Tulsa Artist Fellowship presents Queen Rose: World Building by Tulsa Artist Fellowship alum and Alumni-in-Residence Kalup Linzy at Untitled Art, Houston, bringing together sculpture, painting, film, performance, and collaborative works in an expanded presentation rooted in Linzy’s ongoing narrative practice.

Drawing from Queen Rose Art House, the Tulsa-based project Linzy founded in 2021, the presentation extends a space that functions simultaneously as a public artwork, community art space, artist residency, and the artist’s home. Together, the works foreground Linzy’s longstanding commitment to narrative storytelling, community-building, artistic mentorship, and the creation of expansive fictional worlds.

Tulsa Artist Fellowship joins 96 galleries and organizations participating in the second edition of Untitled Art, Houston, taking place October 2–4, with a VIP and Press Preview on October 1 at the George R. Brown Convention Center.

At the center of the presentation is Little Africa in Ruins (2021), an acrylic and photo collage on canvas created during Linzy’s tenure as a Tulsa Artist Fellow. The work reflects Linzy’s engagement with historical memory and the legacy of Greenwood’s Black Wall Street, incorporating archival imagery within a vivid painterly landscape that merges commemoration with speculative storytelling.

Surrounding the painting, digitally generated collage portraits extend Linzy’s exploration of character, identity, and theatrical personae. The works map the evolving “family tree” of fictional characters Linzy inhabits across his films and performances—a narrative universe encompassing more than forty primary and thirty extended personas. Many are created through Linzy’s alter ego, Katonya, further blurring the boundaries between artist, character, and narrator.

A large-scale monitor presents Conversations Wit De Churen XVII: As da Art World Might Turn 2 (2025), part of Linzy’s long-running video series blending soap opera aesthetics, performance, humor, music, and cultural critique. The narrative centers on Katonya as a mid-career artist navigating digital visibility and professional precarity, using melodrama and musical interludes to examine the psychological dimensions of artistic labor in the contemporary art world.

Three freestanding sculptural figures—Hole in the Wall, I Appreciate You, and The Creator (2026)—activate the presentation as a stage-like environment. Rendered as silhouetted figures that recall cut-paper forms and theatrical props, the sculptures extend the stylized characters of Linzy’s films and paintings into physical space, inviting visitors to move through the installation as participants in his narrative world.

A salon-style presentation of small works by Shane Brown, Ebony Iman Dallas, Charisa Daugherty, Kieran Crutison, and Dianne Smith brings the collaborative ethos of Queen Rose Art House into the fair.

Their inclusion underscores Linzy’s practice not only as an artist but as a mentor and cultural facilitator committed to cultivating platforms for other artistic voices. Together, the presentation operates as a condensed translation of Queen Rose Art House—a site of storytelling, artistic production, collaboration, mentorship, and intergenerational exchange.

IN MY FEELINGS ABOUT IT ALL | PERFORMANCE

Untitled Art, Houston will host Kalup Linzy’s In My Feelings About It All, a performative fashion show developed as a component of Queen Rose: World Building with Tulsa Artist Fellowship.

The performance brings Linzy’s fictional persona Katonya onto the runway through drawings translated into all-over prints and painted garments. Accompanied by local models, Katonya extends Linzy’s interconnected worlds of character, fashion, music, performance, and visual art into a live experience at the fair.

Original music created for the performance will also be released as a five-song EP on streaming platforms, with apparel from the presentation available for purchase.

Read Untitled Art’s 2026 Press Announcement

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Kalup Linzy is a multidisciplinary artist whose work spans video, performance, music, painting, collage, and sculpture. Best known for his long-running, soap opera-inspired video works, Linzy uses humor, melodrama, music, and an expansive cast of fictional characters to explore identity, relationships, cultural memory, and the contemporary art world. Linzy’s work has been exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem, MoMA PS1, Prospect.1 New Orleans, and Hessel Museum of Art, and is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Studio Museum in Harlem, among others. A Tulsa Artist Fellowship alumnus and current Alumni-in-Residence, Linzy founded Queen Rose Art House in Tulsa in 2021, extending his artistic practice into a platform for community, collaboration, mentorship, and artistic production.