling from the frame to the floor.
“Personally, I’m always following and interested in artists who are willing to also push their own boundaries and to be brave and bold and try new disciplines and new media,” says sharon maidenberg, the Contemporary’s Ernest and Sarah Butler executive director and CEO. “To be willing to experiment with new materiality and give yourself more room to fail – not everyone is comfortable doing that. And I think Laura is pretty exceptional in that space.”
Like the innovative spark behind the pieces themselves, the expansive exhibit came about with a sprinkle of serendipity and a shared interest in exploration between the museum and the artist, which maidenberg describes as a “crescendo opportunity.” The HOST exhibition series, usually held exclusively on the first-floor gallery of the Jones Center, commissions new works from artists, giving the space and its team the opportunity to work closely with artists who are pushing their own boundaries “in a way where the museum can really support experimentation and the development of new work,” maidenberg explains.
Lit’s sculptures were already beginning to creep off the walls as assistant curators Rachel Eboh and Julie Le, who has since left the Austin institution, began to visit her studio over a year ago. A few of Lit’s creations were even making their way to gardens and patios. When the museum didn’t have room to present the HOST program Downtown for a stretch, an idea took shape to expand to the water-lined, walkable sculpture museum.
“It’s fun for us to play with our own systems and our own assumptions of how things work,” maidenberg says. Working with an artist operating constantly on the edge of their expertise, always engaged with learning, felt aligned with the museum’s own exploration. The multimedia artist’s precise handiwork adds a splash of color to Laguna Gloria’s greenery, and now brings its playful sincerity to HOST’s usual stomping grounds.
“[Her] 2D works are in such dialogue with her sculpture practice,” says Eboh. “There’s been such an evolution in her abstraction.” Across the museum’s two locations, visitors can now follow the amorphous through line stretching between Lit’s lively works. “Now we get to highlight the reciprocity between the drawings and the sculpture – how these forms live on a page and live out in space,” says Eboh.
Tracing her ever-expanding craftsmanship through the works in her studio, Lit’s refusal to settle into a routine is hard to ignore. Here – she gestures to Transfusion, an early foray into three-dimensional wall hangings – a foil snake covered in papier mâché clay creates a rounded dimension. Then, craving more “poofiness,” she added newspaper to her next work. That still didn’t quite create the plush dimension she was looking for, she tells me, so she leaned on her past experience in furniture restoration, using couch cushion foam to fill out the flesh-colored ellipsoid half-cylinders of Pearl and the pastel topographical layers of Motherload, which hang farther down on the wall.
“Then resin,” Lit says, pointing to Atomic, a worm’s interpretation of the letter M dotted with candy button-bright rounded extrusions. “Then learning how to dye my own resins and making those. Very satisfying,” she adds, miming the process of popping the dollops from their candy molds. Crumbcatcher, a hypnotic teardrop-shaped combination of these materials, has the ridges of a mollusk fossil and the title of a friendly fictional alien, and will join her Jones Center exhibit.
“I wouldn’t have known how to do this if I hadn’t taken the special effects course,” Lit says. “Pouring stuff together, making molds, how to – like the spikes on Ghost. I’ll show you.” We cross the room and bend down to peer inside a cabinet, where Lit pulls out neatly labeled bins filled with plaster-cast spikes, silicone molds, and plastic tidbits of various shapes and sizes.
The special effects course she’s talking about followed a BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design. Figurative work had long been Lit’s passion, driven by a love of anatomy and a perfectionist’s desire for accuracy. “Getting good at it was like a mission,” she says of her early practice. Abstraction, she remembers thinking then, was “for someone else.”
In a lost period of her early 20s, she followed her interest in makeup and her curiosity about practical film effects to the Vancouver Film School, then let that lead her to Los Angeles, where experience she’d picked up over the years in architectural and furniture restoration helped give her the confidence to blend new materials for practical and cosmetic effects. She eventually grew tired of contributing prosthetics, makeup, and effects to “making somebody else’s vision come true.” Pivoting and making the move to Austin, her 2017 solo exhibition of hyperrealistic portraits at Women & Their Work, “Where You End and I Begin,” bore the traces of inspiration picked up from the film world.
Shortly thereafter, Lit’s husband, Grackles songwriter and longtime Austin music staple Noah Lit, opened Batch Craft Beer & Kolaches on Manor with his brother and bandmate Josh. Offhandedly, Lit created a few paintings for the interior, thinking at the time: “I want [the] certain vibe on the inside of Batch to be comfy, groovy, warm, swoopy, psychedelic, bloopy blobs.” Instead of fixating on bakery- or brew-related subject matter, she translated that feeling into colorfully abstract works.
