Members

At ICOSA, our artist members are the lifeblood of our creative community. They come from various backgrounds and disciplines, including painters, sculptors, photographers, multimedia artists, and beyond. Each member brings their unique perspective, techniques, and inspirations, enriching the collective artistic journey. Their artworks range from abstract and thought-provoking to vibrant and whimsical, showcasing the diversity and talent within our organization. Collaborations and discussions among the artist members foster an environment of growth, innovation, and artistic exploration. Through their dedication and passion, our artist members continually challenge boundaries, push artistic boundaries, and inspire both fellow artists and the local community. ICOSA is proud to provide a platform for these talented individuals to showcase their work, connect with like-minded creatives, and contribute to Austin's thriving arts scene.

Leon Alesi

Leon Alesi is a self taught multi-disciplinary artist who hails from New Jersey and has lived in Austin, Texas for the past 30 years. His work is both an archeological dig and a document of transitional situations investigating our spiritual, communal, and physical loss. As much an exercise of recording history as it is an experiment of alchemy. Using his neighborhood as a reference guide for global realities, he records his personal experience for future archivists to consider. From 2012 to 2018 he co-curated and ran Blackbox, an in-house gallery space that promoted local talent. For the past 5 years he has been an active member of the ICOSA collective, focused on creating opportunity for the growing community of artists in Austin and furthering his artistic practice.

Amy Bench

Amy is a cinematographer and filmmaker based in Austin, Texas. She took a circuitous path to filmmaking, first working as an engineer for Eastman Kodak before pursuing an MFA in directing at UT (2010). She has been twice nominated for the Kodak Excellence in Cinematography Award and won grants from the Texas Filmmaker’s Production Fund, Women in Film- Dallas, and the Department of Education’s Jacob K. Davits Fellowship, and is a member of the multidisciplinary artist group ICOSA. She was recently named a “DP on the Rise” by Paste Magazine. Her camera work has screened at festivals including Berlin, SXSW, Sundance, The New York Film Festival, and at MOMA/PS1.

 Her first documentary film HOUSE OF ELEGANCE, about the transformative powers of a historic beauty salon in Austin’s diverse and ever-changing East Side, was featured on the Independent Lens online shorts festival, and was part of a Lonestar Emmy winning episode of the KLRU series “Docubloggers” in 2007.  Her film THE VILLE, about one of St Louis’s most racially charged yet historically significant neighborhoods, won a Juror’s Citation the Black Maria Film Festival, “Best Local Documentary” at the St. Louis International Film Festival, and numerous awards at other festivals. It was described as “lyrical” and considered a “totally captivating look at contemporary urban America” by the Missoula Independent.

 She is currently working on a multidisciplinary project, "Things We Left Behind," documenting the immigration experience of refugees and asylum seekers.

Darcie Book

Book's extensive exhibition history includes The Baltimore Museum of Art, Fort Works Art (Fort Worth), Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Los Angeles), DiverseWorks (Houston), and The Contemporary Museum (Baltimore). She has been published in Sculpture magazine and the Manifest International Painting Annual. Residencies include Vermont Studio Center, Facebook AIR (Austin), and Mauser Foundation (Costa Rica). Book co-founded Crit Nites, an inclusive initiative for contemporary working artists to discuss their work and build relationships.

Major works have been commissioned by The City of Austin, Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts, and Facebook. Awards include the 2016 Belle Foundation for Cultural Development grant, an international award for achievement in the arts and humanities.

Shawn Camp

Shawn Camp grew up in Coeur dʼ Alene, Idaho and completed an MFA in Painting and Printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University in 1997. He then set out exploring, art-making, and exhibiting throughout the United States and abroad as an artist and musician. He settled in Austin, Texas where he is a member of ICOSA artist collective and Associate Professor of Painting at Austin Community College. His works have been shown in the United States and internationally and are included in numerous public and private collections. Shawn’s paintings, videos and sound pieces exploit the effects of context and light on our perception - contrasting the ephemeral nature of awareness with the illusion of constancy.

