The 5 Most Talked-About Artists from Untitled Art, Houston 2025

Known for its connection to the space industry, its rich food scene, and its cultural offerings, Houston now has its own major art fair. On September 18th, Untitled Art, Houston opened its inaugural edition, hosting some 88 galleries at the downtown George R. Brown Convention Center.

For its director, Michael Slenske, the decision to launch the fair was a long time coming for those aware of the city’s underrated cultural clout.

“I get asked this question a lot: ‘Why Houston?’” Slenske told Artsy. “I’m asked, ‘Why not an art capital?’ You don’t know what you’re talking about if you don’t think this is an art capital.” He pointed to the city’s dense network of institutions, from the Menil Collection to the University of Houston’s School of Art and Public Art MFA program, as evidence of its cultural strength. The program, which is featured at Booth A53, is displaying student work throughout the fair.

This is Untitled Art’s first new venture since the firm was acquired last year by the luxury lifestyle portfolio South Florida Ventures. Founded in 2012 by Jeff Lawson, Untitled Art has staged an annual fair directly on the sands of Miami Beach during the city’s December art week. From the start, it sought to distinguish itself from the megafair model by presenting a more focused, curatorial approach.

Untitled Art, Houston aims to replicate that point of view. Framed as a “boutique invitational fair,” it is intended to test the waters of Texas’s art market, and its organizers are taking an intentional approach in line with its local market.

For instance, Slenske emphasized that the pace in the city is intentionally different. “We want to slow people down,” he explained, noting how the labyrinthine booth layout by Michael Hsu Office of Architecture encourages lingering. “People aren’t sick of going to art fairs—what they’re sick of is going to the same art fair in the same art town, done the same way.” Unlike Miami, with its “tidal wave” of visitors and hype, as Slenske puts it, Houston requires building momentum more deliberately. “Here,” Slenske added, “you have to make that tidal wave happen.”

Indeed, the fair’s VIP day got to a steady start at 1 p.m., as modest crowds trickled in during the opening hours. Galleries and advisors observed a common trend: Much like in Dallas, the majority of its VIP Day crowd arrived in the latter half of the afternoon. While some dealmaking occurred with focused collectors during the early hours, the majority of VIP guests descended on the fair in the evening.

Many noted that most dealmaking will carry through over the weekend, true to the Texan pace noted by Slenske. “Galleries are waiting to see how the week unfolds and to what extent collectors come—after work or over the weekend—and are anticipating more of a slow burn of the week rather than just a mad rush when the fair opens,” art advisor Adam Green told Artsy just before 5 p.m. during VIP day.

The fair is also notable for its bold curatorial orientation. Rather than prioritizing scale, it emphasizes focused presentations, often spotlighting solo booths or thematic groupings that reflect contemporary concerns. Also central is its Nest sector—a program dedicated to supporting emerging artists, young galleries, and nonprofit organizations through “progressive” booth costs. Conceived at the Miami fair in 2021 to assist with the financial hurdles associated with art fairs, Nest has become one of Untitled’s defining features and is replicated here.

Untitled’s curatorial mission is buoyed by its Special Projects section. As guests walk in, they will find the first installation, Houston-born Mel Chin’s Pool of Light (2024–25), which was recently featured at the 2024 Prospect triennial in New Orleans. Near the center of the fair, Cuban artist Reynier Leyva Novo presents 500 white cement vessels in Solid Void #1 (2022). Outside of the city, the fair helped organize a major performance by Lita Albuquerque and her daughter Jasmine at the Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern, a show it seems everyone in Houston is talking about.

Untitled Art wagered that the art community in Houston is primed for an art fair. By the evening of VIP day, that thesis was already beginning to bear fruit, with buzz generated among participating galleries and artists. There was much chatter across the fair’s vast aisles, and, indeed, there were plenty of standout presentations to talk about.

Here, Artsy picks five of the most talked-about artists from the fair’s VIP day that had tongues wagging and phones photographing across the concourses.

Rajiv Menon Contemporary

Booth A9

Brooklyn-based artist Mustafa Mohsin chronicles his daily life with a sensitivity that turns his memory into a ubiquitous subject. His paintings tap into his personal experience, drawing on and often combining settings from Pakistan and New York. These scenes are rendered through bold, expressive hues and a surprising softness that caused more than a few visitors to stop by Los Angeles gallery Rajiv Menon Contemporary’s booth on VIP day.

In Karbistan (graveyard) (2025), for instance, Mohsin layers loose, expressionistic brushstrokes to create a familiar scene of a family visiting a gravestone. An academy-trained artist, he approaches painting with deep reverence for the canon while filtering his practice through the autobiographical lens of a recent immigrant. “There’s such a beautiful chronicling of immigrant life coming through his autobiographical perspective,” said the gallery’s founder, Rajiv Menon, who grew up in Houston.

Collectors were quick to pounce. “I purchased his work Date Night (lahore) (2025), a beautiful, small work set in Lahore,” said collector Mitra Muthry. “It shows a couple sitting in a car, with so many layers to it, so much to unpack. It’s a commentary on a society [where] young couples have to have their date nights in their cars, nestled in together, because it’s very frowned upon.”

Born in Lahore, Pakistan, in 1994, Mohsin studied at the Florence Classical Art Academy in Italy before earning an MFA from the New York Academy of Art. His paintings are presented in a two-person booth with Indian American painter Joya Mukerjee Logue, with prices ranging from $1,200 to $30,000. His work continues to affirm the power of painting to carry personal histories into broader cultural conversations.

April Bey built her practice from a story her father told her as a child. When she asked why people questioned her difference from others, he replied that they were from another planet—a place called “Atlantica.”

