Becca Waugh

I am a Fort Worth, Texas based artist who creates playful, colorful work rooted in Texas and American culture, using humor as both invitation and commentary. I’m drawn to the icons we collectively recognize — symbols that shape regional identity, nostalgia, ignorance, and belonging. The corn dog era really began as a one-off, large-scale piece that elicited a jovial response while I had an art booth set up at ArtsGoggle in the spring of 2021. Even though David Bowie said, “you should never play to the peanut gallery,” I couldn’t help but enjoy getting laughs and reactions from the swarms of art fest attendees who walked by all day. That response sparked my curiosity and pushed me to create more of this Texas-rooted, nostalgic fair food as a means of artistic experimentation. I began making smaller grayscale corn dog and hot dog paintings topped with a bright red or yellow “ketchup” or “mustard” swirl — sometimes a combination of both, or even green “relish.” When creating custom ‘dog’ paintings, I let the patron choose the topping (the condiment swirl) and the sides (the color or pattern of the canvas). At a few live market events, I leaned fully into the concept. I wore a chef hat, created a menu board explaining how to order a custom painting, and used a $5 garage-sale grill to display the plain, undressed dogs before painting them live. In the fall of 2024, I feel the corn dog era truly took shape with my HalloWEENIES series — spooky corn dogs infused with horror iconography like Frankenstein, ghosts, skulls, and references to films such as Scream and Beetlejuice. The HalloWEENIES pushed the corn dog into a new direction. I was no longer only playing with the object itself; I was merging corn dogs (and hot dogs) with broader pop culture themes, and I shifted primarily to watercolor instead of the acrylic-on-canvas grayscale works. I began to enjoy this fusion of iconography because it allowed me to blend humble, cute nostalgia with darker themes — both undeniably American. This merging also gave me space to reflect on my own layered history: white American and Texan roots intertwined with my identity as the granddaughter and daughter of Ukrainian immigrants and Holocaust survivors. While some of my work appears purely cutesy or celebratory, American identity — like any national identity — is complex, rooted in both joy and tragedy. The corn dog becomes a playful vessel through which I can hold both.