Phillip Niemeyer, director, curator, and designer at Northern-Southern gallery, remembers that first show at Women & Their Work – but it was the paintings at Batch he couldn’t look away from. “That doesn’t happen often in a coffee shop,” he chuckles, recalling the two asymmetrical paintings and the nearly spiritual presence he felt they emanated.
“They were graphic, they were minimal,” he recalls. They reminded him of the alien-yet-familiar works of Hilma af Klint – “They were very iconic.” He didn’t believe the server, at first, when he told them they were from the same artist whose photorealistic works were hanging in the nonprofit gallery. He called up Lit and asked to visit her studio.
“The way I started to understand her painting was that she was not creating abstractions; she was like an Audubon of the spirit,” says Niemeyer. “She was not letting the paint find out like some abstractionists do, or using some sort of systematic approach, like you would think a constructivist would, but rather trying to observe an inner world and record that inner world.”
The gallerist included a series of black-bordered shapes drawn from the subconscious in a duo show whose name, “After Images,” hearkened to Lit’s internal optical inspiration, then kept an eye on her work as she dabbled again in hyperrealistic paintings, showing her collection of lifelike sculptures as a part of a group show.
When the pandemic sent Lit’s young child home from school and filled the artist’s mind with anxious chaos, the process of creating those abstract figures began to fill a different, meditative role. At night in bed, trying to push out mortal stresses, she began intentionally drawing in the blank space behind her eyes.
“It’s time to relax and do your mind art. Mommy’s mind art time!”
Imitating her old internal mantra, Lit raises her voice to take on a touch of the shrill mania that characterized those initial quarantine days. When we laugh, there’s an audible relief that the pressure of that uncertain period is behind us.
“It’s meditation, but it’s also creative time,” she explains. The more time she spent developing shapes and creatures, flipping them around and changing their colors, the sort of Photoshop of her mind sharpened, letting her flick through a Rolodex of ideas to develop.
From this internalized spring of creation, she and Niemeyer launched the Fuzzy Forces drawing series, a weekly email missive of rigorously shaded colored pencil and marker creations that went on for nearly a year. The line-based organisms, interconnecting shapes, and intricate rainbow colorings that spilled onto the pages grew into later sculptural work and the larger drawings now hanging at the Jones Center.
Le, then piloting the Contemporary’s HOST series, was also at that early Women & Their Work show, and similarly found herself at the counter of Batch asking for the abstract artist showing there. She brought her colleague Eboh to Lit’s 2023 Northern-Southern show, “Others,” where the two marveled at the increasingly multidimensional wall hangings and her early freestanding structures.
“Seeing the everyday world anew through her forms – [it’s] like you’re seeing something mid-transformation,” she says.
Each piece feels familiar, recalling a rendering of an extinct invertebrate or a diagram of sacred anatomy – yet, in their abstraction, they also feel new and futuristic. The shapes carry the weight and significance of an amulet or specimen yet shimmy with whimsical light and color.
Lit’s process these days has very little to do with how inspiration and posing guided her figurative work and feels “so much more satisfying,” she says. Pulling out every tool – literal and figurative – she’s picked up from restoration, special effects, and her painting training seems to light up every corner of her brain, tapping a spring of endless questions that propel her to pick up new materials and techniques.
Her latest love is Pal Tiya, a bagged powder that becomes a weatherproof clay through kneading. The obscure material, typically used for hobbyist projects and Putt-Putt golf course obstacles, is a household name for those around Lit.
“They should totally sponsor her next project,” jokes Le, chuckling at the artist’s enthusiasm for the unusual medium. She’s become a regular in the brand’s customer service inbox, relishing their helpfulness and the malleable, paintable quality of the doughlike sculpting medium. “She’s been asking them all these questions, and I think she’s actually maybe the expert in Pal Tiya [now].”
“I just use it for whatever sculpture I make now, whether it’s inside or outside, just ‘cause I love it,” Lit says happily. “It’s very messy and time-consuming,” she admits, and the bigger projects can become physically taxing, but crucially, the forgiving mixture doesn’t require a kiln, allowing her to create in layers solo – with just a little help from time to time.
“Clayboy all-stars, we called ourselves,” Noah laughs, reminiscing about afternoons spent in his wife’s studio in the nine months leading up to her Laguna Gloria display. On a strictly planned schedule, Lit required literal extra hands to ready her materials. Her husband, and friend and fellow artist Louis Eastman, got to work playing patty-cake with balls of the doughlike substance before tossing the ready mixture into the expert’s palm.
“Every single part of the sculpture was her hands smoothing that out,” he says. The blobby, gray substance transforms from something you’d find at a pizza counter to a skillfully textured surface under the artist’s fastidious touch. Even being there for the process doesn’t dispel the awe the final product inspires for the musician: “When you see it, it doesn’t look like that.”