B Shawn Cox

B Shawn Cox is an artist living and working in Austin, Texas. He creates analog transformations exploring subtext of collective social and personal mythologies. The work refashions conventional narratives by deconstructing and rebuilding story through unconventional mediums: oil on fabric; reassembled modular paper constructions; and lenticularly printed digital collages. Cox subversively comments on our archived, collective social mythology drawing inspiration from his own divergent life experiences (artist/lawyer/rancher) incorporating urban lifestyles with his formative rural west Texas childhood. His vibrant, meticulously crafted work is included in both individual and corporate collections throughout the United States.

Erin Cunningham

Erin Cunningham (b. 1979 Honolulu, HI) is an artist living and working in Austin, Texas. She received her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003 and an MFA in studio art from The University of Texas at Austin in 2007. With a focus in sculpture, her work utilizes material combinations, such as cast metals, and the female figure to explore dualities of masculine and feminine, disposable and precious, fragility and strength. She has shown both nationally and internationally, including The Metropolitan Art Museum in Tokyo and at Mönchskirche Salzwedel, in Salzwedel, Germany. Artist residencies including BAER Art Center in Hofsos, Iceland as well as Atelierhaus Residency Hilmsen in Hilmsen, Germany. Cunningham is one of the founding members of the ICOSA Collective, an artist-run exhibition space in Austin TX. She currently holds a position as an Assistant Professor of Practice in the Department of Art and Art History at The University of Texas at Austin.

Veronica Ceci

Veronica Ceci is an intermedia artist based in Austin, TX, where she has been working as a Master Printer since 2004. Ceci’s pieces have been included in exhibitions at the Cleveland Museum of Art, The Art Museum of Southeast Texas, and the International Print Center New York. Her work is held in many collections including the Library of Congress, the Zuckerman Museum of Art, The Experimental Printmaking Institute, Manhattan Graphics Center and the Dell Children’s Hospital. The artist received her BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, was certified at the Tamarind Institute of Lithography and completed her MFA at Kent State University. Ceci is the founder of the nonprofit organization, Flash Collective, which pays artists for their participation in community art making events and exhibitions.

Mai Gutierrez

Mai Gutierrez is a multi-disciplinary architect and artist living in Austin, TX. She earned her BFA and Masters in Architecture from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2010. Born and raised in Monterrey, Mexico, she sources her inspiration from architecture and nature by using natural elements in her work such as stone, wood and metal labored to display an architectural aesthetic. Her work has been exhibited in the United States and Mexico, and was awarded a year long residency with Jorge Elizondo in Monterrey. Her current practice consists of architectural and interior design services, millwork and furniture design and fabrication, as well as sculpture and public art.

Sarah Hirneisen

Sarah Hirneisen is an Austin based artist using three-dimensional materials and processes to elevate familiar and everyday objects. Born and raised in rural Pennsylvania, Sarah lived in New York, Rhode Island, and California before settling on the great state of Texas. She received an AAS with a major in Glass from Rochester Institute of Technology in 1998, a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2001, and her MFA in studio art in 2011 from Mills College with a concentration in Sculpture. Sarah was awarded a residency through the Hungarian Multicultural Center, has received an Individual Artist Grant through the City of Oakland’s Cultural Art’s Program and the Phelan, Murphy & Cadogan fellowship from the San Francisco Foundation for graduate students in the arts. She has taught Sculpture at Mills College, Cabrillo College, and City College of San Francisco. Sarah has exhibited her work extensively throughout the US as well as Hungary, Korea and England.

Alexis Hunter

Alexis Hunter is an identity-based, multidisciplinary artist currently living and working in Austin, TX. She earned a BFA from Texas State University in Studio Art, with a concentration in painting, graduating summa cum laude (2022). Recent solo and group exhibitions include BINARY (Who Do You Belong To?), ICOSA Gallery, Austin (2021); Own it, examine it, and confront it head on, DORF Gallery, Austin (2021); Signs of Life, Texas State Galleries, San Marcos (2022); Alexis Hunter, at BRICK at Blue Star Arts Complex, San Antonio (2021). She has been selected for the third edition of Big Medium’s LINE Residency (2022) and vol. 2 of the George Washington Carver Museum's Small Black Museum Residency (2022). She is also the newest member of the ICOSA Collective. Alexis is the founder of Others, an ongoing publication project documenting the faces and stories of biracial individuals in central Texas. Her work explores self-image through racial identity, mental health, the female body, and the male gaze.

