GERARD CALISTE
Houston, TX
2023-2024 Grant Preservation, Documentation and Creative Education
Scholarship 2021-2022
Mini-Grant 2015
Grant 2016-2017, 2017-2018, 2018-2019, 2019-2020
Gerard Caliste is a painter and mixed media artist who describes his creative practice as New American Abstract Modern Expressionism. While his practice ranges from painting on canvas to large-scale installations made from found materials and post-consumer packaging, the central message is human expressionism. This includes “environmental issues, social justice, history, culture, futurism, and science.” He is inspired by “dreams, nature, what things could be, and stories” such as “how we came from caves, plagues, self destruction, and we evolve and still ever evolving.”
As a practicing artist for more than 25 years who has exhibited in New Orleans, Miami, Houston, New York City and Los Angeles, Caliste is using this grant to gather work that is scattered across the nation, to document, and to archive his life’s work. “As my body of work grows, I understand how important it is to document and preserve my work.” Caliste will engage a professional photographer to document his work and also teach him skills so that in the future he can document his own work.
Since part of this includes a trip to New Orleans to retrieve work from storage, Caliste is seizing the opportunity to experiment with a new medium in YAYA’s glass studio with mentorship from their staff artists. Caliste says it will be “a true homecoming.” His inspiration to study glass art comes in part from the wish to up-cycle the post-consumer glass he collects for his assemblage pieces.
He is currently teaching art to middle school students in Houston. “Being around the process of creating art by students, reminds me of the natural human creative ability that we all have from early on.”
Gerard Caliste first joined the YAYA Guild in 1994.
All works are copyright of the artist.