Casa Daphne’s intimate gallery was the perfect setting to showcase the work of Daphne Art Foundation’s seven 2026 Artist-in-Residence (AiR). An exhibition of their work opened September 18 and continued on exhibit through October 30.
The seven Laredo artists are Paulina Aceves, Luis Coss, Konan Martinez, and Oscar D. Gomez, who worked from studio spaces at the Pan American Courts Arts Complex; and Jacob Cardenas (Austin), Clarissa Martinez (Brownsville), and Carla Santillana (San Antonio).
The AiR 2026 cohort brought together artists working in painting, textiles, storytelling, illustration, digital media, animation, and interdisciplinary practices, as they explored themes of memory, identity, border life, family, place, culture, and transformation.
Jesse Shaw, printmaker and Texas A&M International University (TAMIU) art instructor, as the inaugural mentor of Daphne Art Foundation’s Distinguished Mentor Series, worked with the AiR 2026 artists with generosity, curiosity, and care — challenging them, supporting their ideas, and helping guide them throughout the residency, which began June 1, 2026.
The Foundation’s AiR program was established in 2021 to contribute to the professional and artistic growth of up-and-coming and emerging artists to explore new ways to approach their concepts and to create in a space conducive to focused work.
Jurors for the selection of the 2026 AiR cohort were Janice Lardey, experimental artist and instructional assistant professor of art at TAMIU; Itzel Vilches, multimedia artist and arts management graduate student at American University; and Seyde García, arts and culture writer, advocate, and board member of the Laredo Center for the Arts.
The exhibit was made possible by the generosity of Cigarroa Clinic, L& F Distributors, and AEP.
ARTIST STATEMENTS
Paulina Aceves, Laredo
This body of work is a love letter dedicated to the places that shaped my upbringing, the people of Nuevo Laredo, and the loved ones who live on through my memory. I intended to depict a city not through its buildings, streets, or landscapes, but through the people who make up its community. Our everyday interactions as a community keep us in a constant state of symbiosis, and through small actions or a few words, we can still have a great impact on each other’s lives. Through this body of work, I also pay homage to the stray dogs that call the streets of Mexico their home. I use dogs as a metaphor for the innocent and seemingly simple nature of life. The dogs who play carelessly, much like children do, are unaware of what the next moment will bring. Their only concern is to be present and indulge in the moment.
I hope these works are ones in which people can find themselves, whether through a place that feels familiar or through an emotion they can relate to.
Jacob Cardenas, San Antonio
Rooted in the complex experience of living in two cultures on the border, this series explores the liminal space where family heritage, national identity, and unspoken histories come together. After conducting interviews with Laredo and Nuevo Laredo residents about their history, I translated their testimonies into a visual language that integrates figurative painting, ecosymbolism, and personal memorabilia.
Through my landscape paintings, I deconstruct and criticize these capitalist structures to better understand the deep cycles of Latinx displacement and perseverance.
My work contextualizes the present through an abstract realism lens, utilizing the landscape and portraiture to clarify our collective identity and trajectory. Ultimately, this project seeks to demystify the foreign experience by creating art for and about the Latinx community—honoring the dignity of marginalized individuals and transforming the unseen struggles of the border into a powerful public narrative.
Luis Coss, Laredo
The pieces I prepared for this exhibition are based on experiences I have gathered as a Mexican. Mexico can be experienced in many ways: through everyday life, walking the streets, shopping at a tianguis, or enjoying a good taco.
Being Mexican also means experiencing tragedy, like being stopped by a soldier wearing sneakers, getting the “ya te la sabes” treatment, and, if you’re lucky, making it home even if your pockets are empty. There are also experiences that feel almost universal, like getting chanclazos as kids, having to carry two cell phones, yours and the thief’s, sharing your location just in case, and asking the Virgencita to keep us safe, porfis.
Despite the tragedies, the deaths, the disappearances, and the corruption, you can’t stay locked inside your house. You have to go to work and keep living as best you can. In these pieces, I present a little of the surreal experience of being Mexican, showing beauty and tragedy existing side by side. Because if you give a Mexican a tragedy, they will give you art in return, whether it’s a poem, a mural, or a good joke.
Oscar D. Gomez, Laredo
My work is shaped by a lifelong love of comic books and toys. Comics were my first introduction to the world of art, and the artists behind them opened my eyes to different styles, approaches, and forms of visual storytelling. Artists such as Jack Kirby, Moebius, Mike Mignola, and Wally Wood helped shape the way I understand image-making, design, and imagination.
As I developed as a fine artist, I also built a deeper appreciation for the way text and image work together to create a unique storytelling experience. Toys have always been an important part of how I think about narrative. They are story ideas given form and their packaging creates another layer of world-building and imagination. My recent work reflects my interest in visual storytelling, pop culture, nostalgia, and humor.
Clarissa Martinez, Brownsville
My work often explores the perpetration of traditional gender roles in Latinx communities. For this new body of work, I wanted to investigate the past as an extension of those themes. What does the history of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans say about the way that we may negatively treat each other within our families and communities? Particularly, how women are treated? Why do these cycles repeat? I’m investigating the Mexican side of the American Gothic. I let my interest in horror influence my approach, including the way that I want the viewer to feel. In the paintings, you will find allusions to racism, generational trauma, assimilation, extinction, and more against a South Texas backdrop. They are ghost stories in vivid hues. The mum (the paper sculpture) is a Texas tradition; a large, decorative corsage worn by high school teenagers for Homecoming. I wanted this piece to also carry a sense of unease, as the present-day consequences of the past cascade and flourish in ribbons.
Konan Martinez, Laredo
Laredo is full of systems that keep the city moving, but most of the time we hardly notice them. Roads, ports of entry, and drainage channels serve a purpose: to move people, goods, and water from one place to another. We usually only pay attention to these systems when something goes wrong.
During this residency, I began looking more closely at the drainage spaces I had grown up around. Across these three paintings, the viewer moves from looking at the drainage system, to looking into it, and finally looking through it. I included fragments of memory and everyday life to show that these spaces are more than concrete structures. They exist alongside the people who live around them, quietly becoming part of their experiences. The work asks what we might notice if we looked at these systems before they failed.
Carla Santillana, San Antonio
During this residency, I used painting and deconstructed denim to think through the stories, memories, and emotions passed down through the women in my family. As the work developed, I became less interested in direct representation and more focused on form, movement, and tension. This shift emerged through an irregularly shaped painting, three pepper paintings representing my grandmother, my mother, and myself, and, finally, a denim sculpture inspired by the form of a tree. These works consider how emotions can be inherited and carried through the body. While anger remains central to my practice, I began thinking more deeply about the shame, guilt, and tension that can accompany it and become internalized across generations. The residency allowed me to revisit and reshape these ideas, letting the materials and forms guide how those emotions manifested in the work.
(Photos by Nic Lewis)