Chantal Lesley

Chantal Lesley is a multicultural, first-generation American born and raised in Brownsville, TX, located along the U.S./Mexico border. Being the daughter of immigrants from both Germany and Peru has brought upon a feeling of being stretched between four cultures and has led her to confront ideas that focus on identity and contemporary social and political issues in her work. Her work is self-reflective, often portraying themes of the intangible such as memory, dreams, and the retelling of autobiographical stories. Lesley acquired her BFA in Fine Art Photography from Texas State University in 2021. Her work has been exhibited throughout Texas and the US. Selected shows include Houston Center for Photography, Houston, TX; Craighead Green Gallery, Dallas, TX; Touchstone Gallery, Washington D.C; and Humble Arts Foundation, New York City, NY. In 2021 she was noted as an Honorable Mention for the Lenscratch Student Prize Award, and in 2022, was an artist in residence at LATITUDE in Chicago, IL and exhibited her first solo show titled En Medio de la Nostalgia. Lesley lives and works in Austin, Texas.

Amanda Linn McInerney

Amanda Linn McInerney (b. 1981 Sioux City, IA) is a Texas-based visual artist, printmaker and homebrewer. She is one of the co-founders of Artist Screen Printing Cooperative where she teaches screen printing. She graduated from Iowa State University in 2004 and continued her printmaking career in San Diego, California until she moved to Austin in 2010. She has contributed to and shown work with artist nonprofits and mentoring programs like the Women Printmakers of Austin, Chula League, ICOSA Collective and The Contemporary Austin. She is the secondary Design Teacher at Meridian World School and an instructor at The Art School at The Contemporary Austin. Her work is inspired by mortality, how different cultures process loss and how it affects the decisions we make in life.

Monica Mohnot

An Indian American visual artist based in Austin, Texas, draws inspiration from the intricate beauty of the natural world and her experiences navigating diverse cultural realms. Born and raised in Kolkata, India, she moved to the United States in 2001 after her marriage. Holding a BFA in painting from Texas State University, San Marcos, and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Monica's artwork integrates painting with woven, stitched, and quilted textile pieces, often utilizing vintage textiles, especially saris, to engage with the South Asian diaspora and address contemporary gender and labor issues.

Her paintings, employing acrylics, oils, and pastels, portray abstract bodily forms, simplified landscapes, and distinctive patterns. Monica aspires to create a visual language that captures the fluidity of identity and the universal human experiences of otherness, movement, change, and growth. Beyond the canvas, she enjoys precious moments with her husband and two daughters, sharing a close connection with music, indulging in travel, movie marathons, and cooking together. These moments of joy contribute to the fulfillment she finds in both family life and her artistic pursuits.

Vy Ngo

Vy Ngo is an Austin based visual artist, who draws influences from her life as a Vietnamese-American, a physician, mother, and observer of the human condition. Born to refugee parents in rural Pennsylvania, her passion for the arts was overshadowed by cultural expectations, an interest in the sciences, and the desire to serve others. After establishing a career in medicine, Vy finally came back to her creative self and began painting in 2015. Her dedicated studio practice has led to solo exhibitions and group shows in various public art spaces and galleries across the U.S and acquisitions into permanent public collections such as Austin City Hall and Texas A&M University. Her work has also drawn attention from various publications and media, such as Tribeza, Austin Woman, and PBS Arts in Context. Whether it be representational work or site-specific installations to create a dialogue about identity, culture, and political issues, or abstract paintings based on memories, neuroscience and human emotions, her body of work is as diverse as her life.

Juliette Nickle

Juliette M.M.Nickle is a Neu Bauhaus TRA$C0R3  artist from St.louis, Misery. Residing in Austin Texas the last 15 years, volunteering, studying at ACC and engaging in the local Austin arts community. Inspirations come from familial a Bauhaus connection, playing in junkyard cars, growing up in the gritty worn dirty industrial midwest.  Art practice involves exploring materiality , 3d rendering, performance, mark making, and collaging.

