Erika Alonso

Since establishing her studio practice in Houston, Erika Alonso (b. 1987) has emerged as a dynamic and self-taught voice in contemporary painting. Her work has been the focus of solo exhibitions at Lanecia Rouse Tinsley Gallery (2023), Foltz Fine Art (2023), Winter Street Studios Gallery (2022), and G Spot Gallery (2021), and has appeared in major group exhibitions across Texas, including The Big Show at Lawndale Art Center (2021, 2024), the Art Museum of Southeast Texas (2022), Big Medium in Austin (2023), and Project Row Houses (2023), as well as nationally at River Oaks Arts Center in Louisiana (2019).

A second-generation Cuban-American, Alonso was raised in Southern California before relocating to Texas over 25 years ago. The landscapes of both regions remain vital to her creative process—fleeting impressions of the places she’s lived ripple through her work. Her painterly practice celebrates materiality and movement, capturing the rush and reverberation of memory, emotion, and environment through layered mark-making and an ever-evolving cast of symbols and creatures. Her work exists at the crossroads of abstraction, figuration, and landscape, often taking shape as “narrative landscapes”—spacious, imagined terrains animated by lyrical lines, repetition, and ritual. Alonso’s process embraces both structured wonder and spontaneous emergence, guided by intuition and internal rhythms.

Alonso was named Artist-in-Residence at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in 2023. She is the recipient of a 2024 Spring Creative Award from the Wendy Wagner Foundation and a SACI grant from the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance (2022). Her work has been reviewed in Glasstire, Chron.com, Houston CityBook, and PaperCity Magazine.