Fall exhibitions / Texas Biennial 2024

“Where should we go after the last border? Where should the birds fly after the last sky?”

Texas is constructed territory, therefore unstable borders and occupations shape communities and their participants. Systems and structures rise and fall. The collapse produces dust and dirt, yielding material histories written in detritus and debris. In its eighth iteration, the 2024 Texas Biennial: The Last Sky, looks to the still-lingering dust to ask: What happens after the last line in the sand is drawn?

The Last Sky–with its title borrowed from Mahmoud Darwish's poem “Earth Presses against Us”–situates the clouds as a gathering space in response to the rising and falling structures that seed myth, signal warnings, or transpose matter across borderless terrain. We look to the levitating clouds of dust, yet to settle, anticipating its potential for new routes back to the land. The process unveils artist-led practices for a different type of future in Texas, which reminds us that we already have what we need to shape the world and make change.

Through a collaborative and non-hierarchical approach, Erika Mei Chua Holum, Ashley DeHoyos Sauder, and Coka Treviño co-organized the eighth iteration of the Texas Biennial through friendship, reciprocity, and mutual support. The selected artists presenting works, performances, and activations at the Blaffer Art Museum include Olaniyi Akindiya, Stacey Allen, Mashal Awais, Anahita Bradberry, Essentials Creative, Farima Fooladi, Ian Gerson, Jessica Carolina González, Guadalupe Hernandez, Antonio Lechuga Jr., Gabriel Martinez, R Eric McMaster, Open MFA, Gil Rocha, S Rodriguez, Lisa Saldivar, Corey De’Juan Sherrard Jr., and Isabelle Vik.

From October 17–19, 2024, the Blaffer Art Museum will host the 2024 Texas Biennial Performance and Music Nights entitled, Hymns of the Spirit, organized by Goodnews Nwankwo.

Over eighty artists with significant connections to Texas are participating in the 2024 Texas Biennial: The Last Sky. Learn more.

Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions
October 11, 2024–March 9, 2025

Opening reception: October 11, 6–8 pm, performance by Indira Allegra at 7pm
Artist talk with Jarod Lew: October 8, 2024, 4pm

KADIST San Francisco and the Blaffer Art Museum are pleased to announce the exhibition Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions, a two-venue exhibition with programming examining the shifts in time, ritual, memory-keeping, and community-building in artistic practices in the years 2020–2024 tied to the COVID-19 pandemic. The exhibition traces the magnified impacts of the pandemic upon artist communities across the world, highlighting the cyclical nature of improvised, responsive, yet sustained systems of mutual aid, information sharing, and embodied knowledge throughout a prolonged moment of global crisis.

The years 2020-2024 began with the onset of the COVID-19 global pandemic, which continues to expose systemic inequities that disproportionately affect historically marginalized communities. Yet the pandemic also brought to the fore ongoing and interrelated crises, including the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic and the many societal and carceral forces that drive Black and Brown grief. Artists in the exhibition assume the role of informal narrators or archivists for mimetic memory, working against power structures that continue to sanction personal isolation, cultural amnesia, and planetary extinction. 

The exhibition at the Blaffer includes Indira Allegra, Richard Bell, Tony Cokes, Kiri Dalena, rafa esparza, Jes Fan, Alicia Henry, Every Ocean Hughes, Jarod Lew, Helina Metaferia, Eduardo Navarro, Rajni Perera, Michael Rakowitz, Marwan Rechmaoui, Varunika Saraf, Pangrok Sulap, Kenneth Tam, James Webb. Artworks by Gil Rocha and Gabriel Martinez from the 2024 Texas Biennial are intertwined into the exhibition. Learn more about Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions at KADIST San Francisco 

Founded in 1973, the Blaffer Art Museum endeavors to further the understanding of contemporary art through exhibitions, publications, and public programs. The museum is a catalyst for creative innovation, experimentation, and scholarship. Its exhibitions and programs are free and open to the public, create community through dialogue and participation, and inspire an appreciation for the visual arts as a vital force in shaping contemporary culture.