OUR MISSION IS TO EXHIBIT SOCIALLY-ENGAGED ART AND LITERATURE,
FOSTER DIALOGUE AND POLLINATE CREATIVITY. JOIN US!
KB Brookins: Freedom House
Open Saturdays & Sundays, 12pm to 5pm, through May 11th
And Thursday, April 18th, from 6pm to 9pm
If Freedom was a house, what would the house be like?
Freedom House: An Exhibition is a multimedia installation equipped with poems, film, furniture, and collages that simulate what freedom — embodied in everyone’s most delicate and personal place — looks, feels, and sounds like. The poems in this exhibit are from KB Brookins’ book of the same name (Freedom House - available for purchase at Prizer), and KB aims to make them more than what can exist on a page. What happens when we live what we language, when we speak of “art” as a verb? When a home displays everything we’ve been through, and everything we stretch for when we say buzzwords like “liberation”, “free _____”, “defund the police”, and the like? A home is a mind well-lived in. Art is one of the many tools we need in order to create a truly free world. So take a walk through KB’s Freedom House. It’s meant to be lived and loved in by you.
Join us for a reception with the artist on Sat, April 13th from 6pm to 9pm
About the artist: KB Brookins is a Black, queer, and trans writer, cultural worker, and installation artist from Texas. Their writing is featured in Poets.org, HuffPost, Teen Vogue, Poetry Society of America, Oxford American, and elsewhere. KB’s chapbook How To Identify Yourself with a Wound won the Saguaro Poetry Prize, a Writer’s League of Texas Discovery Prize, and an ALA Stonewall Honor Book Award. Their debut full-length poetry collection Freedom House was called “urgent and timely” by Vogue; named a Best Book of 2023 by Autostraddle, Texas Observer, Chicago Review of Books, and The Poetry Question; and won the ALA Barbara Gittings Literature Award for Poetry. KB’s debut memoir Pretty (Alfred A. Knopf) releases on May 28, 2024.
Their previous art installations include Y(our) Town and American History Vol. II. Y(our) Town is a piece KB created that incorporates the circle — as a symbol of repetition, perfection, and faces — as well as literal symbols to make maps of three cities: Fort Worth, TX, Austin, TX, and Provincetown, MA. It debuted as part of a group exhibition with the Fine Arts Work Center in August 2023. American History Vol. II was a group exhibition presented at RichesArt Gallery that KB participated in as a poet in February 2023. Freedom House: An Exhibition is KB’s first solo installation.
Freedom House: An Exhibition runs from April 13th - May 11th.
Follow KB online at @earthtokb.
“This space provides authentic care of visitors and the capacity to create social healing through creativity.”
PAST EXHIBITIONS
Andy St. Martin:Timed Lines & Otherworks
Timed Lines and Otherworks features new paintings from Austin-based artist Andy St. Martin. The show also includes a selection of his smaller drawings and explores how St. Martin has long used the practice of drawing to inform his painting. The opening will serve as the launch of a book of these drawings titled, Si Si. About the drawings included in the show and the book, St. Martin writes, “These drawings have lived on as powerful little documents of line and priority regarding my thinking and composing. My preoccupation allowed me to shed self-consciousness while drawing, and its other function took momentary priority. The results have an honesty, economy, efficiency and life that can be hard to access. Artists are often at their best when self-consciousness is not present. This combined with heightened consciousnesses is the ironic formula for strong stuff.”
Beth Schindler: Like Oil & Water, We Look Good Together in a Parking Lot
About the artist: Beth Schindler, (she/her), is an artist living and working in Austin, Texas. She works in textiles, video, photography and found materials, creating ephemeral installations and performances. She has shown her work in Austin, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Marfa, D.C. and San Francisco.
Schindler is a founding member of Homo Photo Club, QueerBomb and OUTsider Festival. Her driving motivation is crafting creative, liberating space for queers and lesbians to learn and connect in person, through events like Dyke Bar, Lesbian Wedding, Lesbian Touch-Dykes You Should Know, Austin Dyke March, Power Snatch, Free and Queer Cinema.