That origin story became the foundation of her art: a speculative utopia free of prejudice, where glitter is prevalent and agricultural workers are celebrated as royalty. This world is captured in her massive textile, I See All The Way Back To Where I’m Supposed To See (2024), at The Bahamas–based TERN Gallery’s booth.

The work, part of Bey’s Houston debut, generated immediate buzz. “They went big,” Sean Green, CEO of software firm Arternal, told Artsy. “Go big or go home, right? You’re in Texas. This is museum-quality work, and TERN, who had to make the decision to come here, said, ‘Okay, I’m going to Houston; they need the vibrance that April brings to her work.’”

I See All The Way Back To Where I’m Supposed To See is a monumental Jacquard tapestry accented with sherpa, crushed velour, metallic thread, beads, adorned clothespins, and bamboo earrings. Priced at $112,000, the work envelops viewers in Atlantica’s lush, speculative cosmology, rendering a vision of liberation that is as tactile as it is expansive. “It’s a moment in the U.S. that feels dark, and her vision is about joy and finding joy and creating a world where there‘s beauty and rest and acceptance, and that’s a really powerful message right now,” TERN founder Amanda Coulcet told Artsy. The booth also features smaller works, including the surreal portrait COLONIAL SWAG: Say I Mean Something (2023).

Based in Los Angeles, Bey earned her MFA in 2014 from California State University. A tenured professor at Glendale College, she has taught at ArtCenter College of Design and is represented by Vielmetter Los Angeles.

Earlie Hudnall, Jr. is a staple of Houston’s art community. For more than five decades, his black-and-white photographs have chronicled the everyday lives of Black Houstonians with intimacy and dignity, preserving moments of joy and struggle embedded in the city’s cultural memory.

Texas’s PDNB Gallery dedicated a solo booth to Hundall, Jr.’s work, with prices ranging from $2,500 to $8,000. The photographs, often described as intimate portraits of Houston itself, stirred deep responses from the crowd, particularly from local attendees. “It makes me feel right about this fair that he’s here,” said Jessica Phifer, director of business development and art advisor at the Fine Art Group. “As a native, seeing some of his shots from back in the day of [former municipality] Freedmen’s Town and looking east stirred me in ways I hadn’t expected. This man is overdue for this kind of attention.”

After returning from his tour of duty in Vietnam, Hudnall, Jr. studied art at Texas Southern University, where painter and muralist John Thomas Biggers encouraged him to draw from his own experiences. That advice shaped a lifelong practice: Hudnall’s black-and-white photographs—many set in the city’s historic neighborhoods like Freedmen’s Town—capture daily rituals. For instance, Street Champion, 4th Ward (1986) features a group of kids playing games on the street, particularly one kid wearing boxing gloves, with his arms raised in a champion stance.

The resonance has been immediate. “It’s been phenomenal,” said Burt Finger, co-founder of PDNB Gallery. “I’ve had people say, ‘Oh, that’s so-and-so, I grew up with them.’ Others recognize buildings. It’s brought a lot of nostalgia back to people.…You’re not just buying a photograph, you’re buying a piece of photographic history. Art history.”

A spider web on a rain-trodden porch, figures skipping rocks on a dreary day, and a moody, empty bedroom: Mason Owens’s miniature paintings recall the intimacy of Vincent van Gogh’s famed Arles interiors.

The response has been immediate, and the gallery sold out its presentation—which also features works by TJ Rinowski—in the first few hours of the fair. “Megan Mulrooney once again brings her A game,” said gallerist Nicholas Campbell. “No surprise that most of the booth has already sold. [She’s] leading the charge as one of the most exciting galleries out there.”

Owens’s book-sized paintings were meticulously painted with egg tempera, resulting in a matted glow. Owens cultivates what Los Angeles gallerist Megan Mulrooney calls “Anemoia,” a dreamlike nostalgia for memories one never actually lived. “They give you nostalgia for a memory that isn’t yours,” she noted.

Owens’s panels, priced from $2,000 to $8,500, unfold with devotional slowness and a grounded attentiveness to the natural world. In paul’s little blue room (2024), a blue bedroom hums with stillness; in lets just cleanup tomorrow (2025), a night garden suggests spectral presences beneath its shadows. Meanwhile, the skipper and his first mate (2025) depicts two figures skipping rocks on a hazy body of water that bleeds into the horizon, giving the essence of a fleeting memory. Each work balances precision and fluidity, conveying the subtle passage of time—a breeze through a window, the faint silvering of dusk, the hush of evening descending.

This two-person presentation precedes Owens’s first-ever solo show, which will be held by the gallery in Los Angeles. Owens currently works as a landscaper and farmer in Baltimore and is certainly a name many will be watching following this appearance.

“My clients have really gravitated towards Mason Owens,” said Lea Weingarten, Houston-based art advisor. “It’s a meditative thing when you’re tending a garden, and he took that into painting, and you really feel it in the paintings; they feel intimate.”

Miko Veldkamp’s standout paintings, featuring colorful scenes of everyday life obstructed by patterns, weave personal memory with influences from his Surinamese and Javanese heritage, shaped by his upbringing in the Netherlands.

Ghostlike silhouettes and shadowy figures drift across his canvases as if projected from behind. These forms allude to Southeast Asian shadow theater while also invoking the unseen presence of ancestry and lineage. “It’s a reference to what comes before you—the idea of your lineage, your heritage, and something that perhaps you don’t see [that] is hidden behind [you], but yet it’s what informs who you are, your identity,” said London gallerist Alice Amati, who is showing his work alongside that of American painter Abigail Dudley.

Though tucked away in a booth at the back right corner of the convention center, Veldkamp’s colorful, culturally rich paintings caught the attention of eagle-eyed advisors and collectors throughout the VIP day.