As Vernon Fisher has attained international fame as an artist, two elements have been constant in his work over the years—blackboard paintings and text. Now, however, reaching his late 50s, Fisher desires more spontaneity in his art, more immediacy from initial concept to final realization. In Fisher's new body of work, he reveals both the complex process of his thinking and the personal anxiety of its making. Like his previous work, it transports us on an episodic journey that confronts the sublime and scientific, the rational and romantic. But now the work is both more staunchly real and yet ever more fragile and tenuous. To achieve this new attitude, Fisher fundamentally altered his working process. Instead of creating blackboard paintings with oil-based blackboard slating on masonite and wooden structures (as in Texas Blue and Texas Red), he discovered an acrylic paint that would produce the same faux blackboard effects. The artist has also recently produced a group of modestly scaled paintings. The "zombies," as Fisher calls them, seem to be abstract paintings, but are they? Compositionally, they consist of two horizontal fields, one above the other, and Fisher's reference to Rothko and the sublime is evident. However, they are also reminiscent of stark desert landscapes with a clear horizon line. He has also meticulously crafted cast epoxy flies, each with a unique, hand-painted body and personality to match. Using them to continue his probe into the nature of painting today, Fisher's abstract paintings come "alive" when the flies alight on them or their surrounding walls. For the artist, they draw attention to the conditionality of art and art-making—the critical nature of time and place.

John Hernandez' art is a reflection of both his Hispanic heritage and popular American culture. His bold and aggressive mythology of characters spring from sources such as horror movies, cartoons, and comic books. Like his antecedents Wesselmann, Rosenquist, and Lichtenstein, Hernandez also mixes everyday popular imagery with "high" art. The artist skillfully hides his emotions behind his cast of characters, which are not as light-hearted as they may first appear.

Hernandez' work is composed of wooden panels, cut out to represent figures or objects, and then painted by hand or airbrushed with meticulous detail. Big Daddy Dream Glass (1983) from the museum's permanent collection is a low-relief wall sculpture consisting of three parts. It combines painted and shaped wood images taken from a variety of popular sources including comic books, juke boxes, pinball machines, and hot rod magazines. His works often begin from a single idea but when completed include "everything that comes to mind" as a result of the initial idea. Hernandez views it as no small task to make a cartoon look convincing in the context of formal art and expects his work "to create a mirror into the fun house."

Celia Munoz creates narrative, somewhat conceptual, photography-based multimedia work that is accomplished, distinctly personal, and very bicultural.

"Once, I thought being a Catholic Chicana from El Paso were three strikes against me. Now, that is precisely where I draw my material,"

But unlike other Mexican-American artists who have recently gained national attention, Munoz adapted her lessons from the past—and from her own past—in a singularly ironic style. She didn't make altars or folk images, though she often incorporated those elements into her work. She used her past, but looked at it through a microscope, always maintaining distance. As such, her work is more like the narrative genre of Vernon Fisher.

Ella y El (1988), also in TMA's permanent collection, expands on her formula of combining photographs and text. This piece also features found objects. Ella y El is a cabinet, divided in half between boys' things—pen knives, little pocket treasures—and girls' things—ribbons, beads and milagros, and hearts. The story is one of romance, telling of a couple with different interests who meet.

Alongside was more recent work by Ms. Munoz which deals with the Row House Project in Houston. This city-funded effort provides housing, mentoring, and infant care services for selected young mothers in Houston's Third Ward. A series of photographic diptychs portrays the emotions felt by these women as they enter and later emerge from the experience.

Suzanne Paquette uses simple materials, primarily wood, to create otherworldly images. From sunspots to spiraling galaxies, the rings of Saturn to streaking comets, she explores the wonders of outer space in her meticulously crafted paintings and sculpture. Paquette became interested in the cosmos as a child when her scientist father spent family vacations visiting ancient astronomical observatories. Another image that appears frequently in her work is the cityscape, which is the subject of Enshroud (1992) from the museum's permanent collection. Ms. Paquette states,

"I find cities very interesting visually. This might be because I grew up in such wilderness areas that I can look at them freshly. They seem like giant sculptures to me, and I find them particularly impressive at night. I also see these cities as a living organism that is rooted in the earth growing up into the atmosphere. That balance between man-made and more organic and primal forces really interests me and is at the heart of these works."