Juxtaposed. A man and a woman. Two artists who have been married for nearly 40 years. Both sculptors. But he works in the abstract, playing with geometric shapes, lines, reflections and logic. She is compelled to tell stories and talk about politics, working in images inspired by emotion, experience and nature.

Frances Bagley and Tom Orr are prominent Dallas-based artists whose work is showing in the “Juxtaposed” exhibition at Houston’s Andrew Durham Gallery through Saturday, December 20. This is a compelling and engaging art show, capturing the brain and the heart.

Though Orr works in the abstract and Bagley is figurative, there is overlap. Particularly in the emphasis on minimal lines, shadows and reflections. And they help each other.

Farmhouse Isolation

Bagley says she started out trying to be “strictly abstract,” but she had to “let the narrative creep in.” Growing up on a farm in Tennessee, she made her own dolls — even their houses and furniture — while experiencing the loneliness and longing for companionship that can come with the isolation of distant farmhouses. 

This emotional history is embodied in her work. In The Escape, 2019-2025, a vaguely feminine fabric form floats high above a neighborhood of tiny homes, the community that Bagley longed for. (Note: Her mother, a high school art teacher, let her stay home from school to create.) 

In The Place, 2025, a cast bronze that stands about two feet tall, a tiny house is placed in the embrace of weaving, branchlike forms. As Bagley explains, it represents the secret refuge — the special place in the woods where she sought solace as a child.

Other works, such as The Reach, 2015-2025, use actual branches of a pecan tree, but the outstretched branches end in tiny reaching hands.

Lessons From the Salvage Yard

Orr, on the other hand, was raised in an urban salvage yard. His father owned a company in Dallas that tore down houses and resold the parts. His work reflects that background, particularly in the focus on the intrinsic qualities of the materials. Bent, twisted and crisscrossed pieces of steel, copper and aluminum, along with transparent plastic, are placed directly on the ground.

They distort and trick the viewer’s vision, playing with depth perception, transparency, shadow and mirror, dark and light, order and chaos. They create abrupt contrasts, collapsing regular squares and precise geometric forms into dueling lines and crumpled shapes.

Orr says he likes to put “materials together that normally wouldn’t go together” and “make them do what they normally wouldn’t do on their own.”

In other small sculptures of wood, metal and plastic, solids compete with vacuums, heavy with light. They toy with logic. In Small Stairs, 2021-2025, a model of a much larger piece, see-through squares of thin metal wire support steps of rectangular pieces of wood that elongate and solidify the wire pattern beneath.

The show also includes two-dimensional works. Orr discovered castoff advertising images from the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly. He began tearing apart the images, reassembling and printing them in cryptic, intriguing ways that play on contrasting colors and the once-recognizable shapes, rearranging the commercial message into a sort of aesthetic mind game.

Both Bagley and Orr have had major shows at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas in the past year. Orr’s large installation, titled Atlas, engaged with “optical phenomena that shift and change in relation to the viewer’s movement.” A photograph from Bagley’s exhibition at the Nasher, “Shangri-La” is included in the Durham Gallery show.

Bagley is a founding member of the feminist art collective Toxic Shock, a group that started with five Dallas women (it’s now four, one unfortunately died), who have been meeting, talking, cooking and making political art together for nearly 50 years. Reminiscent of that is The Collar, 1980-2025, a small piece by Bagley in the current show. The cast bronze lace collar evokes the iconic Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, famous for her signature collar, and the controversy surrounding her refusal to resign. 

The Nasher in Dallas will be hosting an installation created by Toxic Shock in the fall of 2026. It is set to open on October 3, 2026.

Bagley and Orr also work together. This wife and husband team created the sets and costume designs for Verdi’s Nabucco, which opened The Dallas Opera’s 50th anniversary season in 2006.

“We think a lot alike,” Bagley says. “We feed off each other.”

Juxtaposed will be on view through this Saturday, December 20 at Houston’s Andrew Durham Gallery. Learn more here.