In my current role as Public Programs & Interpretive Projects Manager, I focus on the development and production of live programs and performances, the establishment of cultural partnerships and collaborations with peer institutions nationwide, and the creation of interpretive resources. These experiences and tools expand audience appreciation and understanding of TCA’s exhibitions, artworks, and sites. Currently, I am also overseeing the development of a new app offering multi-media content that explores the ecological and historical significance of Laguna Gloria.

Part of an eight-person museum leadership team, in my initial role as Senior Director of Programs & Engagement I oversaw four public-serving departments: Public Programs, Education, Visitor Engagement & The Art School. While in this role, I worked in collaboration with a team of programming, education, and Art School employees, as well as curators in the Exhibitions department, to produce a range of interpretive and educational events and resources across all lanes of programming, serving adult and youth audiences alike. Additionally, I provided insight, creative direction, and strategy towards the broader ambitions and development efforts of the museum.

Special projects I programmed during this time include the large-scale and site-specific performance Tremble Staves by artist and composer Raven Chacon, multiple sound ceremonies led by artist Guadalpue Maravilla activating his artwork Mariposa Relámpago, myriad performances and events in support of the exhibition HOST: Celeste, and a range of celebrations and performances honoring the 20th Anniversary of Fusebox, an experimental performance festival in Austin.

In addition, I programmed events featuring such artists and authors as Ocean Vuong, Jenna Wortham & Juliana Huxtable, Eamon Ore-Giron, Lubaina Himid, Carl Cheng, Jiab Prachakul, Raven Halfmoon & Candice Hopkins, Chandrika Metivier, and BIG BAD Karaoke (Alexis Hunter & Jane Hervey), amongst others. I also established and oversaw a number of partnership events with such organizations as Austin Film Society, Design Austin, Texas Book Festival, Fusebox, Texas Performing Arts, KUTX, Future Front, Origin Studio House, Outsider Fest, Friends Art Fair, and First Light Books, amongst others.

Accomplishments in other program areas include;
– The Art School: increasing and setting standards for teacher-pay, publishing transparent pay-scales and compensation terms; introducing new class types in order to welcome new and expanded audiences (Saturday Samplers, Art & Wellness Weekends); better integrating Art School classes with exhibition content, including special artist-led workshops and events.
– Education: transitioning all K-12 Tour programs from a volunteer or docent-led model to an entirely paid educator model; invested in additional bilingual resources and established full-time staff position for Bilingual Educator; introduced new community programs that promoted self-guided resources for youth and families (Back to School Night).
– Visitor Engagement: oversaw the establishment of a Drop-In Tour program, including ASL-interpreted tours, tours in Spanish, and tours for those with limited mobility or sensory sensitivities; increased accessibility by offering resources at the front desk for those experiencing color-blindness, those who are hard-of-hearing, and those facing financial barriers to entry.

None of the above or below was accomplished in isolation and I share credit with various Curatorial colleagues (Alex Klein, Robin K. Williams, Julie Le) and my team: Emmy Laursen (Curator of Public Programs), Mario Villanueva (Events & Experiences Manager), Zach Souser (Event Production Manager), Meghann Rosales (Senior Manager of Family & Community Programs), Ariel Spiegelman (Director of The Art School), Sarah Chestnut (Senior Manager of Learning & Interpretation), and Simone Alexander (Senior Manager of Engagement & Accessibility).

Below is a slide-show of assorted programs I helped to organize or oversaw, demonstrating the breadth of programming offered by The Contemporary Austin – from talks and performances, to festivals and celebrations.

