Anat Ronen: Urban Legend is a solo artist exhibition on view at the Pearl Fincher Museum of Fine Art until January 11, 2020. Anat Ronen is a self-taught urban artist born in Israel who has resided in the United States since 2008. Typically specializing in mural art and street painting, which are public large-scale art pieces, this exhibition presents a collection of digital art, large scale wall art, and an interactive 3D installation to bring the feeling of urban art to a museum space. While the large-scale art included in the show was impressive, the large variety of content in a small space led the exhibition to feel disjointed rather than legendary. The exhibition itself focuses on bringing urban art into a museum setting. Urban art is defined as all visual art forms arising in urban areas, being inspired by urban architecture or present urban lifestyle. This includes graffiti, street art and murals as its most popular forms. Ronen’s show is meant to find a bridge between the public setting of urban art and the indoor setting of the museum. When first entering the exhibit space, a placard of information about Ronen’s life, work, and style is situated next to a television screen playing time lapses and slide shows of previously completed large-scale works. Familiar figures of Lego men, Disney Princesses, and Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (1665) scroll by in a new form of chalk and paint on concrete and brick. Above the television, the definition of “Urban Legend” has been painted on the wall- a modern story of obscure origin and with little to no supporting evidence that spreads spontaneously in varying forms and often has elements humor, moralizing, or horror. It becomes easy to see these three elements at play in the content of the artworks selected and created for this exhibition. Following along the same wall, four square prints of digital paintings complete the wall. Strangely, the four images don’t seem to have any correlation in content. The first work is a portrait of Willy Nelson followed by a brown Great Horned owl, then a peeled orange, and finally the head and torso of a vulture. Where can a connection be found between a country music star and a bare piece of citrus fruit? Seemingly nowhere. Each digital painting is noticeably smooth on their printed surfaces along with the high quality of each of the digitized rendered brush strokes. Unfortunately, compared to all other works in the exhibition, these four works stick out as extra, filler, seemingly superficial. The next wall contains a series of differing subjects, yet there was something to be seen in their message. The first work, Contemporary Portraits (2016), is a series of six 12-inch by 12-inch portraits in mixed media on cardboard. The portraits themselves include both young and old sitters. All are smiling and all but one gaze back at the viewer. Each portrait seems to tell a story of a moment in time between the sitter and the artist. The placard does not explicitly name the six people depicted but explains that they were students and staff of Blackshear Elementary selected for a mural that did not have enough room for everyone to be depicted. Each square is very visibly cardboard, and no attempts have been made to prime the surface or hide the bare cardboard were by the artist. The arrangement of these portraits together gives off a sense of inclusion, community, and happiness. Directly next to Contemporary Portraits is another portrait, but it is rendered in a very different manner. Instead of a local Houston resident, Serena (2019) depicts the face of tennis star Serena Williams staring back at the viewer. Her pink leopard printed tennis shirt and headband frame her face as she states in deep concentration. Judging by her depicted body language and slightly agape mouth, the viewer can sense her movement in an intense part of a match. Serena Williams has long been heralded as an exceptional athlete, but in this work, it feels as though Ronen is commenting on more current events. Serena Williams continues to dominate the women’s tennis world, but she has also taken a stand against rules and regulations that are unfair to athletes and not up to modern standards. The look in Serena’s eyes can be described as nothing short of fierce, determined, and not backing down. While measurements were not included on the wall label’s description, the work itself was quite large. The framing and zooming in on Serena’s face created a larger than life feeling that served to further empower the subject. Ronen’s inclusion of this work beside Contemporary Portraits gave a wonderful juxtaposition of local versus national recognition of people. The final work included on the second wall is the first of two site-specific murals painted directly on the wall during the beginning of the exhibition. This show contains two site specific murals both in the corner of a walled in space and viewable at the same time. The first is an extremely larger than life armadillo holding a Texas bluebonnet