She is the new President of the non profit MASS Gallery in Austin, TX and has focused on making it the gayest community art space in town. She also has a collaborative art partnership with Lex Vaughn as FFTWINZ.
Dust Portals: Fort Lonesome’s 10th Anniversary Show
10 years ago, Kathie Sever launched Fort Lonesome at Prizer with an exhibition featuring her custom chainstitch embroidery work. Her distinctive and amazingly intricate pieces sold out immediately. Now, Fort Lonesome, with Kathie at the helm, has grown to include Christina Hurt Smith, Bekah DuBose, Lauren Chester, Amrit Khalsa, Michelle Devereux, Brian Allmand and Stephani Rose. They continue to make stunningly beautiful custom chainstitch embroidery clothing in an era of fast fashion while simultaneously pushing the boundaries of western wear.
Fort Lonesome writes, “As we approach the 10-year anniversary of Ft Lonesome, we are considering the arc not only of our last decade of rodeo tailorhood, but what the next era of the Fort might look like. Bringing the paradigm of western wear along for the ride and building off of the shoulders of our predecessors, we’d like to invite new heroic archetypes into our visual vernacular.”
Fort Lonesome exists within the physical boundaries of Austin, Texas. It is, however, more accurately constrained only by the ever-expanding dialogue between a small handful of curious luddites, collectively dragging the shrapnel of a forgotten craft into alignment with our contemporary era. While the invention of digitally deployed embroidery relegated most hand-cranked chainstitch embroidery machines to the basements and attics of pragmatic technicians, one erstwhile machine in Texas captured the imagination of a trained oil painter with a fixation on western wear. The resulting deus ex machina summoned forth from the ether a harmonious collection of individual artists, curious to tap the potential of these forgotten machines; meanwhile fortuitously concocting a collective visual whole vastly greater than the sum of it’s autonomous parts. Since, Fort Lonesome has blossomed into an evolving ecosystem, focusing primarily on maintaining a dedication to the continuum between art and fashion with a strong focus on heirloom quality and unexpected imagery. Lovingly, the Fort carries forth the torch of the Rodeo Tailor, aiming to midwife the legacy of the craft into its rightful place as an iconic evergreen opportunity to innovate, narrate and adorn.
Nick Flynn: Sacred Trash
Presented in Partnership with the Texas Book Festival
The show, titled Sacred Trash, highlights Flynn’s collage work. Flynn writes, “Throughout my life I’ve gathered ephemera (from sidewalks, brochures, magazines, children’s drawings). I cannot say why I do this, but I’ve always had a hard time ignoring an interesting scrap of paper, especially one with some scrawl on it. From this gathering I developed a collage practice, which continues to this day.”
During the pandemic, Flynn started writing a poem a day in response to his collages. These poems are now part of his forthcoming book, Low (Graywolf, 2023), from which Flynn will read from at the opening.
About the artist: Nick Flynn is a writer, poet and memoirist. Selected books include Some Ether (2000), Blind Huber (2002), The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands (2011), My Feelings (2015), Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (2004), Being Flynn (2005), The Ticking is the Bomb (2010), and The Reenactments (2013). Many of Flynn’s books are structured by using a collage technique, and he carries this format into his visual work.
Pictured: “Prayer” by Nick Flynn
Caroline Wright: The Garden, The Body
This show by Austin-born artist Caroline Wright traces her experience postpartum—twice!—during the pandemic. While navigating isolation, uncertainty, and emotional upheaval, Wright found her way, through the garden and the body. Nature and movement anchor her large-scale works on canvas. The exhibition also includes ink portraits and a 16-foot painted-over stage set titled, “Birth”. It’s an inclusive look at the many facets that shape this complex body of work, and work of the body.
About the artist: Caroline Wright dances across her large abstract paintings, bringing music and movement into the visual field. A native Austinite, Wright received a BA from Brown University, and an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. After Brown, Wright moved to Paris and lived in an abandoned state building in Belleville, with artists from all over the world. This imprinted in her the path of a life made through and for art-making. Wright returned to Austin in 2007 to participate in the art community of her hometown. She loves encouraging artists to take up space, explore deeply, and make a living with their art. As a new mother of two, Wright now considers the revolutionary and subversive potential in caretaking, creating, and talking openly about the mess that makes us.
