“The desert has always moved me. The wide-open spaces, the secret places, the animals and plants who thrive against all odds. It speaks to a tenacity we could all have more of.”
An equestrian, native Texan, and writer, Shannon spends her time building a homestead in west Texas and traveling the southwest deserts and international border as a woman on her own with horse and dogs. Her writings have been featured in state and local publications such as Texas Parks and Wildlife Magazine and the Cenizo Journal, as well as in Horse Trails of America, a national publication for equestrians. Her recent article on horseback riding Texas State Parks and finding healing along the way won first and second place with the Outdoor Writer’s Association of America and American Horse Publications in their 2024 and 2023 media awards, respectively.
She hopes to parlay her experiences into a book, or books, detailing her travels and giving voice to the thoughts many of us have but never say.
Shannon is a frequent horseback rider of both Big Bend National Park and Big Bend Ranch State Park, holds a bachelor’s degree in marketing from the McCombs School of Business at UT Austin, and is honored to be one of the 2025 Artists in Residence at Big Bend National Park.
May 19-May 31, 2025 Wildlife and Nature Photography
Rita Frey is a wildlife and landscape photographer based in Eldorado, TX. Born and raised in Texas, a lifetime of fascination with all things nature culminated in the pursuit of a degree in Wildlife and Fisheries Management from Texas Tech University. Drawing upon her education and enduring passion for the outdoors, she eventually began to explore wildlife photography as a way to learn and document local wildlife, seasonal patterns, and area landscapes. In time, photography would serve as the catalyst for trips all across the state — from the inky waterways of Caddo Lake, to the rugged wilds of the Devils River, to the top of Guadalupe Peak, and eventually to Big Bend. She can often be found exploring ranch pastures or wading through rivers, camera in hand.
Rita’s work has been utilized in various outdoor and conservation publications, by organizations, and in installations. She focuses on photographing wildlife in wild settings,without the use of bait or calls, and believes photographs should authentically reflect the challenges and conditions of the locale where moments are captured. The ultimate goal is to create images that evoke a sense of place, inspire curiosity, and cultivate respect for the natural world.
In addition to photography, Rita is an independent web developer and designer, and graphic designer. Her photographs often find their way into projects in the form of illustrative reference. In her free time, she enjoys gardening and exploring other artistic mediums including painting, embroidery, pyrography, and weaving with natural fibers.
Lorraine Bubar is a native of Los Angeles and studied at UCLA and Yale University and received a Masters in Art Education and a Teaching Credential from CSULA. Lorraine worked for many years in the animation industry, animating television commercials, special effects, and film titles. Her short-animated films showed at many international animation festivals. She taught animation at Santa Monica College and then taught drawing and painting to students from elementary to high school. At that time, Lorraine was also exhibiting her watercolor paintings, was the featured artist for a calendar published by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and illustrated a children's book, Lullaby, by Debbie Friedman. While traveling the world she realized that in numerous cultures, from Europe to Asia and Mexico, artisans create varied forms of papercuts.
Lorraine Bubar's current painterly papercuts reflect that heritage of papercutting. They are created from layers of handmade colored papers and are cut by hand with an x-acto knife. Her papercuts capture the diverse ecosystems where she has hiked and explored.
She has been honored to be an Artist-in-Residence at Denali, Zion, Petrified Forest, Lassen Volcanic, Capitol Reef, and Acadia National Parks. Bubar’s paper pieces have been exhibited in galleries locally and internationally, including Germany, Lithuania, Switzerland, Tasmania, Japan, and at the Shanghai International Paper Art Biennale.
Katie Martin Lightfoot is a Texas native with a deep love and appreciation for nature that sparked as a child through backyard explorations and family camping trips to Texas State Parks. As a lifelong artist, she has explored various mediums of expression starting from a young age into adulthood. In 2022, She took her first pottery class.
Clay has gifted her with the opportunity to feel rooted to the land while honoring the human experience. This connection is the cornerstone of her art practice. Katie’s work celebrates the intersection of nature and humanity. She is a hand building ceramic artist that specializes in slab, coil, and sculptural pottery. She follows her clay goods along their journeys from starting as a lump of clay to a fired, finished product. Through her work, she seeks to evoke feelings of home, togetherness, and joy.
