ARTIST TALK FROM MARCH 5TH (Mark Greenwalt with Patrick Michael Palmer): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkzKVd2GqJc
Hooks-Epstein Galleries proudly presents new drawings by Houston-based artist, Mark Greenwalt. The exhibition, "Drawing on Drawing" opens Saturday, February 28, 2026 with a Reception for the Artist taking place from 5:00PM-7:00PM. The exhibition will continue through April 4, 2026.
***SAVE THE DATE 3.5.2026 | GALLERY HAPPY HOUR AT 4:30PM & ARTIST CONVERSATION AT 5:30PM | MARK GREENWALT + PATRICK MICHAEL PALMER, GLASSELL STUDIO SCHOOL'S DEAN OF STUDENTS & INSTRUCTOR
Drawing as an activity implies pulling or revealing imagery from a flat pictorial womb. I draw on drawing when I wish to listen carefully, apply myself to something greater, disrupt my expectations, and respond to present conditions. I draw from drawing an appreciation for the unpredictable, the implausible, the familiar, and the unknowable. I draw to remember, and I draw to forget. I draw on drawing to suppress my ego. The image is immortal, archival, thin and layered. Mortal hands draw these nascent planar miracles into the world. We do our best and get what we get.
The large panel in the exhibition, Bird Man, 2026, was created from our trip, well over a decade ago, to Rapa Nui. There we hiked the moai roads, the village sites, the quarries and learned of Hoa Hakananai’a, lifted by British sailors in 1868, used as ballast in a dark hold, paint washed away, and ‘gifted’ to the British Museum by the Admiralty. The Moai was carved from hard lava deposits and later engraved with relief carvings of the emergent “Bird Man” culture, coeval with early European contacts, diseases, enslavements, and sheep.
In December 2025, we went to visit Hoa Hakananai’a at the British Museum in London with the intention of ritually stealing a British artifact via drawing. At the National Portrait Gallery, I was unknowingly drawn to a symbolic British ancestor, re-embodied through portraiture, of the great aviator and birdman-hero John Alcock who died in 1919 in the same year he flew the Atlantic. I blatantly smuggled my drawing, and thus Alcocks spirit, back to Texas and reimagined the portrait to scale. As an American with British-Swiss ancestry, I am perhaps not so much interested in reparation as I am interested in playing the old game in a more ethical way.
Other drawings utilize my 98-year-old mother, and soon to be ancestral figure, as a model, who most recently has been abstracted by dementia but now newly transformed into a living buddha-child who for the first time is truly delightful to hang-out with. Other drawings physically draw on older drawings, rebirthing them into new germinations marvelously depicted on surfaces formed and reformed by addition and subtraction, synthesis and analysis, constructs and dreams. --- Mark Greenwalt, 2026
Mark Greenwalt earned his MA from Stephen F. Austin University in 1986 (Nacogdoches, TX) and MFA from The Pratt Institute in 1990 (Brooklyn, NY). Greenwalt has been a tenured professor with The College of the Mainland (Texas City, TX), since 2005 and an Instructor at the Museum of Fine Art Houston’s Glassell School of Art (TX) since 2019. He previously taught at the University of Houston and Rice University (Houston) from 1993-2000. Greenwalt’s work has been shown in various solo and group exhibitions, primarily throughout Texas. In 2021, he had a solo exhibition at South Texas College in McAllen, TX. In 2022, his work was featured in group exhibitions at Lamar University (Beaumont, TX) and The Glassell School of Art.