Amanda Johnston: It’s Expensive
"It’s Expensive" features new visual work from 2024-2025 Texas Poet Laureate and artist Amanda Johnston. For this show, Johnston created and photographed herself wearing headpieces made of objects that represent the mental and physical burden of capitalism, with stunning results.
About the artist: Amanda Johnston earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine. She is the author of two chapbooks, GUAP and Lock & Key, and the full-length collection Another Way to Say Enter. Her work has appeared in numerous online and print publications, among them, Callaloo, Poetry Magazine, Puerto del Sol, Muzzle, and the anthologies, Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry and Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism. She has received fellowships, grants, and awards from Cave Canem Foundation, Hedgebrook, Tasajillo, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, The Watermill Center, and the Austin International Poetry Festival. She is a former Board President of Cave Canem Foundation, a member of the Affrilachian Poets, cofounder of Black Poets Speak Out, and founder of Torch Literary Arts. She is the 2024-2025 Texas Poet Laureate.
Amy Scofield: Descendency
The exhibition "Descendency" features new work from Austin-based artist Amy Scofield. Scofield is best known as a sculptor who works with leftover, discarded and found materials. She is also a prolific photographer of the urban debris all around us. For this show, she took individual images of discarded manufactured goods and evidence of consumerism and arranged each into a kaleidoscopic grid. Through this process, she transforms and morphs the original object – often beyond recognition. This exhibition depicts the evolution of objects; how what we manufacture then discard is still here, in one form or another.
About the artist: About the artist: Amy Scofield was raised in the Colorado mountains by a family who valued science, nature and imagination- fundamentals she relies on as an artist. Although she studied and practiced art in college, she earned an English degree which helps her hone and clarify ideas and thoughts so her art making can be unrestricted. In recent years she’s been invited to create large-scale outdoor installations in Texas, Colorado and France, each using recycled or repurposed elements that graphically express our tenuous relationship to our environment. Salvaged bike tubes, Mylar strips, decommissioned city water pipe, and fallen trees are some of the components she incorporates into striking, incongruous forms. In smaller works, she employs other found and scrounged materials such as stones, mud, plastic bottles, even her own shoes, as well as digital video and photography to examine ideas of balance, harmony, and perfection. Although she’s been in Texas since 1987, she thinks of herself as a mountain girl who thrives in nature and strives for clarity and connection.
Alejandra Almuelle on her work: The focus of my work is the human form. The body not only carries our genetic memory, but it is the biological archive of experience. We are historically shaped and conditioned by the environment and by the same socioeconomic structures we have participated in creating. The human body is both witness and event, as well as the field where these two aspects are at play. My work points to this juncture. Through the human form in its different iterations, I shift attention beyond form to what is implicit: the event, the experience that has taken place.
Abut the artist:Alejandra Almuelle was born and raised in Peru, a country in which the abundance of clay has made this medium a language of artistic expression. Clay is its own idiom, and being there, she began to speak it.But it wasn't until she moved to Austin that she started working with clay. Here she was able to develop her skills as a ceramic artist, establishing and maintaining a studio practice for the past 25 years. Almuelle is a self taught ceramic sculptor and potter, and addressing the functionality of the medium as well as its sculptural expression has been equally important for her.
Jorge Sanhueza-Lyon: SMITHVILLE, USA
This show featured portraits of residents of Smithville, Texas by photographer Jorge Sanhueza-Lyon. About the exhibit, Sanhueza-Lyon writes: “Photography for me has always been an excuse to boldly walk up to people and meet them. Here in Smithville, I had the opportunity to photograph about one hundred and fifty people and was introduced to many more folks. Everyone has been warm and inviting and willing to be vulnerable in front of the camera - willing to share things that maybe they haven't been asked to share in a while, or ever. To me, that’s the greatest gift anybody can give you - their attention and time and stories. I am grateful for the moments I have had with people here in Smithville and for all who were willing to take the risk of being photographed. With this show, I hope to give viewers an opportunity to get outside of their comfort zone, too, and look at themselves and their community in a new way.”