An advocate by day, Katie holds two Masters degrees in policy and social work from the University of Texas at Austin. She and her husband Matt own Martfoot Made, a small batch ceramics studio in Austin, Texas. She shows her work around Central Texas and teaches handbuilding pottery classes to kids and adults in her community. Since 2017, Katie and Matt have made a yearly pilgrimage to Big Bend National Park - an inspiration for many of her pieces. Katie is a self-proclaimed adventurous homebody. She enjoys exploring public lands, traveling, cooking, caring for native plants and creatures in her garden, and being at home with her husband, three cats, and pup.
Landry McMeans is a full time artist based in Austin, TX with a passion for color and the American West. She creates limited edition stencil paintings with a sophisticated, muted, desert color palette. She brings to life a sunbleached dreamworld of iconic southwest landscapes and its flora and fauna with large scale, lifesize works. Her art is transportive and balances a warm, organic tone with crisp, clean lines, and a graphic pop aesthetic.
In her own words “Nature, largely the desert, is my muse. I have an obsession with color relationships, and love the challenge of simplifying an image into its most essential and beautiful parts. I extract what's necessary, and play with color pallets. I enlarge and amplify what is normally small and overlooked to create a powerful, immersive, and serene experience.”
Website: www.landrymcmeans.com
Lauren Cason
Lauren Cason
July 14-July 31 Gouache, Interactive Media
Lauren Cason is a painter and interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of history, storytelling, and interactive media. Rooted in traditional mediums including gouache, her work extends beyond painting into interactive experiences, blending analog and digital tools to bring history to life.
Her work has been exhibited at venues including Currents New Media Festival, and she has spoken about interactive art at places like MIT and BAFTA. With a background in creative technology, Lauren has worked on award-winning projects, including Monument Valley 2, and continues to integrate emerging mediums with traditional craft to explore how we engage with history through both physical and digital spaces.
July 1-July 13, 2024
Painting/Oils, Illustration/Graphite, Charcoal, Pastels, and Ink
Ben Congdon is a wildlife and landscape artist living and working just north of Austin. His journey into fine art began at an early age with a love of the outdoors, especially fishing and hiking. He earned a degree in illustration and worked as a graphic designer for several years before deciding to combine art with his love of nature. He began studying painting technique and color theory while gaining experience in oils. In time, Ben had pieces displayed in galleries around Texas, and his work appeared in outdoor magazines and hunting publications.
It was at this time that Ben first discovered Big Bend National Park, and he fell in love with the rugged beauty and otherworldly appearance of the landscape. He set out to recreate the unique flora and fauna in a series of illustrations and paintings, and the park has become the primary focus of his work. Today, in addition to fine art, Ben also teaches his craft to secondary students at Summit Christian Academy in Cedar Park. He loves to help others on their own artistic journey, and he believes that no matter the starting point, everyone can learn and produce beautiful work. Website: www.bcongdon.com
Emma C. Schmidt
July 15-July 27, 2024 Cartography
Emma Schmidt is a native Texan artist who uses her deep love of nature to inspire hand drawn designs telling meaningful stories. Building on her background in painting from Savannah College of Art & Design, she’s grown her art practice through a range of mediums including intricately inked maps, illustrations, watercolors and large-scale painted murals. Cartography is her primary medium; creating maps that tell stories, give direction and chart memories.
In recent years, most of Emma’s maps have focused on capturing the natural world, with a range of subjects including bird migrations flyways, state aquifers and springs, hiking trail experiences, and native species illustrations. Emma approaches her work as an explorer and amateur botanist, conducting research hikes and site visits in order to create artwork that thoughtfully reflects the environment she is depicting.
Emma’s home and studio are rooted in Austin, Texas, where she can be found baking, gardening, or hiking the greenbelt trails. Over the past 10 years, Emma is honored to have collaborated on projects with Great Springs Project, The Contemporary Austin, Faherty, lululemon, Deep in the Heart, and many more. Website: www.emmacschmidt.com
Colleen O’Brien
July 29-August 10, 2024 Painting
Colleen O'Brien, b. 1990, is an earth artist working with natural pigments and clay. Colleen's current research/work explores geomorphology and time. She works out in the field using the earth’s topography to physically record the land in both her painting and ceramic practices. She seeks out exposed rock beds and boulders and uses soil from the site to make surface recordings of the earth on canvas. She moves natural pigment, water, and pastel through the erosion path and over the texture of the rock. The result is a record of place and time. Her ceramic practice is similar as she casts clay vessels from erosion pathways and natural pools.
