Four Texas Tech art students stretch creative and cultural boundaries as their work travels from the plains of West Texas to the galleries of Mexico City.
When four Texas Tech University art students learned their work would be featured in Disrupting the Horizon: Human Gestures from the Texas Tech University School of Art at Mexico City’s Centro Nacional de las Artes (CENART), the news marked more than a line on a resume. It was recognition of how far their creative voices had reached, and how their work could speak across borders.
The exhibition, organized through a partnership between Texas Tech’s School of Art and CENART, brings together student artists exploring how human experience meets the edges of perception, material, and culture. For two of the artists, graduate students Courtney Juen and Hunter Marze, the opportunity also includes traveling to Mexico City to see their work presented and attend related events. Undergraduate artists Madelyn Hopper and Rylee Tucker will have their collaborative design represented in the exhibition as part of the same exchange.
Picture: Artwork by Hunter Marze: Baskets, 2025, ceramic, red velvet, steel rod,
apx 26”x21” each
Expanding the Idea of the Horizon
The title Disrupting the Horizon draws inspiration from the wide skies and flat expanses surrounding Texas Tech’s campus. In the curatorial essay, the horizon is described as a space that both separates and connects, is disquieting yet hopeful, suggesting the limits of human perspective and the drive to reach beyond them.
For Courtney Juen, that sense of tension mirrors the physicality of her performance-based work. Her piece In My Own explores the relationship between the body and clay through endurance and repetition. After spreading wet clay on the floor she attempts to jump rope on top of it. The clay splatters across the wall behind her as her jump rope hits the thick mud-like substance and her feet pound the clay unforgivably. “The whole thing was thinking about futility and strife and doubling down in a season of burnout,” she said. “It was really reflective of my own inability to do it on my own.” Juen attributes her ability to persevere to her faith, describing how learning when to pause and rest ultimately shaped the work. What began as an exercise in exhaustion evolved into an honest reflection on vulnerability and grit, a process she now sees as a personal success.
Hunter Marze’s ceramics also engage with ideas of balance and transformation. His mixed-media works blur the line between functional pottery and sculptural form. “It’s about this kind of decentering of the human,” he explained. “I’m pushing tradition to the point of making things that don’t resemble tradition at all.” Marze’s work draws inspiration from the 1920s Japanese Mingei movement, which celebrated craftsmanship in response to industrialization. “I’m making insects that take over symbols of power, like the pedestal or the intellect,” he said, “but in a way that’s no longer traditional. There’s an advocacy for the natural world and a privileging of it instead of the human on top of the hierarchy.”
Artwork by Courtney Juen: In My Own Remnants, 2023-2025, stoneware floor installation, dimensions variable. Incorporating jump
rope, 300lbs of stoneware clay, plastic, sewing pins, paracord, miscellaneous spring,
clamp light, corner of cinderblock, gallon bucket, and clay slip.
Communicating Through Design and Image
While Juen and Marze work through tactile materials, Madelyn Hopper and Rylee Tucker approach the exhibition’s themes through design and anaglyph 3D techniques, disciplines that explore how visual communication shapes perception. Both graphic design students collaborated on an interactive piece addressing book bans and censorship.
“I wanted to push our design into something I thought I couldn’t do, and make it a kind of interactive design,” Hopper said. Their research revealed that book banning is prohibited in Mexico, a striking contrast to their experiences in the United States. That difference became central to their concept: an artwork that conceals written content in the native language, inviting viewers to actively engage and uncover the message. “We wanted people to experience what it’s like to break through the noise and choose to learn more about another country’s stories,” she explained.
Tucker expanded on the idea of interaction, describing how viewers need special glasses
to properly read and view the piece. “We all have our own stories,” she said. “I hope
after connecting with our piece, people will feel called to do something, to go into
their communities and get involved in the change.”
Although neither will travel to Mexico, both expressed how meaningful it is to share
their work internationally and to see their design contribute to a broader conversation
about culture, communication, and access to ideas.
Pictured: Artwork by partners Madelyn Hopper and Rylee Tucker, Graphic Design 36”x48”
A Shared Experience of Growth
The CENART collaboration reflects a growing emphasis within the School of Art on international
exchange and professional development for students. For Juen and Marze, the chance
to meet artists and educators abroad represents a valuable step in their creative
journeys. “I’d like to see how artists from another country, especially ceramic artists,
are working in this kind of domain,” Marze said. “It’s all a valuable learning experience,
and an international exhibition on a resume is kind of a big deal.”
Juen added that she looks forward to connecting with the artists and community at
CENART. “I’ve had the opportunity to work in a gallery at Texas Tech,” she said, “and
I’m excited to go on this journey with my peers and classmates and see how things
are run at CENART.”
Even for those not traveling, the project has created a sense of connection. Hopper reflected, “I knew I wanted our poster to be something that, even translated into Irish or Chinese or anywhere else in the world, could be accessible to anyone, and the issues we face here and care about could be understood.” Tucker added, “As an undergraduate student, getting to have an international exhibition experience this early in my career is incredible. I’m really thankful to Texas Tech for that opportunity.”
The exhibition unites a range of artistic practices from Texas Tech students: ceramics, performance, sculpture, and design - each reflecting the central idea of Disrupting the Horizon: exploring the imaginative possibilities of the horizon and the constraints that ground us in our human particularities.
Picture: Artwork by Hunter Marze: Outbreak, 2025, ceramic, dimensions variable
Looking Beyond the Line
As the students prepare for the exhibition, their work also marks a personal horizon:
a chance to share what they’ve created, connect with new audiences, and step into
the next stage of their artistic journeys.
The horizon, as the curators describe, is not a fixed edge but a place of potential.
For these Texas Tech artists, it represents both where they come from and where they
are headed next.
Disrupting the Horizon: Human Gestures from the Texas Tech University School of Art opens
this fall at the Centro Nacional de las Artes (CENART) in Mexico City, featuring selected
works by students from Texas Tech’s School of Art.
Pictured: Courtney Juen; Hunter Marze; Madelyn Hopper; Rylee Tucker