“She has such precision and skill for both her painting and her sculpting,” agrees Eboh. Thinking about the cat tower that secretly makes up the spine of Arpeggiator and the hobbyist materials she prefers, the curator notes that there’s a “garage logic” to Lit’s process.
“She’s really using such a variety of mixed media that’s coming from a really layered background,” she says. “She’s just created a very unique way of making works that are so polished at the end.”
The work, for those there to see it, stands out. Among similarly imaginative draftspeople and designers – like the Haas brothers, another Austin export – a solo artist whose fingerprints are on everything from the initial outline to the final brushstrokes is a rare beast.
“I love her elbow grease. I love that she is somebody that thinks with her hands,” echoes Niemeyer. The final project’s polished sheen is just one more layer of magic behind Lit’s works. “The conception comes to her in a second, but the labor that she puts into realizing these things feels like, to me, the labor that someone must do to conjure a saint.”
“She clocks in,” Noah affirms, with a touch less grandeur. “People say putting in the work, and she literally goes there at 9am and comes home at 5pm.”
Arpeggiator, a curvy coral comb critter whose colorful arms are at once intimidating and welcoming, gave Lit the most trouble in the studio. “The form was so complex and weird,” she sighs. From that cat tree scaffolding through the being’s wavelike extensions, the large sculpture pushed the precision-oriented creator to let go and embrace the structure that arose.
That wouldn’t be the end of her worries. “I put so much pressure on myself to make sure that the color was right because I was going to be so angry at myself if I put that much effort into the sculpting of it,” she says, exasperation still in her voice. The color did the trick, though – the fade from deep Mariana Trench blue to faded light wash denim, edged with a vibrant stroke of purpling red, gave the piece a narrative. “Then there’s an emotion, and it’s like a story because you’re gonna walk around it,” she explains.
Laguna Gloria’s greenery inherently shifts the interpretation of her works – as do the largely neutral-toned preexisting sculptures tucked within. Standing with the presence of an ancient deity teleported into science fiction, the blue-speckled Kyanos mimics the arches found elsewhere in the park, though its vibrant shade and tri-armed short stature suggest portal-like powers. Oracle, which overlooks the swampier sections of the museum, evokes a similar relationship between the human and the mystical.
Here, Lit’s creatures encounter the elements and the grounds’ preexisting animals. Big Drip greets visitors before the others in the long lawn at the museum’s entry. Its shape, when flipped upside down, resembles the titular drip, though you could argue for an exclamation point or a bubble-script letter, or an animal.
“At first we all said snail,” Eboh remembers the curator team thinking as they prepared to place the statues at Laguna Gloria. “[When] they were on-site, we started seeing peacock, and then the peacocks obviously saw that too.” The splashy birds, initially not pleased to have such colorful competition in their midst, flew atop cars and fanned out, showing off their feathers to the amorphous being’s Pal Tiya clay, steel, Styrofoam, foam board, and acrylic paint form. “Now they’re friends,” laughs Eboh. “I sometimes will send pictures to Laura of the peacocks snuggled next to the sculpture and taking naps.”
“When you’re doing commissions, you’re asking the first questions around what is this made of? How does it live in the world? How will it look a year from now?” Le explains. With her first large-scale outdoor sculptures now having lived through an Austin spring and summer, Lit had the unique opportunity to incorporate further questions into a new set of commissions for the Contemporary. In the Jones Center, the next elements of Lit’s exploration are already surfacing. “I love that she thinks about how our encounters can be added into the equation,” Le says.
The artist’s seat-ready bench in the first-floor gallery expands on these curiosities, and the surprises already gleaned from creating the works on display now at Laguna Gloria. Lit can’t seem to help herself from wanting to push her work further – chasing one question after another into new dimensions and surroundings. Ready to pounce like a cloud-formed sphinx, or some other unnamed chimera unique to Lit’s mythology, the bench beckons the gallery to step even further into her expanding world.
Visible from that unusual seat, the large framed works also capture Lit’s process in evolution, organic shapes stretching bigger than ever before into hieroglyphic, definition-defying figures that no doubt come from a similar planet and the same precise process.
Across two exhibit spaces, Lit both expands and reflects upon the abstractive practice she’s created over the past seven years. Weatherproofed shapes venture toward interaction at Laguna Gloria, while the expansive drawings at Jones Center tie back to the beginning of her artistic shift and promise more exploration from the artist to come.
“This ongoing exhibition series is very special to our organization,” Eboh says of the commission-driven HOST series. “It is a wonderful opportunity for artists, and I think Laura really answered that call in such a big way.”
Four Laura Lit sculptures are on display now through January 17 at Laguna Gloria. Her Jones Center exhibit opens September 18.
This article appears in September 18 • 2026.
