Latina Artists Take Texas Culture to New York City
Marta Sánchez, “Ms. Kittie’s Still Life, 2015.” Courtesy of Ruiz-Healy Art.
The Ruiz-Healy Art Gallery in New York City presents Vast and Varied: Texan Women Painters, a group exhibition that includes works by Marta Sánchez , Eva Marengo Sánchez , and Ethel Shipton. The exhibit will be on view at the gallery from June 12 to August 15, 2025. Women Painters tackles the Latina cultural milieu through themes of cityscapes, motherhood, mementos, and domesticity.
Marta Sánchez visiting the Romo Home in San Antonio. Photo by Ricardo Romo.
Marta Sánchez has been an influential figure in Chicano/a and Latina art since her inclusion in the Mira! show in 1984, the first national Chicano/Latino art exhibition in America.
Born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, Sánchez has been painting and teaching art in Pennsylvania for the past 30 years. She constructs a cultural identity portrait by merging everyday life scenes with folkloric expression. Sánchez approaches her artistic life with the idea of “sharing art, history, and activism.”
Eva Marengo Sánchez, “Highway Esperanza.” Photo courtesy of the artist and Ruiz-Healy Art.
Sánchez’ love of art began at age five when an aunt bought her an art print from a street vendor. Early in life she also collected and read comic books which led her to begin teaching herself the art of drawing. Her appreciation of art grew as she ventured downtown on the city bus by herself at age nine to browse through the art bookshelves of the San Antonio Public Library.
Sánchez earned her BFA in Art Education from the University of Texas at Austin in 1982 and later an MFA in Painting from the Philadelphia Tyler School of Art at Temple University. Her time in Austin was formative–she was introduced to the Chicano Movement through fellow artist Santa Barraza and began to see art as a form of social activism.
Eva Marengo Sánchez, urban murals series. Photo by Ricardo Romo.
To find her voice as an artist, Sánchez gained inspiration from Austin’s many exhibitions, plays, and jazz sessions. Sánchez wrote: “My work slowly turned from being purely artistic to becoming art that served a purpose as I evolved from being a student, to an artist, to a Chicana artist.”
Eva Marengo Sánchez, “No, I can fix it! To: Tia Lupe.” Courtesy of Ruiz-Healy Art.
A significant amount of Sánchez’ work is deeply influenced by traditional Mexican folk art, and she is one of the leading Chicana artists engaged in retablo paintings and ex-votos, the small devotional paintings on tin that honor saints and express gratitude or petitions in Mexican Catholic tradition. She is also inspired by contemporary social issues and uses her art to reflect on both her heritage and present-day concerns.
Sánchez’ artistic practice includes linocuts, monotypes, and works on aluminum or tin, often exploring themes of migration, community, and memory. Notably, she has created a series of prints and paintings focused on the San Antonio train yards near her childhood home, examining the role of trains in Mexican migration and the city’s history. She has collaborated with other artists and poets, including a project with Chicana poet Norma E. Cantú that resulted in the book Transcendental Train Yards (Wings Press, 2013).
Sánchez has lived in Pennsylvania for the past three decades. Nonetheless, she remains deeply connected to her Texas roots and frequently references her childhood and Chicana identity in her work.
Ethel Shipton at the San Antonio Convention Center. Photo by Ricardo Romo. Shipton photo by Steve Bennett.
Another San Antonio artist, Eva Marengo Sánchez, uses her art to brilliantly capture the state of mind, color, and flavor of her hometown. She has been featured in stories by Texas Public Radio and Texas Monthly magazine. Sánchez paints canvases in her studio, images on concrete highway pillars, and murals on tall buildings. She is a rising star in the Latino art scene.
Following her graduation from a small liberal arts college in Richmond, Virginia, Sánchez began an internship with Andy and Yvette Benavides at their San Antonio South Flores frame shop in 2013. The following year, Sánchez traveled to Mexico City where she worked on her Spanish and studied Meso-American art and architecture. Her interest in the art of the great Mexican muralists grew as she visited museums and saw the best of Mexican art in public buildings.
Ethel Shipton, “Where are we going?” Courtesy of Ruiz-Healy Art.
Eva left Mexico with a strong desire to devote herself fulltime to painting. Eager to strengthen her artistic skills, she enrolled in several art classes at San Antonio College. At the same time she developed a deep interest in the color and texture of Mexican food which led her to painting pan dulce, tacos, and frutas frescas commonly found in Mexican restaurants and bakeries on the Westside of San Antonio. Sánchez’ murals of pan dulce [Mexican sweet bread] at the San Antonio International Airport and on downtown highway columns adjacent to the city’s Mexican Mercado have contributed to her reputation as a realistic still life painter.