Guadalupe Maravilla (born 1976; San Salvador, El Salvador) grounds his sculpture, painting, performance, and large-scale installation in activism and healing, informed by his personal story of migration, illness, and recovery. At the age of eight, Maravilla fled El Salvador’s civil war as an unaccompanied minor and made a perilous journey through Central America to reunite with family in the United States. In the 2010s, Maravilla was diagnosed with colon cancer — an illness that links to generational trauma and the stresses of being undocumented — and during the recovery process, he was introduced to ancient methods of healing, including the use of sound. This life event shifted Maravilla’s practices, and he has since worked tirelessly to raise awareness of trauma and expand access to healing, nurturing collective narratives with a sense of perseverance and humanity.

Mariposa Relámpago is part of the artist’s Disease Throwers series — sculptures that incorporate natural materials, handmade objects, and items collected by the artist while retracing his migratory route to become shrines and healing instruments. Some of Maravilla’s sculptures include contemporary metal gongs that are activated by the artist during public sound ceremonies to deploy the powers of vibrational sound as a form of healing. Maravilla’s artworks also contain a cosmology of powerful symbols and objects that connect the artist’s personal journey with ancient and new healing practices; diverse spiritual beliefs; and contemporary crises of disease, migration, and experiences of war.

As part of its exhibition in Austin, The Contemporary hosted multiple public sound ceremonies, led by Guadalupe Maravilla and guest sound healers. For this immersive experience, Maravilla transforms the installation into a large-scale vibrational healing instrument. While undergoing cancer treatment, Maravilla was introduced to sound therapy, a healing practice that uses tonal vibrations produced by gongs to improve physical and psychological health. Maravilla is a trained sound healer who regularly holds workshops for undocumented immigrants, cancer patients, and those in need of vibrational healing.

Guadalupe Maravilla: Mariposa Relámpago is commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. The Contemporary Austin’s presentation of Guadalupe Maravilla: Mariposa Relámpago is organized by Alex Klein, Head Curator & Director of Curatorial Affairs. The sculpture will travel to venues across Texas through a partnership between The Contemporary Austin, Ballroom Marfa, and the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston.

Related Performances
4.11.24: Opening Reception with Rebecca Havemeyer & The Huxleys
4.12.24: The Illustrious Blacks & Joseph Keckler
4.24.24: Jiabao Li – Nocturnal Fugue
5.29.24: Jim Findlay – Tomorrow is Cancelled
6.15.24: Gesel Mason – Yes, And

This exhibition celebrated the twentieth anniversary of Fusebox. The brainchild of a group of young artist-friends living in Austin, Fusebox began in 2005 as a local festival for adventurous performance, staged in various venues and alternative spaces around town. Since then—having presented a wildly eclectic array of programs showcasing hundreds of local, national, and international artists — the organization has evolved to become both a cornerstone of the arts in Austin and a noted presenter of live and interdisciplinary art worldwide.

HOST: Fusebox presents an interactive gallery experience featuring a sampling of works by Fusebox artists. To contend with the problem of how audiences may tangibly engage with a history of ephemeral, performance-based artworks, especially when the actual record, or documentation, is limited, the exhibition, conceived as a playful Fusebox “record store,” invites visitors to browse through shelves of “records” displaying imagery and providing information about selected performances from Fusebox’s history.

In addition, a schedule of performances curated by Fusebox founder Ron Berry with The Contemporary Austin’s Emmy Laursen and Danny Orendorff will keep live performance an element of the exhibition throughout its duration. Including local and national artists, each performance represents just a slice of the breadth and diversity of programming Fusebox has supported and celebrated over it’s incredible first 20 years.

For their HOST exhibition with The Contemporary Austin, Mexico City-based artist duo Celeste presented a new textile painting, created specifically for The Jones Center, and temporarily installed their outdoor artwork Manta de cielo at Laguna Gloria.

The painting at The Jones Center, intended to be viewed from left to right, portrays an abstracted landscape. The artists take inspiration from the vital history of murals in their hometown of Mexico City, including how these murals have functioned to shape public space and communicate through images. While traditionally these murals presented specific scenes and conveyed moral messages, Celeste’s imagery instead accommodates innumerable interpretations. Inspired by narrative therapy, which holds that the stories we tell shape the worlds we inhabit, the artists invite visitors to tell their own stories through the work’s evocative yet open-ended images. This impulse to share space was extended through a series of in-gallery performances by local Austin musicians, titled as contener, organized by Mario Villanueva.

