Cisco Willison, Sarah Fedak, George Ann Johnson
November 20, 2021 - January 2022
@401 S. Austin Street
This year’s Standing Out exhibition features Merit Artists Sarah Fedak, George Ann Johnson, and Cisco Willison, selected at the 2020 Currents show by juror Caroline Crockett Kneese, a Dallas-born artist and founder of Cerulean Gallery located in Dallas and Amarillo, Texas.
STANDING OUT 2021 MERIT ARTISTS
Sarah Fedak
Fedak is an award-winning artist whose interest in mixed media art began in 1997 with a collage workshop in Costa Rica. After returning to Houston, she spent 11 years at the Glassell School of Art, further developing her artistic prowess in collage, drawing, and painting. The focus of Fedak’s artwork has long been the architecture of nature and environmental awareness. Her move to Port Aransas in 2009 even inspired her to begin creating a series of collaged wall-dependent sculptures depicting beach sand dunes, abstractly created by cut and then stained wood pieces, with unaltered, reclaimed beach plastic used to represent the white, yellow, orange, and purple flowers that create anti-erosion protection on the dunes. Fedak has been a member artist of K Space Contemporary in Corpus Christi and Rockport Center for the Arts, where she was honored as a merit artist in 2019 and 2021.
George Ann Johnson
An active professional artist for more than 30 years, George Ann Johnson’s unique and detailed wildlife portraiture in scratchboard is becoming highly recognized. Having a strong natural talent, she initially began her career painting professional racehorses to help support her own horse business, which eventually led her into starting her own commercial art company. After several years of commercial art, she began to focus on fine art, attending the Danforth Museum of Fine Art near Boston and in the years since, she has focused on scratchboard medium, enabling her to capture the level of detail required to transfer the natural beauty of the animal. As a finalist in numerous competitions, her art is commonly shown in The Artist’s and Southwest Art magazines, with her current work published in Strokes of Genius 10.
Cisco Willison
Frances “Cisco” Willison began pursuing art as a child; drawing, painting, and taking classes throughout her early education. Although her professional path was that of a civil engineer for more than 30 years, she continued to develop her artistic capabilities, taking classes at Glassell School of Art after retiring. Now living in Rockport, Willison finds inspiration from nature with much of her work focused on the Texas Gulf Coast. She utilizes a serious approach to produce art realism that provokes audience reflection, whether back to childhood memories or personal loss, reminding us of the joy and pain we experience in simply living. Willison primarily works in watercolor and charcoal, but also dabbles in other art forms, such as ceramics, printmaking, and stained glass.