Gay Fay Memorial Exhibit
A life-long artist, Gay Fay’s catalog of consists of more than a thousand paintings, drawings, prints, and three-dimensional pieces, split roughly 50/50 between representational and abstract styles. For the exhibit, we selected over 40 pieces that display Gay’s amazing breadth of talent. The show also marked the launch of “Gay Fay: The Brooklyn Fuji Sketchbooks," written and compiled by Dan Kelly and designed by Austin artist Scott Rolfe. It includes drawings and collages from the sketchbooks that Gay contributed to the Brooklyn Art Library between 2012 and 2021. The pieces in the book are intimate and reflective, chamber-music complements to her big orchestral canvases.
These Walls
These Walls features paintings, photograms, videos, books, and installation works from artists Mark Menjivar and Rickey Cummings. Mark and Rickey have been working collaboratively for the past six years as Rickey fights for his freedom from Texas' death row. To learn more about Rickey please visit: www.iamrickeycummings.com
Rejina Thomas: Who Do You Think You Are?
In this exhibition of new and selected older works, Rejina “Reji” Thomas asks this question to herself and others: "Who do you think you are?" Filled with signs and symbols of personhood, these paintings explore the question of identity as well as the possibility for transformation and transcendence.
About the artist: Rejina Thomas is an acclaimed painter, glass artist, visionary and historian. Her work is held in private and public collections around the world. In 1995, Thomas reproduced the intricate glass work for the restoration of Texas Capitol building. She is also a community advocate and the founder of Pine Street Station, Graphic Glass Studios Inc, and JuJu Creative. She writes, “I have experienced the joy of being part of the unique artistic landscape of Austin for over four decades. I equate the needs of the producing artist to those of the fish needing water or the bird needing air. The artist needs their environment. The artist’s frontier is defined by their use of space, which is virtually unlimited when paired with curiosity, manifesting the creative spirit. My goal is to have the artwork be a destination not only for observation but also participation.”
Gretchen Phillips: It’s Worth It
With the show “It’s Worth It,” Gretchen Phillips focuses on the domestic interior landscape. These intimate new photographs were created in response to the constraints imposed by the pandemic.
Phillips writes, “I have to revel in the little things. The graceful stretch of my cat's legs and curved tail. The generosity of texture that light through trees through window onto sheetrock provides. All of the simple items of domesticity rendered somehow magical due to sunlight interacting with their opacity. Can these sights give me feelings of awe and even comfort in these benumbed, quarantined, catastrophic, anxious end times? Actually, yes, they do.”
Jorge Sanhueza-Lyon: Vecino
For over 25 years, Sanhueza-Lyon has lived and photographed in the same East Austin neighborhood, all along creating strikingly beautiful portraits of his neighbors. "Vecino" includes selected portraits from this 25 year period.
Sanhueza-Lyon writes, “With Vecino, I look to explore the distinctive sense of spirit that defines this neighborhood. For me, this spirit has always been fostered by my neighbors. The stories of these kindred spirits, old-timers, families and folks have shaped my sense of home, and together, they are my “Genius Loci”, the keepers of the spirit of the neighborhood. Over the past two decades, I’ve watched neighbors come and go, businesses open and businesses close, homes get demolished and new ones built in their place. Vecino is a way for me to chronicle and honor my neighbors and the stories we carry collectively. The portraits and interviews, both past and present, are a living narrative of the place I call home.”
HAS BEEN: JB Fry, Ana García Jácome, Carlos Ortiz-Gallo & Unyimeabasi Udoh
HAS BEEN is a group exhibition of new and pre-existing works by artist residents from Chicago's ACRE Projects. Founded in 2010, ACRE is a non-profit organization designed to support emerging artists as they develop, discuss, and present their artistic practices.
Objects and images by Fry, García Jácome, Ortiz-Gallo, and Udoh spotlight both public and private archives of what-has-been that just aren't cutting it anymore. Each artist in their own way has responded to glaring lacks with human-scaled vulnerability, poignant variation, and loving homage.