At Laguna Gloria, the portable textile sculpture Manta de cielo was made up of eight pieces of dyed fabric tied together with knots, creating a flexible space adaptable to a variety of installation sites. Within the shade of the sculpture, a talk and picnic with the artists and the exhibition’s curator was held, as well as additional musical performances. Preceding the event, the artists hosted a blanket-making workshop with students enrolled in The Art School.

About the Artists
Celeste is an artist duo based in Mexico City formed by María Fernanda Camarena (b. Guadalajara, 1988) and Gabriel Rosas Alemán (b. Mexico City, 1983). The artists’ collaborative practice centers on explorations of archetypal images and the creation of spaces that are both physical and social. Their large-scale, dyed and painted fabric installations employ a distinctive warm color palette and respond to architectural environments while incorporating abstracted images, such as extended hands and empty vessels, that speak to the personal and collective unconscious.

Curated by Robin K. Williams as part of This Land
Performance Organized by Emmy Laursen & Danny Orendorff

In conjunction with the exhibition This Land at the Jones Center, Raven Chacon’s Tremble Staves was performed at Laguna Gloria. Conceived as a site-specific work originally presented at the Sutro Baths in San Francisco, Tremble Staves considers the sanctity and scarcity of water, and tells a story of the land where the work is presented.

The site-responsive adaptation was performed on the shore of the Colorado River at The Contemporary Austin – Laguna Gloria on Oct 13 in partnership with Texas Performing Arts, Fusebox, and The University of Texas at Austin’s Butler School of Music Percussion Ensemble. Featuring Bay Area musicians The Living Earth Show (Travis Andrews and Andy Meyerson), Tremble Staves was be accompanied by an original narrative written by Austin-based interdisciplinary artist and writer, Virginia Grise.

About the Artist
Raven Chacon is a Pulitzer Prize–winning composer, performer, and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. As a solo artist, collaborator, and a member of Postcommodity from 2009 to 2018, Chacon has exhibited, performed, or had works performed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; San Francisco Electronic Music Festival; REDCAT, Los Angeles; Vancouver Art Gallery; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Borealis Festival, Seattle; SITE Santa Fe; Chaco Canyon, New Mexico; Ende Tymes Festival, New York; The Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C.; Whitney Biennial, New York; documenta 14, Athens and Kassel; Carnegie International, and Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.

Since 2004, he has mentored more than three hundred Native high school composers in writing new string quartets for the Native American Composer Apprentice Project (NACAP). Chacon is the recipient of the United States Artists fellowship in Music, The Creative Capital award in Visual Arts, The Native Arts and Cultures Foundation artist fellowship, the American Academy’s Berlin Prize for Music Composition, the Bemis Center’s Ree Kaneko Award, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award (2022) and the Pew Fellow-in-Residence (2022).

I was very honored to be asked by Jeroen to write the essay for an exhibition of his work, The Serial Portraits, at Wichita State University in 2023. While I didn’t know Jeroen very well at the time, the opportunity to write about his artwork afforded me a very intimate and special glimpse into his life and practice as an artist and gay man. Jeroen passed away shortly after this project was completed, after a sudden and brief battle with illness. Learn more about him and his work, here, and read my essay on this body of work, here.

Exhibition Statement
“The Serial Portrait” is an exhibition by Jeroen Nelemans with two series that delve into the intersection of time, medium, (digital) space, and their connection to identity.

“I See You Too, Young Bear” captures the essence of early 2000s digital culture with screenshots from a video chat program. Resurfacing after 20 years, I photographed these screenshots of my younger self with a flash on my computer screen in order to reclaim them as a self-portrait series.

