Raul De Lara immigrated from Mexico to the United States at the age of 12 and has been a DACA recipient since 2012. Growing up in Texas as a non-English speaker, feeling neither from here nor there, his work now reflects on ideas of nationality, language barriers, body language and the sense of touch. His sculptures explore how stories, folklore, and rituals can be silently communicated through inanimate objects, tools, and foreign environments. De Lara often works with wood, a material that always shows the passing of time on its skin. His aesthetics and materials are inspired by the shared backyard between the United States and Mexico. 

De Lara received his MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University and a BFA from the University of Texas at Austin. He has been awarded the Ox-Bow School of Art Fellowship, a Chicago Artists Coalition HATCH Residency, the International Sculpture Center Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award and he recently completed his fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

Virginia Lee Montgomery (VLM) is a filmmaker, sculptor, and facilitator working between Austin, Texas and New York, NY, USA. She received her BFA from The University of Texas at Austin in 2008 and her MFA from Yale University in Sculpture in 2016. Her artwork is a research practice of feminist metaphysics. VLM interrogates the complex relationship between physical and psychic structures. VLM also works as a professional scribe, a Graphic Facilitator. In her artwork, VLM turns her professional skill-set, "mind map scribing", inwards to render the contours of her subconscious and open portals into unknown psychic realms. She has had solo exhibitions with New Museum (NY), Times Square Arts (NY), Museum Folkwang (Germany), Wright Lab at Yale University (CT), The Lawndale Art Center (TX), False Flag (NY), and Hesse Flatow (NY). She has exhibited internationally at institutions including Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Denmark), SculptureCenter (NY), La Panacée-MoCo (France), The Hessel Museum at Bard College (NY), The Banff Centre (Canada), Socrates Sculpture Park (NY), The Shaker Museum (NY), and The Menil Collection (TX), among others.

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Raul de Lara

Virginia Lee Montgomery