She earned her BFA from Texas Tech University in 2014. Since 2012, Colleen has participated in over 9 solo shows in addition to 15 group and juried shows. Her work is in several private and corporate collections throughout the US with a heavy collector base in the Southwest. From December 2013 to December 2014 she was an artist in residence for the Charles Adams Studio Project in Lubbock, Texas. In addition, she participated in the 2012 field season of Land Arts of the American West. In 2022, Colleen participated in the Willow House Artist Residency in Terlingua, Texas as well as the Object Hotel Artist Residency in Bisbee, Arizona. Website: www.colleenroseobrien.com
Tim Cooper
August 12-August 24, 2024 Photography
My life-passion has been photography since my first Brownie box camera in 1963, inspired by my grandfather, Peter Koch, and magnified by my desire to please. Peter Koch was larger than life and ticked all my boxes. Adventurer, natural scientist, photographer, public speaker and strong advocate for the Big Bend country and conservation of natural resources. The highlight of our summer vacation was almost always the week we would spend in Alpine and the day-long journeys that he and I would take into the landscape to photograph.
In 1980s my photographs achieve some acclaim. I exhibited at the prestigious Juried Art shows at the Westheimer Arts Festival and Houston International Festival. My works were hung in local galleries including the O’Kane Gallery at the University of Houston. My proudest achievement was a solo exhibition at the Big Bend Museum at Sul Ross in Alpine, 1989. Work-life balance, though, had become an issue, with too much time spent working in the hospital or dark room for the Alpine exhibition proved that the time commitment required was growing beyond what I could commit with a growing family.
With the maturation of digital cameras and postprocessing, exercising my passion again became viable. I grew adept at using this media and the capabilities of Photoshop and then Lightroom. I privately printed several Coffee-Table books as gifts and continued making photographs and improving my craft.
I specialize in landscape photography with the goal of applying a sense of design and color to express the textures and richness of the landscape. I also enjoy focusing on the smaller elements of nature, the natural motion of water and swaying of trees and wildflowers. Website: TimCooperPhotographs.com
Chris Ruggia
August 26-September 7, 2024 Painting, cartoonist, illustrator
Chris Ruggia is a cartoonist and painter whose work focuses on wildlife and wildlife research. Though trained as a painter, the focus on animals in his work began in the early 2000s with a series of web and print comics titled “Jack: Adventures in Texas’ Big Bend”.
A broad comedy adventure story including jackrabbits, kangaroo rats, kit foxes, coyotes, badgers, earless lizards, burrowing owls, grasshopper mice and more, the comic’s characters were informed by extensive research, including interviews with biologists at Sul Ross State University (SRSU), The Nature Conservancy and Big Bend National Park.
After completing the comic, Chris gradually returned to painting. He is currently engaged in an extended series of paintings, cartoons and books exploring the Big Bend region’s wildlife through the lens of current research, working with scientists to learn about the animals as well as about the questions we are trying to answer about them, how we select those questions, and why.
SRSU’s Borderlands Research Institute has been a helpful and encouraging partner in this ongoing project.
Chris shares an art and graphic design studio with his wife Ellen. They have lived and worked in Alpine since 1994, after receiving their undergraduate degrees in Studio Art from the University of Texas at Austin.
In acknowledgment of this art residency, Chris is offering his most recent book on black bears in the Big Bend region as a free digital download at his website: chrisruggia.com
Allie Lingren
September 16-September 28, 2024 Musician, Composer
Alistair Lingren (they/them) is a multi-instrumentalist and composer based in Austin, TX. Allie’s solo output is split between two projects: Lingren and gathered waves. Lingren is a contemplative folk/rock songwriting endeavor, and gathered waves tends more toward instrumental loops, field recordings, and improvisation. While the approach and sonic palette may vary, the catalyst of creation is consistent: music is a way to process and amplify emotion.
Allie’s first “composition” was a series of numbers corresponding to labeled keys on their mom’s upright piano, scrawled onto a piece of paper in little kid handwriting. They began playing trombone in sixth grade, and guitar followed soon after. They started writing songs with words in middle school, and eventually they came to rely on songwriting as a vital method by which to process what they were feeling. Allie studied composition and trombone performance at Southwestern University, and they graduated in 2015 with a B.A. in Music. They earned a Recording Arts Certificate from MediaTech Institute in 2016.
Allie’s field recording practice evolved from a habit of sitting still and listening. They grew up in a small town on the outskirts of Austin, and as a child, they explored forests of oak and juniper. They observed the creeks, the rocks, the fungi growing from the trees, the insects, the tadpoles in the pond, the tracks along the water’s edge. They delighted in the natural world. While field recording is the newest element to be woven into Allie’s compositions, its roots predate their knowledge of scales and chord shapes, back to the early days of running around outside with no objective but to be.