Pictured: Unyimeabasi Udoh, “altar head for an oba (my brother)" (detail, 2018). Tetrapytch of eight silkscreen prints on matte Duralar, 14"x11" (each panel; dimensions of the arrangement vary).
Stephen Pruitt: A Cartography of Solitude
Stephen Pruitt is best known in the Austin performing arts community for his stellar work as a scenic and lighting designer. A Cartography of Solitude highlights another one of his light-based talents: photography. Pruitt writes, “For years, I’ve taken long adventures with just my camera and journal for company, and in those travels, I’ve experienced some stunning places that seem to revel in their remoteness, in their quiet, in their inhospitality, unless you’re willing to accept their terms – no easy meals, no water, no roads – stay only as long as you can be self-sufficient. The photographs and stories that make up this installation are both an exploration of those places – places that emphasize how small and ephemeral we are, how big the world is – and the many different ways that we experience solitude internally.”
Mikael Owunna: Infinite Essence
Equipped with his camera, an ultraviolet light, and fluorescent body paint, photographer Mikael Owunna sets out to recast the Black body as an incarnation of the eternal cosmos, making visible the divinity inherit in Blackness. His series, “Infinite Essence,” responds to pervasive media images of Black people dead and dying and articulates an alternative vision of the Black body as transcendent, ethereal vessels. Owunna explores the transfigured vision of the Black body in relationship with West African spiritual and cosmological systems, particularly Igbo and Dogon, with each image referencing myths and divine principles and connecting Black bodies of the present across space and time to ancestral conceptions of the universe.
Andy St. Martin: The Weight
"The Weight" is an exhibition of new paintings from Austin artist Andy St. Martin.About the work, St. Martin states, "Like all my paintings, collage and drawings, these new ones are a chain reaction of reactions,reflections, decisions (about them, paintings, and life and light, literally). They are my activity, evaluation, commitment incarnate, and contract with myself. Hence, the imagery, process and flexibility of reading are co-present. To some with what’s done, an image is apparent. Others see abstract form, pattern, obscurity. Regardless, the weight one travels is perhaps my commitment to a life in art, making and for caring for it all."
Savannah Kumar: the margins come to center
In the exhibition, the margins come to center, community artist and civil rights lawyer Savannah Kumar displays the abstract blueprints of carceral control. Kumar’s mixed-media and participatory pieces serve as reminders that systems built on confinement, separation, and surveillance reinvent themselves, often using the guise of reform to ensnare entire communities. What are the dimensions of a cage that reproduces itself again and again, expanding from detention centers and prisons to streets and homes? Who does the state bring into its tight physical control, and how much violence will we ignore? A collective framework for imagining a freer world is infused throughout the margins come to center exhibition.
people the We
"people the We" is a collaborative exhibition by the artists Adrian Aguilera and Betelhem Makonnen conceived in the wake and on-going aftermath of the Black Lives Matter led uprisings that were reignited in May 2020.
Opening on the eve of the 2020 watershed presidential elections, people the We offer text-based works, cyanotypes, video, installations and a publication that engage foundational questions and ideas of citizenship – who belongs and who doesn’t? And, whose dreams are whose nightmares?
Mary Koniavitis
Between Myth & Dream
"Between Myth and Dream" features paintings and drawings completed since Mary Koniavitis migrated to the United States four years ago. Her art practice merges mythology with memory and subconscious states of being. Mary’s Greek background is reflected throughout the artwork, particularly her fascination with Ancient Greek mythology that is deeply embedded in the iconography.
Carl Smith: The Path of Light
The Path of Light is a site-specific painting and mix-media installation by Austin painter Carl Smith. With the use of string, Smith draws a line in space from one painting to another. The result is a study in connectivity, drawing and composition. Smith also attaches newsprint, folded paper and other three-dimensional materials to the individual paintings as a way to “explore what expressivity locked in form could look like.”
Rejina Thomas
This exhibit includes selected paintings by the legendary Austin artist, visionary and community advocate Rejina Thomas. Her paintings radiate energy, holding both the past and the present within the container of their frames, blurring the line between then and now.