“The Serial Portrait” draws from Google Art Project, a digital platform launched in 2011, featuring images from global museums of their collections. In 2013, when its popularity surged and image quality enhanced, I felt compelled to utilize this new art experiencing platform as source material. I collected nine high resolution images of artworks depicting a physical interaction between two naked men. I found a connection in the concealed identities and the masked nature of the physical gesture. Ten years later, these became the subject through a means of image transfer, a craft technique that allows ink to move from paper to wood. This analog collaging mirrored Photoshop’s essence, as I am physically cutting, copying, and pasting the ink of an image onto the board. Printed images of body parts made from different times and mediums now come together as a consistent yet evolving self-portrait series, reflecting the mutable nature of identity.

About the Artist
Jeroen Nelemans (1974-2024) is/was a Netherlands born conceptual artist who most recently lived and worked in Kansas where he served as a full-time professor at Kansas Wesleyan University. Through his practice, Nelemans investigates digital images and treats them as physical objects. Through the act of scanning the computer screen or photographing a backlit digital device, Nelemans dissects these images, investigating their process while exposing the mechanism of display. Ultimately, this relationship investigates how we process and read digital images through backlit devices. Nelemans is interested in these new forms, yet still maintains a thread of nostalgia throughout the process
nelemansjeroen.com

Initially Presented at The Free Library of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, PA)
June 30 – August 12, 2022
Major Support from Art for Justice Fund

Full Exhibition or Exhibition Excerpts Later Shown At: Bennington College, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, University of San Diego, Ford Foundation Galleries, Vermont Law School, Centro Cultural de la Raza, University of Washington – Tacoma

About The Exhibition
Still Doing Life: 22 Lifers, 25 Years Later is a publication (published in March 2022 by The New Press) and an exhibition by Howard Zehr and Barb Toews consisting of 22 interviews and pairs of photographs taken 25 years apart of individuals serving life without the possibility of parole sentences in Pennsylvania prisons.

In 1996, Howard Zehr, a restorative justice activist and photographer, published Doing Life, a book of photo portraits of individuals serving life sentences without the possibility of parole in Pennsylvania prisons. Twenty-five years later, Zehr revisited many of the same individuals and photographed them in the same poses.

In Still Doing Life, Zehr and co-author Barb Toews present the two photos of each individual side by side. As an exhibition, Still Doing Life presents a deeply moving tableau of people who, for the past quarter-century, have been trying to live meaningful lives while facing the likelihood that they will never be free.

In the tradition of other compelling photo books including Milton Rogovin’s Triptychs and Nicholas Nixon’s The Brown Sisters, Still Doing Life offers a riveting longitudinal look at a group of people over an extended period of time—in this case with complex and problematic implications for the American criminal justice system.

About The Authors
Howard Zehr is a distinguished professor of Restorative Justice at Eastern Mennonite University’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. He is the author of the bestselling The Little Book of Restorative Justice; Doing Life; and co-author, with Barb Toews, of Still Doing Life (The New Press), among other titles.

Barb Toews is associate professor of criminal justice at University of Washington, Tacoma. She is the author of The Little Book of Restorative Justice for People in Prison; the co-author, with Howard Zehr, of Critical Issues in Restorative Justice; and the co-author, also with Howard Zehr, of Still Doing Life (The New Press). Toews is the editor of the Little Books in Restorative Justice series and lives in Tacoma, Washington.

As Executive Director, I worked with a 12 member Board of Directors and an Artist Collective of up to 25 members at a time — a mix of visual and performing artists, writers, film/theater-makers, community organizers, and activists — to oversee an ambitious schedule of exhibitions, live-events, community engagement programs, and fundraising activities. During my leadership, the venue consisted of four visual art galleries, a Community Engagement space, and a Black Box performance space located on the third floor of a historic warehouse building just north of Center City. Annually, we hosted over 30 exhibitions, upwards of 80 programs, a curatorial fellowship, various partnership events, and fundraisers.