in its mouth as it walks. The armadillo itself takes up the whole of the wall’s allotted space, from ground to ceiling. Much like Ronen’s other wall murals shown on the television when entering, the texture and color of the animal is hyper realistic. The armadillo even has a shadow that is seemingly cast not by some ambiguous light source, but by the museum lighting itself furthering its realistic feeling. According to the wall label, this mural was created during and in the days after the start of the exhibition’s opening. Visitors were welcomed to witness the creation of such a large work of art and were invited to talk with the artist. This is an aspect of urban art that is not so easy to recreate in a gallery space- the publicness, the accessibility of sight, and the ability to watch the artist at work. While these aspects have been brought into galleries in increasingly new ways, the mural aspect of urban art is often commercialized in order for artists to pay the bills. In the case of this work as well as the second site-specific mural Ronen included in the show, the content of the work is left to the artist’s delight. On the adjacent wall, the second site-specific mural, titled Toys Will be Toys(Plastic Water Gun) (2019), is painted onto the museum wall much the same as the Armadillo. This time however, Ronen clearly depicts ideas and opinions into her work but in a playful way. The work itself is a depiction of a large orange and red plastic toy water gun. The depiction is once again hyper realistic, with the museum lighting once again exemplifying the choice in placement of shadows and highlights for the gun. Ronen was careful to depict a sense of translucency in both the gun itself, seeming to be made of clear plastic with several opaque pieces such as the bright orange safety cap and trigger and darker black innerworkings of the water firing mechanisms. The shadow section also has highlights of red and muddled warm gray tones to give an implied transparency to the gun. The title of this work itself leads to questions of gender and hypermasculinity, but the content on first sight is both humorous, playful and a horrific reminder of the crisis of school shootings in America. This is indeed a child’s toy, however it is also a daunting thought when compared to what it is meant to symbolize alongside what it has easily come to symbolize in contemporary society. This mural is not the only piece to touch on the idea of horror. A tryptic of paintings from Ronen’s Real Life Superheroes series sit aside the mural and wrap the end of the show. The images are renderings of famous photographs of Ruby Bridges, Jesse Owens, and Rosa Parks that Ronen expects the audience to be familiar with. While all three of these images are depicted in black and white, just like the actual photographs themselves, Ronen’s added in specific super hero elements of each are brightly colored like the super hero they represent. The first panel, Wonder Ruby (Ruby Bridges) reimagines the infamous scene of six year-old African American Ruby Bridges walking into a previously all-white school, marking the end of legal segregation in the public schooling system. Bridges’ black dress has been reimagined as a bright red and blue wonder woman costume complete with golden lasso in place of her school bag. The middle panel is titled Captain Jesse (Jesse Owens). Owens was an African American Olympic track star whose track and field records won him four gold medals in 1936 in Berlin. In attendance of these games was Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi Party. By winning four events, Owens not only made a political statement at the time against the fascist and racist ideals of the Nazi party, but also left a legacy of grace and kindness in the face of adversity. Truly like Captain America, who is supposed to be the ideal American in ways beyond physical abilities, Owens holding the iconic shield is more fitting than initially meets the eye. The final panel of the tryptic reimagines Rosa Parks holding not her booking number into jail, but instead the bright yellow and red Superman logo. Parks was a key figure in the civil rights movement and is seen as a symbol of doing what is right in the face of injustice. Associating her with the most influential and well-known superhero of all time attests to Parks’ importance in history. Unlike her portraits, Ronen’s murals are not meant to be permanent even if the walls they are painted on are more than permanent. After the exhibition, the murals will be painted over and a new exhibition will take over the space the armadillo and the toy gun once so proudly held attention. It feels a bit sad to consider the destruction or erasure of this artwork, but Ronen believes that “temporary art is a practice of learning to let go- it can’t be purchased and taken home. It’s more about process and audience connection.” Truly, the questions posed by Ronen’s work in connection to society at large serve to humor, moralize, and even reveal the horror of the past.