Southern Soliloquies
featuring work by Bernardo Vallarino, Ruth Leonela Buentello, and Cecilia Sierra
March7th - May 2nd, 2025
Southern Soliloquies is a powerful collaborative exhibition featuring artists Bernardo Vallarino, Cecilia Sierra, and Ruth Leonela Buentello. Through sculpture, installation, painting, printmaking, and mixed media, the exhibition offers an intimate yet urgent reflection on life in the contemporary South—where personal memory, cultural inheritance, migration, and systems of power intersect.
Southern Soliloquies centers voices that speak from lived experience. Each artist approaches the South not as a monolith, but as a layered and contested space shaped by borders, labor, ecology, ancestry, and survival. Together, their works form a collective meditation on what it means to bear witness, to remember, and to remain human within conditions of erasure and displacement.
Featured Artists:
Bernardo Vallarino
Bernardo Vallarino is a Colombian American mixed-media sculptor and installation artist whose work reflects on violence, power, and the value of human life. Drawing from history, media, personal experience, and a lifelong interest in insects and entomology, his practice explores the tension between humanitarian ideals and the realities of human behavior.
Vallarino is a NALAC Fellow and holds a BFA in Sculpture from Texas Christian University and an MFA from Texas Woman’s University. He is the current coordinator of the Fort Worth Art Collective and serves as an arts commissioner for the City of Fort Worth. His work has been exhibited widely across Texas, Oklahoma, England, and Spain, with installations and exhibitions at institutions including the Nasher Sculpture Center, Meadows Museum, and multiple regional art museums.
Cecilia Sierra
Cecilia Sierra is an artist from Brownsville, Texas. Rooted in the Rio Grande Valley, her work draws from South Texas ecology and the quiet nostalgia of growing up in a border community. Using relief printmaking, cyanotype, embroidery, and found objects, Sierra explores migration, generational memory, and the abundance found in land, water, and everyday life.
She is the Community Outreach Coordinator for the Flower Shop art residency in Brownsville and a 2025 South Texas Artist in Residence with the Art Center of Corpus Christi and Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi. Her work has been included in group exhibitions throughout South Texas and beyond.
Ruth Leonela Buentello
Ruth Leonela Buentello a visual artist and arts educator, whose practice is rooted in painting and often bridges with other disciplines, including community/public arts and collaborative installations. Her work centers on representations of Xicana/o working-class communities. In 2011, she earned her Bachelors of Fine Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
She was nominated to receive the 2017 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors grant. In 2019, her work was selected in the Outwin Boochever National Portrait Competition at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. She has served as an artist-in-residence at the Joan Mitchell Center and at the Institute of Humanities University of Michigan, where she had her first solo exhibition. Her most recent work is currently exhibiting work at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. Ruth is currently an elementary art teacher and practicing public artist.