Gary Floyd: New Work
About the Artist: In Austin in 1980, Floyd co-founded and was the lead singer of the punk band The Dicks. As an openly gay punk musician in the 80's, Floyd is considered a queer icon and music pioneer.
Rehab El Sadek: Transient
With Transient, artist Rehab El Sadek continues her exploration into issues related to immigration, belonging, communication and language. Utilizing sound installation, photography and the written word, El Sadek meditates on residential spaces and our relationship to them and to each other.
Farmer as Artist
Now in it’s seventh year, Farmer as Artist explores the link between creativity and farming by exhibiting the artwork of Central Texas farmers.
Home Stories
Presented by the Young Women of GirlForward + Austin Bat Cave
Global Housewarming
Featuring the film photography of Homo Photo Club members Gretchen Phillips, Deb Norris and Beth Schindler
A Space Opens Up
A collaboration between poet Shelley Herbert & painter Carl Smith
Journeying: Stella LJ Alesi
Progressing from Alesi’s earlier highly detailed, long hand abstraction, Journeying moves in the direction of simplicity. Simple, monumental, stacked shapes speak quietly of the lived experienced and the constant micro adjustments made continuously as a need for balance and a recognition of interconnectedness is achieved.
Karrie Hovey:
In Danger
Featuring environmental Karrie Hovey & literary writers Lize Burr, Dreux Carpenter, Desiree Evans, Charlotte Gullick, Donna Johnson, Emmy Pérez, Naomi Shihab Nye, Rose Smith, Robin Storey Dunn, Natalia Sylvester & Kirk Wilson.
(images by Karrie Hovey, text by Dreux Carpenter)
I Will Vote
Multi-media exhibition by John Fiege
Drew Riley: Gender Portraits
6th Annual Farmer as Artist Show
Photo by Christian Sacra
Raul de Lara
How do you know you're / your home?
Andy St Martin
PARALLEL NOTES (from the big picture)
Gary Floyd: The Elder Child
Paintings & Drawings by Gary Floyd
There is no audience
Tax form paintings and other abstractions by Carl Smith
ROUX
Ann Johnson, Rabéa Ballin, Delita Martin and Lovie Olivia
Together, the artists of ROUX examine cultural and societal issues of genealogy, feminism, identity, & other topics affecting women of the African Diaspora.
Image: If Spirits Danced,by Delita Martin
Birds’ Nests and Refuge: Impermanent Homes
Photographs by Sharon Beals paired with literary writers on immigration.
Farmer as Artist
Annual Show
Local Central Texas farmers share photography, painting, sculpture, mixed media, poetry, fiber arts, metals, woodworking, and more.
Painting by Carol Ann Sayle of Boggy Creek Farm
HOMO PHOTO CLUB:
Is Everyone OK But Me?
Gretchen Phillips, Deb Norris and Beth Schindler
CARE/GIVER: In Memory’s Hold
30 artists, writers & community members explore a significant caregiving relationship--or the meaning of care itself. Click the image to see more work.
Painting by Fidencio Duran
MOVED ACCORDINGLY
Paintings and Works on Paper by Andy St. Martin
Israel/Palestine:
An Act of Seeing
Photographs by Mocha Jean Herrup
Farmer as Artist
Annual Community Show
Paintings by Carol Ann Sayle
Ancestral Souvenirs
The Sun-Drawn Work of Damien Noll
with Paintings by Scott Ewen
A Hurricane Without Water
Google Street View Images of Detroit, 2008 to 2015 by Alex Alsup
HOMO PHOTO CLUB:
Ménage à Process
Photo by Gretchen Phillips
Poet-to-Poet: A Friendship in Letters
by Abe Louise Young and Alan Shefsky
Ground Songs
Collage & paintings by Andy St. Martin
Our Piece of Earth
Photos by Steve Moakley with The Multicultural Refugee Coalition
Quandam Forest, Quandam Sea
Noelle King
Kathie Sever: Ft Lonesome
Spanning Structures
Photographs by Dan Lobdell
