Library Street Collective (Booth G8) is pleased to showcase new work by Basie Allen and Tyrrell Winston at the Dallas Art Fair 2026 from April 16 – 19, 2026.

Central to Allen’s practice is a transfer process inspired by historical monotype techniques, as well as his father’s history in darkroom photography. The presented works are rooted in a form of material alchemy, utilizing utilitarian surfaces including camping tarps and iridescent shower curtains as matrices. He builds up paint in thick, successive layers until the medium is substantial enough to be peeled away and mounted onto muslin or linen.

Winston’s ‘Skewers’ are assemblages featuring linearly placed discarded basketballs, linked in predetermined compositions. Winston collects the basketballs and preserves the disfigured shapes in which he finds them. Once gathered together, the morphed spherical shapes take on a choral nature, collaboratively bringing forth stories of their past—embedded histories that have since become abstracted, yet linger as broad documentation of human existence.

Place is a primary influence for both Allen and Winston, who extract meaning from the remnants of the public sphere to reconstruct new stories. The artists converge in their use of mundane, domestic materials to challenge the notion that the sublime is a luxury reserved for the natural world. By elevating the objects of their urban environments, Winston and Allen argue that the grit of the city is as spiritually and materially significant as a traditional landscape.

The pair’s practices further overlap through the labor-intensive fabrication of their works, where the physicality of the hand and body is central to the final form. Drawing on his carpentry background, Allen hand-builds modular frames that function as an extension of the work’s narrative. These panels allow him to navigate his dyslexia by rearranging the composition like movable text, while his gestural brushwork acts as a defiant breakout from the “grid” of systemic confinement he witnessed during a decade of teaching poetry in prisons. For Winston, his process is two-fold: while the basketballs exist as the central subject, the bespoke self-engineering of their armatures is just as essential to the final composition as the sourcing of the material itself. Through trial and error, Winston has over time developed a standardized and rigorous production method that situates craftsmanship at the heart of his output.

Exhibiting visually distinct bodies of work both autobiographical in nature and reflective of contemporary life, the presentation suggests that the identity of a place is inseparable from the work required to build it.