Knight,Autumn_MeeshPolaroids_No5

Exhibition Tour with Ryan Dennis, Max Fields, and Evan Garza

Thursday, September 2 | 6PM

Silver Street Studios
2000 Edwards St. Houston, TX 77007

Join FotoFest Associate Curator Max Fields with Texas Biennial Curators Ryan N. Dennis and Evan Garza for a tour of the exhibition In Place of an Index, produced and presented in conjunction with the 2021 Texas Biennial exhibition, A New Landscape, A Possible Horizon. The exhibition features artists native to or living and working in Texas, including Regina Agu, Travis Boyer, Tay Butler, Ja’Tovia Gary, Ryan Hawk, Autumn Knight, Baseera Khan, Annette Lawrence, Adam Marnie and Aura Rosenberg, Stephanie Concepcion Ramirez, and Kara Springer. The tour will begin at 6PM the night of the opening reception.

The event is free and open to the public for all ages. Masks are required to attend. Complimentary self-parking is available. To learn more about the exhibition, visit the link here or download the FotoFest mobile app.

Out of concern for the safety of our guests and staff, the exhibition tour for In Place of an Index is limited to a maximum of 20 guests and is currently fully booked. If space on the tour becomes available, it will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis.

About the Curators

Ryan N. Dennis is the Chief Curator and Artistic Director of the Center for Art & Public Exchange (CAPE) at the Mississippi Museum of Art.

Ryan previously served as the Curator and Programs Director at Project Row Houses (PRH), where her work focused on African American contemporary art with a particular emphasis on socially engaged practices, site-specific projects, public interventions, and the development of public-facing programs for adults and youth. At PRH, she has organized and co-organized more than 12 Artist Rounds including, Round 47: The Act of Doing: Revitalizing, Preserving and Protecting Third Ward (2017) and Round 46: Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter at Project Row Houses (2017). 

Her writings have appeared in online and print catalogs and journals, including Prospect.3 Notes for Now, Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts, and The Studio Museum in Harlem’s Studio magazine. Recently, she edited PRH’s inaugural book, Collective Creative Actions: Project Row Houses at 25, and contributed to the first monograph of artist Autumn Knight titled, In Rehearsal: Autumn Knight, published by the Krannert Art Museum. 

Dennis is currently a proud fellow of the Center for Curatorial Leadership’s 2019 Fellowship Program. Dennis resides in Jackson, MS.

Max Fields is the Associate Curator and Director of Publishing at FotoFest. He has presented numerous exhibitions and has written for and overseen the production of multiple museum and gallery publications. Fields’s exhibitions and projects have been reviewed in publications including Frieze, ArtForum, Art in America, and Aperture among others. Recent projects include Public Life (2020–21), African Cosmologies: Photography, Time, and the Other (with Mark Sealy, 2020), and Gareth Long: Kidnappers Foil at the Blaffer Art Museum (2019-20). His current exhibition Public Life: Recording the Blur is on view now in Arts District Houston. His upcoming exhibitions include In Place of An Index, co-curated with Ryan Dennis and Evan Garza and held in conjunction with the 2021 Texas Biennial, and the 2022 FotoFest Biennial, co-curated with Steven Evans and Amy Sadao.

Evan Garza is a Washington, DC-based Curator, Writer, and a 2021–2022 Fulbright U.S. Scholar at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) in Dublin, Ireland. He is 2021 visiting faculty in the MFA in Visual Arts program at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA.

Much of Garza’s curatorial and museum work in the last several years has been dedicated to exhibition and collection diversification, focusing on women, LGBTQ+ artists, and artists from historically marginalized communities. From 2016–2019 Garza served as Director of Public Art at Rice University, where he oversaw major acquisitions of public artworks by Sol LeWitt and Ursula von Rydingsvard, representing the first permanent outdoor sculpture by a woman in the university’s history. At Rice, he curated solo presentations by Nina Katchadourian, NASA ARES artist-in-residence Erika Blumenfeld, and Jarrod Beck. 

Garza is the co-founder of Fire Island Artist Residency (FIAR), a New York nonprofit and the first residency program in the world exclusively for LGBTQ+ artists, where he served as Assistant Director until 2014. He has curated several exhibitions nationally, including PAINT THINGS: Beyond the Stretcher, co-curated with Dina Deitsch for deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (2013), and William Cordova: this one's 4U (pa' nosotros) at Boston Center for the Arts (2012). His writing on the work of contemporary artists has been published in several books and monographs and by The Drawing Center, Flash Art, ART PAPERS, Hyperallergic, and Artforum.

Image: Autumn Knight, Meesh Suite Polaroids No. 5, 2021. Unique polaroid photograph, 4.17 x 3.13 inches. Courtesy of the artist.