Guest Artist Project
Each year, Making A Mark® partners with a local, professional artist to host a series of workshops with patients and their siblings from Texas Children’s Cancer and Hematology Center to create a collaborative, visual arts piece to be featured in the annual Making A Mark® exhibit.
The 2026 Making A Mark Featured Guest Artist is Zulma Vega.
A Surface to Meaning
2026
A Surface to Meaning | Artwork Statement
At the center of this piece is a single word: happy. It wasn’t chosen by me. It emerged, workshop after workshop, from the children themselves, spoken more often than any other word when asked to name what they carry at the moment, even through illness and recovery and/or supporting a loved one through the process.
That word now stands sculpted at the heart of the canvas, formed from tissue paper, the same material that sits at a child’s bedside, within reach, held out when tears come down. I take that ordinary object and press it into something else: letterforms, sculptural and lasting, made from the very thing that once caught someone’s grief. The material doesn’t hide what it was. It carries that history into the shape of the word itself.
Around it, letters scatter without order, the noise every child moves through before landing on the one word that held. Happy is what remained. Beneath and around the letterforms lies a collage built from dozens of individual abstract paintings, color used as feeling, gesture used as release. Each child’s page became a fragment of the larger surface; none of them are visible as discrete works anymore, but all of them are present, layered into the ground the letters stand on.
A Surface to Meaning takes the object present at the hardest moments, tissue, reached for when there’s nothing else to say, and turns it into the thing that says everything: happy.
Zulma Vega
Contributing Artists
Aaron, age 10
Addison, age 8
Aiden Geoff, age 10
Alana, age 9
Alejandro, age 11
Alexander, age 10
Allison, age 7
Amiliyah, age 16
Ana, age 9
Anabel, age 10
Ari, age 8
Arlette, age 3
Aubrey C., age 11
Caiden, age 10
Cairo, age 3
Cameron, age 9
Christian, age 8
Dante, age 9
Draya, age 11
Eiden, age 9
Eli, age 11
Elina, age 12
Elizabeth, age 9
Emily, age 8
Eva, age 10
Evan, age 9
Ezekiel, age 9
Fitz, age 9
Gael, age 11
Gavin, age 11
Genesis, age 11
Gianna, age 10
Jakob, age 7
Juliana, age 9
Juliette, age 12
Kaiden, age 10
Kinsley, age 10
Kyndalyn, age 12
Levi, age 4
Liam, age 12
Lillian, age 8
Lilliann, age 11
Liya, age 12
Matteo, age 9
Mauricio, age 10
Mykala, age 9
Nicholas, age 10
Olivia, age 7
Omar, age 8
Omar, age 8
Owen, age 12
Quinn, age 8
Raeda, age 7
Rayhan, age 9
Robert, age 8
Roger, age 9
Rolando, age 16
Sanvee, age 12
Savannah, age 9
Scarlett, age 8
Sydney, age 11
West, age 7
Xavian, age 10
Zulma Vega | Artist Bio
Zulma Vega is a Houston-based artist whose sculptures and installations explore ancestral cultures, our connection to the land, and the relationships between humans and non-human beings. Her work is rooted in the belief that all beings are active participants in a living, evolving world, a philosophy she extends into her process: often inviting communities to shape a piece collaboratively, whether through collective assembly, shared material-making, or direct physical interaction, and leaving the final work open to completion through viewer engagement. Vega was awarded a spot in Round 19 of the Lawndale Art Center Artist Studio Program in Houston (2024–2025). She has exhibited at numerous venues throughout Texas, including the Holocaust Museum Houston, the Glassell School of Art, the Blaffer Art Museum, the Houston Symphony, the Modern Art Gallery, the Amarillo Museum of Art (Biennial 600), Monterroso Gallery and Contemporary at Blue Star in San Antonio (Contemporary Month Perennial, 2024). She received the Cynthia Wood Mitchell Fellowship (2022–2023) and holds an MFA from the University of Houston. Vega also serves as a teaching artist at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. www.zulmavega.com