No longer, not yet

marisol valencia

Main Gallery

On view: May 15 - July 19, 2026

Opening Reception: Friday, May 15, 2026, from 6-8 PM

Artist Talks: Saturday, May 16, 2026, starting at 2 PM

Art League Houston is pleased to present No Longer, Not Yet, an installation of new sculptures by Houston-based artist Marisol Valencia. The exhibition arises from a year and a half of sustained volunteer work at a Houston-area shelter serving migrant women and children, and is grounded in lived experience, shared making, and acts of care.

As news cycles around immigration continue to speed up and flatten into headlines, Valencia resists the pressure to resolve or frame the subject through policy or argument. Instead, she lingers with lived experience and what it means to move through uncertainty, and the slower, quieter realities of endurance, adaptation, and care that rarely make it into public discourse.

The materials she works with are central to the work: ixtle fibers sourced from rural Mexican communities where migration often shapes daily life; bedsheets and pillows gathered from the shelter, set against industrial construction materials; and porcelain pieces inscribed with collected definitions of “home.” Together, these materials move between necessity and aspiration, survival and hope, pointing to the complexity of migratory experience and the individual lives that sit behind broader narratives of displacement.

At the center of the exhibition is a large cascading crochet sculpture made in collaboration with women and volunteers at the shelter. It draws on long traditions of women’s handwork, where knowledge is passed across generations and shared informally between mothers, daughters, grandmothers, and friends. In this kind of making, conversation and craft are hard to separate as things are said while hands are busy, stories circulate as forms take shape. What’s embedded in the work is less a fixed narrative than a record of time spent together.

The title, No Longer, Not Yet, points to a suspended time—an in-between state that echoes the uncertainty and possibility of migration itself. Collective labor is held as both material and memory, and the works read as temporary structures of belonging. Rather than resolving the conditions it responds to, Valencia’s work stays with them, holding space for grief and hope without forcing a hierarchy between the two. What’s left is less a conclusion than a sense of something still in process.

About the Artist

Marisol Valencia is a Houston-based artist, born and raised in Guadalajara, Mexico, where she studied Restoration and Conservation of Art at ECRO, Escuela de Conservación y Restauración de Occidente. She has lived in the United States since 2004. Her creative practice focuses on ceramics and mixed media. In her pieces, she creates unique conversations between the interaction of different materials. Marisol finds ways to manipulate and relate materials to each other to achieve visual ambiguities that will encourage the viewers to re-examine their assumptions. She is constantly exploring ways to expand the perceptions of everyday objects by focusing on their aesthetic and formal qualities, which are often overshadowed by their functionality. Her work seeks to capture her desire to find meaning and beauty in the everyday, in abandoned objects, in things that have lost their purpose or should not have happened, that are overlooked or disregarded. After earning a Certificate of Achievement in Ceramics from the Glassell School of Art, MFAH, in 2015, Marisol completed Glassell’s two-year BLOCK Program in 2022. Her work has been included in multiple shows, including at the Holocaust Museum of Houston, the Consulate General of Mexico, Anya Tish Gallery, and Glassell’s Levant Gallery, MFAH.

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Art League Houston extends its gratitude to the Brown Foundation, Inc., the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance, Houston Endowment, Kathrine G. McGovern / The John P. McGovern Foundation, Texas Commission on the Arts, and the Wortham Foundation, Inc. for their generous support.

Art League Houston acknowledges the following individuals, private foundations, public funders, and corporations for their support this season: Amy Blakemore • Jennifer Blanco & John Earles • Arts Connect Houston • The Harry S. and Isabel C. Cameron Foundation • Edaren Foundation • Nima & Jasmine Farzaneh • Field of Study • Michael Golden • Harris County Department of Education: CASE for Kids – County Connections • HEB Community Investment Program • Heimbinder Family Foundation • Jacques Louis Vidal Charitable Fund • The Levant Foundation • The Powell Foundation • Rarity Solutions LLC • Russell Reynolds Associates • Saint Arnold Brewing Company • Scott R. Sparvero • Simon Printing • Texas Art Supply • Topo Chico • Workhorse Printmakers