The Preservationalist

$10,000 SPONSOR

Visionaries and cultural guardians. Their impact safeguards the past and fuels the future — protecting heritage, elevating art, and shaping Lockhart’s living legacy.

• Germer Insurance

Rooted Patrons

$5,000 SPONSOR

Steady, grounded, essential. These are the cultural caretakers who help keep the foundation strong and the spirit alive.

• Wayne and Fran Carlisle

• The Cibolo Market

• Corridor Title

The Revival Circle

$2,500 SPONSOR

The beating heart of this movement — a community of supporters keeping the fire lit and the future growing.

• Donna and Kole Townsen

• Home Ally Team

• SH 130

• Lockhart Initiative for Tourism

• Casey Clem

Robbie’s artistic voice finds the positive and possibilities in all things. He draws from, on, and in collaboration with timeworn materials: maps, postcards, ledgers, tablecloths…platforms with an inherent story. “Whether labeling my voice and method naïve, hopeful, elating, or suspicious,” explains Robbie, “all harmonies are essential and lead the charge both in weighing choices and encouraging chances. Locking into materials is a gift, giving the voice that already exists. I try and channel what the divine provides. I’m just the filter.” Robbie Austin is an artist, a teacher, a father, and a husband – though that order fluctuates regularly. He lives in a 115-year-old house, in Lake Charles, Louisiana, the town where he was born, one-half mile from his high school alma mater, where he has taught for 20 years. Robbie holds a BFA from CalArts, an MFA in sculpture from UCLA, and takes pleasure in the routines of ordinary living.

Bieke Campos is a Mexican-American artist from Austin, Tx. As a first generation student, Bieke currently studies Studio Art with a concentration in painting at Texas State University. He is anticipated to graduate with a BFA in Studio Art in Fall 2026. His paintings are influenced by his environment, specifically his experiences and trauma with poverty in East Austin. He uses oil paint to portray contemporary subject matter, reflect Art History and social issues. Bieke's work has received notable awards including the Scholastic Gold Medal (2022) and Americans Visions award (2022).

Drew Carman is a multi-disciplinary artist and award-winning landscape architect living in Austin, Texas. While pursuing an MLA at the University of Georgia in the early 2000s, he was introduced to oil painting through the friend and mentorship of renowned painter, musician, and folklorist Art Rosenbaum. Like Art, he developed a multifaceted approach to creative work, overlapping storytelling through music, oil paintings, and in Drew’s case, even the design of public parks and open spaces. This diversity of mediums, what Carman refers to collectively as his "design cohort" ensures his artistic ideas have a variety of outlets to be developed, refined, destroyed, and finally realized.⁠

Marcella Colavecchio is an Italian-American contemporary visual artist whose work explores the tension between memory, identity, and constructed narratives. Known for her evocative paintings and photographs, Marcella's recent work takes a more intimate and cinematic turn, drawing deeply from her family’s immigrant history and the emotional textures of 20th-century Americana. Her latest series reimagines ordinary spaces like department stores, diners, and laundromats through the lens of her mother’s journey as a young Italian immigrant in 1970s America, infusing each setting with quiet longing, stylized composition, and retro color palettes. While her earlier work was defined by exaggerated lighting and vibrant, theatrical worlds, her current practice leans into stillness and restraint, merging nostalgic realism with painterly softness, influenced by both Wes Anderson’s visual symmetry and the emotive brushwork of figurative painters like Amy Dury. Whether she's working from vintage photographs or staging scenes inspired by personal history, Marcella’s paintings maintain an emotional undercurrent that speaks to belonging, labor, memory, and the delicate space between past and present. Marcella is largely self-taught but studied classical drawing at Lyme Academy of Fine Art under the master draftsman Deane G. Keller. Her work has garnered national attention with exhibitions at Anya Tish Gallery in Houston, TX, and Commerce Gallery in Lockhart, TX, and she was a finalist for the prestigious No Dead Artists exhibition at Jonathan Ferrara Gallery in New Orleans, LA.

B Shawn Cox is an artist living and working in Austin, Texas. He creates to the calm light of pop philosophy with fragments of the written word and iconography from our collective social mythology. As a native Texan, after a West Texas rural ranching upbringing, careers as an architect and an attorney, he finds meaning by creating works that resonate from his past but are transformed with the filter of urban life explores themes of contemporary social mythology by reassembling, transforming and reimagining icons. Cox has degrees in Architecture and Law but has maintained and developed an art practice for over 35 years. His vibrant and diverse art practice has been exhibited widely and his represented by numerous galleries. A large-scale solo museum exhibition entitled “WESTWARD, FAUX!” opened in 2024 near his hometown in Odessa, Texas. His work is in corporate, museum and private collections across the United States.

ANDREW WALKER

Andrew Walker is the Executive Director at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas.  Since his arrival in 2011, he has led the initiative to expand the museum’s impact, both as a research center and as a community destination.  Under his leadership the museum has also undergone a major renovation and programmatic transformation. Prior to his tenure at the Carter, he served as the Assistant Director for Curatorial Affairs and Curator of American Art at the Saint Louis Art Museum, where he oversaw a team of twelve curators and developed major exhibitions on African American artists in the collection, George Caleb Bingham and Joe Jones.  He received his PhD in Art History from the University of Pennsylvania and serves as the Chairman of the Board of the World Chess Hall of Fame in Saint Louis, Missouri.  

CRUZ ORTIZ

Cruz Ortiz is an American contemporary artist who uses multiple mediums to examine connections to nature, hope, healing, beauty, endurance, and the cosmos. Ortiz uses bold graphic screen prints, figurative abstract portraiture, dream-like landscape paintings, temporal guerrilla installations, utilitarian machines, hand-carved wooden sculptures, large-scale public art, video, and performance art. He is interested in the exhausting narratives searching for love and a sense of homeland. Currently, Ortiz has been exclusively working on painting as a romantic art historical form of documentation. It is by this archaic form that he is taking risks of institutionalizing subject matter. In a time where everything is digitalized and virtual, Ortiz is mixing oil paintings and painting from direct observation, while detecting the importance of painting for the future. He is also very interested in how painting pushes the critical contextualization of sociopolitical issues. His artistic projects aim to center the periphery to capture moments in history, especially the settler state that has tried, over and over, to erase from collective memory. With a great sense of urgency to record, preserve, and disseminate, he paints. 

LESLIE MOODY CASTRO

Leslie Moody Castro is an independent curator and writer whose practice is based on itinerancy and collaboration. She has produced, organized, and collaborated on projects in Mexico and the United States for nearly two decades. She is committed to creating moments of exchange and dialogue within exhibitions, is a co-founder of Unlisted Projects Residency, and Co-Lab Projects, and in 2022 served as inaugural curatorial fellow and curator in residence at New Mexico State University and Casa Otro Residency, respectively. She has been awarded two grants from the National Endowment of the Arts for her curatorial projects and a fellowship from the Department of State for her research on borders. Moody Castro has participated in numerous residencies including the Narva Artist Residency, Estonia, The Galveston Artist Residency, Casa Lü Residency, Tepoztlán, MARSO CDMX, and Fountainhead, Miami. She has curated biennials including the Amarillo Museum of Art Biennial in 2021, The Texas Biennial in 2018, and co-curator of the Aurora Biennial in 2024.  Moody Castro was guest editor of Glasstire Magazine from 2021—2024, is the founder of AtravesArte, and believes Mariachi makes everything better.