Matt Rebholz

The spaces depicted in Matt Rebholz’s landscape paintings are informed by film stills from Western, Fantasy, and Science Fiction movies. These environments have been denuded of all evidence of life, leaving rocky and alien landscapes rendered in an electrified, saturated palette.

Rebholz engages with film as a coping strategy to manage a lifelong struggle with bipolar disorder. Genre movies like those referenced in the paintings represent a comfortable space of retreat and an emotional scaffold in times of crisis. Like bipolar disorder itself, the landscapes that have been built around these films are simultaneously lonesome and populous, quiet and loud, barren and fertile.

Jacqueline Overby

Jacqueline Overby (b. 1991, San Antonio, TX) earned her BFA from Texas StateUniversity in 2016. A multi-disciplinary artist, Overby began as an oil painter and has since moved towards more performative and sculptural efforts, most recently delving into the social practice realm. Jacqueline currently lives and works in Austin and San Marcos, TX.

As a progression, she is currently working on expanding her practice with abstracted soft sculpture and needle felted forms. Overby takes inspiration from childhood cartoon aesthetic, pop cultural standards and her experiences with body dysmorphia. She is interested in the feminine, the masculine, and the non-binary and their relation to exaggerated geometric form, societal expectations and sexual innuendo. Some of the allegories in the work touch on the conversations between the comforts of childhood toys and the traumas of adulthood as it relates to nostalgia and a yearning for a lost innocence.

A large portion of her practice serves to process her own issues with mental health, self-image, sexual desires and trauma. Being a survivor of sexual assault and domestic violence, her needle felting process of repeatedly stabbing fibers back into themselves serves as a way to meditate and heal while confronting various intrusive thoughts with a sense of humor. Exhibiting bright venomous hues, not unlike what poisonous animals use to ward off predators, she is interested in the role that color and shape play in the psychological response to a piece.

Tammie Rubin

Tammie Rubin is an artist whose sculptural practice considers the intrinsic power of objects as signifiers, wishful contraptions, and mythic relics while investigating the tension between the readymade and the handcrafted. Using intricate motifs, she delves into themes involving ritual, domestic and liturgical objects, mapping, migration, magical thinking, longing, and identity.  Rubin has exhibited widely, selections include Project Row Houses, Houston, TX., the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY., George Washington Carver Museum, Austin, TX., Mulvane Art Museum, KS., Indianapolis Art Center, Indianapolis, IN., The Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, TX., Women & Their Work Gallery, Austin, TX., and C24 Gallery, New York, NY. She's represented by Galleri Urbane, Dallas, TX., & Rivalry Projects, Buffalo, NY.

Rubin’s artwork has received reviews in publications such as Artforum, Art in America, Glasstire, The Brooklyn Rail, Austin American-Statesman, Austin Chronicle, Sightlines, Buffalo Rising, Tribeza, fields, Conflict of Interest, Arts and Culture Texas, Ceramics: Art & Perception, and Ceramics Monthly. Rubin is the recipient of the 2022 Tito’s Prize, and grants from Artist Trust in Seattle, the Illinois Arts Council, and Clay Houston. Born and raised in Chicago, Rubin lives in Austin, Texas where she is an Associate Professor of Ceramics & Sculpture at St. Edward’s University.

Lana Waldrep-Appl

Lana Waldrep-Appl (b. Fort Worth, Texas 1985) is a painter, teacher, and mother. She received her MFA in Painting from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2010 and her BFA in Studio Art from the University of Texas at Austin. She has participated in residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. Waldrep-Appl teaches Painting, Drawing, and Art Foundations at Texas State University. She lives in San Marcos, Texas with her husband and her young son and daughter.

Jenn Wilson

Jenn Wilson (b. 1981 Galveston, TX) is an artist, art historian, and curator that lives and works in Austin, Texas. She has shown nationally and internationally with Corbett vs Dempsey (Chicago), Beca Gallery (New Orleans), Packer-Schopf Gallery (Chicago), Eggman & Walrus (Santa Fe), Thomas McCormick Gallery (Chicago), American University of Beirut (Lebanon), University of Arkansas Fine Arts Center Gallery, and Kohler Art Museum in Wisconsin. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008.