At Vox Populi I had the opportunity to motivate and guide the collective, an annual curatorial fellow, and numerous other artists selected via Open Calls through the installation and exhibition of their artwork, including projects by Abigail Lucien, Stephanie Powell, Jova Lynne, The Institute of Queer Ecology, Chelsea A. Flowers, Cameron Granger, and Yaloo. I also had the opportunity to curate my own exhibitions, including shows by KC Crow Maddux, Tura Oliviera, Black Quantum Futurism, and the gallery-spanning group exhibition Future Ecologies, a group exhibition funded by The Philadelphia Foundation. Working with artist/organizer Malachi Lily on The Children of Sirius series of exhibitions and performances presented as part of their Fellowship was a particular highlight of my time at Vox that you can read about, here.

In 2021, I also organized the exhibition Still Doing Life: 22 Lifers, 25 Years Later in collaboration with the authors of a publication of the same name by Barb Toews & Howard Zehr (published by The New Press) that debuted at The Free Library. The project consisted of 22 interviews and pairs of photographs taken 25 years apart of individuals serving life without the possibility of parole sentences in Pennsylvania prisons. The exhibition was funded by The Art for Justice Fund and traveled to numerous venues after opening in Philadelphia. Read more about the project, here.

In addition to my creative and community-outreach projects, my role was largely administrative and was responsible for all financial matters, including book-keeping, grant-writing, and fundraising. During my tenure, I successfully earned grants from The Pew Center for Culture & Heritage, The William Penn Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Philadelphia Cultural Fund, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and several others.

Finally, on the level of governance and strategic direction, while at Vox I focused on developing a membership and board that better reflected the diversity of the city in which it exists through such gestures as eliminating member dues, launching open calls for board service, and hosting city-wide info sessions. I produced new opportunities for artists working in socially/civically-engaged ways and successfully guided the organization through the worst years of the COVID-19 pandemic. During the pandemic I managed to maintain programing while also getting involved in arts advocacy, re-positioning the organization as an unwavering champion of both racial and economic equity in the arts through a number of grassroots efforts.

Below is a slideshow of just about 100 of countless images documenting numerous exhibitions and events held at Vox Populi during my time as Executive Director.

Artists: Blanche Brown, Emily Carris-Duncan & Joanne Douglas, Dakota Gearhart, Rian Ciela Hammond, Matte Hewitt, Mandy Katz, Natalie Kuenzi, Melissa Langer & Roopa Vasudevan, Kay Seohyung Lee, Malachi Lily, Kirk McCarthy, Nicole Olivieri Pagán (ElociN), Salvador Muñoz, Makeba Rainey & Julien Terrell, Raúl Romero, Zac Skinner, Misty Sol, Lane Speidel, Aaron Terry, and Tiny Farm Wagon

About the Exhibition
Future Ecologies is an exhibition of contemporary art projects that seek to reorient individual and collective relationships to nature in its current state of emergency. Taking climate breakdown as a given condition of our time, the artworks on view propose visions for what may lie ahead, oscillating between the fantastical and the practical – where invention tends to thrive.

Featuring over 20 artists, including several members of the Vox Populi Collective, Future Ecologies is a sprawling exhibition including vibrant, hallucinatory, provocative, and political approaches to ecologically-themed art making today.

For many exhibiting artists, imagining life in the future entails drawing upon ancestral methods of survival and skill-sharing, as well as Pre-Columbian or non-Western paradigms of deifying, learning from, and interacting with nature. Others fantasize about the end of human-supremacy on Earth, imagining a coming landscape replete with rapid mutation and highly evolved hybrid lifeforms – hinting at a bio-diverse future (and past) that contains multitudes of genders, sexualities, and species.

Despite our bleak forecast at present, Future Ecologies is not de facto dystopian. It is, instead, curious about whatever world comes next, who inhabits it safely, and how.

Images c/o Raúl Romero