A show at the Presa House Gallery in 2019 curated by Rigo Luna helped “jump start” her career. More recently Sánchez participated in the “Soy de Tejas” show in San Antonio and Fort Worth, Texas. Several years ago when Sánchez was a participating artist in virtual discussions of contemporary art at the McNay Museum in San Antonio, Harriett and I heard her describe her use of still life and food as a way of talking about cultural identity.
Ethel Shipton, “Where are we going II?” Courtesy of Ruiz-Healy Art. Photo by Ricardo Romo.
Eva’s work in the Ruiz Healy exhibit presents on canvas her realistic “still life portraits” of seemingly mundane subjects. The oil on canvas painting titled “No, I can fix it! To: Tia Lupe” is an excellent example of ordinary objects in life that capture her attention. Ruiz Healy noted, “Sánchez explores the complexities of grief, guilt, and regret that arise from attachment to an inanimate object. She delves into the intersection of longing, hope, love, and nostalgia, exploring deep sentimental ties to the ordinary.”
A third artist in the NY show, Ethel Shipton, grew up in the borderland community of Laredo, Texas during a time when the border was more open and movement back and forth across the international bridge over the Rio Grande was more fluid. The border influenced her interest in artistic endeavors. She told the San Antonio Current that her first exposure to art, in many ways, was walking through the markets in Nuevo Laredo looking at all the handmade objects, from metals, to ceramics, to glass works, to textiles, and becoming aware of the changing of the objects from season to season.
Shipton left Laredo to attend the University of Texas in Austin where she developed a deeper interest in art. After graduating with a Bachelor of Art degree, she became a full time photographer at the Texas State Capitol. She has fond memories of photographing Texas Governor Ann Richards and Texas Senator and U.S. Congresswoman Barbara Jordan.
A move to Mexico City in 1990 sealed Shipton’s passion for art. In Mexico City she lived in an art colony in the very center of town, several blocks from the famed Plaza Major. She stayed two years and returned to Austin
Marta Sánchez, “Rome 1982.” Courtesy of Ruiz-Healy Art.
in 1992. Harriett and I met her during her photography years after her return to Austin, but we were not familiar with her art work.
Shipton’s art career began to evolve after she moved to San Antonio in the mid-nineties. She rented a house in the famed “Compound” owned by patron of the arts Mike Casey, near Blue Star, an emerging art complex. She continued her photography work while developing a deep interest in canvas painting. At the Compound, she established a close friendship with well-known San Antonio artist Chuck Ramirez. One of the great features of living in Southtown was its proximity to Blue Star where she rented a studio for $50 a month.
Curator and gallery owner Dr. Patricia Ruiz-Healy describes Shipton’s conceptual practice as encompassing “a variety of expressions” including text, and notes that her work centers on “urban scenes, language, and attempts to process information.” A Glasstire reviewer explained how Shipton’s obsession with signs and signals—like those found on highways or in city streets—”becomes central to her work, transforming everyday objects into artistic statements that prompt deeper reflection on meaning and perception.”
The experience of urban environments—specifically those shaped by the fluidity of the U.S.-Mexico border—is a recurring artistic device in Shipton’s work. Her art frequently draws attention to the ways language and
information shape our understanding of the world. In her painting “Where are going?” in the Ruiz-Healy exhibit, Shipton incorporates text, signage, and symbols. One sign reads “Rough Road” while two other signs warn “Street Not Thru” and “Detour.” In addition, Shipton added the words “Donde Vamos?” [Where are we going] and “Chaos.”
Marta Sánchez, “Sunday Tea.” Courtesy of Ruiz-Healy Art.
The local arts newspaper SA Current further noted that Shipton’s use of text and typography in prints emphasizes her approach as both conceptually driven and rooted in the bare-bones presentation of language. A companion oil painting in the New York exhibit has a similar question “Where are we going?” but below the highway overpass, she places several tents similar to those used by homeless individuals. The lower highway leads to “Chaos,” a word Shipton repeats three times in the painting. The artist wants to engage viewers and knows that they will likely have ample questions about the objects and meanings of texts embedded in and near her highway paintings.
The Vast and Varied: Texas Women Painters exhibit will introduce East Coast viewers to a complexity of South Texas and Borderland culture that is definitively vast and varied and very exciting to experience through the eyes of these Latina artists.
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Copyright 2025 by Ricardo Romo. All photo credits as noted above.