In Place of an Index

Presented in conjunction with the 2021 Texas Biennial
Presented in conjunction with the 2021 Texas Biennial

On view: September 2–November 13, 2021

On view: September 2–November 13, 2021

Silver Street Studios
2000 Edwards Street
Houston, TX 77007
Wednesday–Saturday | 10AM–5PM

Silver Street Studios
2000 Edwards Street
Houston, TX 77007
Monday–Saturday | 9AM–5PM

Silver Street Studios
2000 Edwards Street
Houston, TX 77007
Monday–Saturday | 9AM–5PM

Regina Agu, Travis Boyer, Tay Butler, Ja’Tovia Gary, Ryan Hawk, Baseera Khan, Autumn Knight, Annette Lawrence, Adam Marnie and Aura Rosenberg, Stephanie Concepcion Ramirez, Kara Springer

Gary_Ja’Tovia_Installation view_IPOAI_5

Installation view of Ja'Tovia Gary, THE GIVERNY SUITE, 2019, in the exhibition In Place of an Index at FotoFest. September 2–November 13, 2021. Presented in conjunction with the Texas Biennial 2021, A New Landscape, A Possible Horizon. Photo courtesy of FotoFest.

In Place of an Index is a group exhibition featuring 12 artists native to or currently living and working in Texas. The exhibition is produced and presented in conjunction with the 2021 Texas Biennial exhibition, A New Landscape, A Possible Horizon. The exhibition is a curatorial collaboration between Max Fields and Texas Biennial curators Ryan N. Dennis and Evan Garza.

In Place of an Index addresses historical narratives from a position of potentiality, rather than construct or add to a timeline, archive, or index of history and experience. Featured artists situate personal and political narratives outside of fixed contexts, and their work suggests that historical narratives are fluid, and can be revisited, rewritten, and reimagined. Featured artists’ respective practices address historical documentation and narrativization from the perspective of what Ariella Azoulay calls potential history, “[the] effort to make history impossible and to engage with the world from a non-progressive approach, to engage with the outcome of imperial violence as if it is taking place here and now.”[1] The exhibition title, In Place of an Index, refers to Azoulay’s notion of potentiality, suggesting an alternative to an index of time, space, and experience that exists in opposition to a dominant ideology and forms of hegemonic narrativization. Through various photographic means, each of the featured artists use or make references to archives or archival images and histories, and in doing so invite or create new meaning, potentiality, and relations to contemporary media and culture.

Concerned with language, history, and representation, Houston native Regina Agu’s featured work questions forms of technological translation and representation through the manipulation of images and their readings by algorithms designed to describe representative images. Fort Worth native and Brooklyn-based artist Travis Boyer explores the material and cultural legacy of slain Tejano megastar Selena Quintanilla-Pérez through the display of images and Boyer’s archive of garments from Selena, Etc., the late star’s South Texas fashion boutique. Houston’s Tay Butler will present sculptural work which combines photographic and collaged references to Black culture, advertisements, and pop culture archives. Dallas-based artist Ja’Tovia Gary’s experimental film THE GIVERNY SUITE (2019) combines celluloid animations, drone and archival footage, filmed interviews with Black women, and images of the artist exploring Monet’s famous garden to frame and ask the question: "Do you feel safe in your body?" Ryan Hawk’s interdisciplinary practice imagines and realizes unexpected forms of embodiment, and his recent works explore the rhetorical semantics in meme and tattoo culture to imagine alternative contexts and corporealities.

Houston native and New York-based artist Autumn Knight, whose performance-based practice often centers her body and questions of agency, operates as both director and subject in her recent photographic work which explores the role of the archival image. The featured work of Dallas-born interdisciplinary artist Baseera Khan centers images of their native Texas family and the stored belongings of a deported family friend and scholar, examining the scale and meaning of what we leave behind. Artist and educator Annette Lawrence will present a site-specific installation of billboard-scale photographic images of journals culled from her personal archives, creating a new physical environment from which to examine our relationship to the printed image. Adam Marnie and Aura Rosenberg and artist Kara Springer each examine the routine of marking time from the perspective of the personal narrative: revealing the fragmentary nature of historical time through meditations on fluid forms of recollection such as memory and personal experience. Pearland-based Salvadoran-American artist Stephanie Concepcion Ramirez combines photography, site-specific installation, and text to explore notions of memory, filtered history, and fantasy. Together, these artists refuse the notion of a dead past; they insist that the past is present and evolving. Featured artists highlight the ways historical potentiality requires reimagining the past as an ever-evolving subjective document that relies on the agency of the recorded subjects.

In Place of an Index features several new artworks and commissioned projects by select artists, including new works by Regina Agu, Travis Boyer, Baseera Khan, Autumn Knight and commissioned projects by Tay Butler, Ryan Hawk, Adam Marnie and Aura Rosenberg. Artists Stephanie Concepcion Ramirez and Annette Lawrence will each produce adaptations of their works as site-specific installations at FotoFest. The exhibition also marks the Texas premiere of Ja’Tovia Gary’s experimental film installation, THE GIVERNY SUITE (2019).

In Place of an Index is co-curated by Max Fields, Ryan N. Dennis and Evan Garza. The exhibition is the eighth and latest in a series of FotoFest exhibitions focused on Texas artists and photographers.


[1] Azoulay, Ariella Aïsha, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 312.

PUBLIC PROGRAMS

All programs are free and open to the public. Masks are required to attend all in-person events and programs presented by FotoFest. Information about the exhibition, artists, and upcoming events and programs can also be found on the FotoFest App. To download the app, visit the Apple or Google Play store, search “FotoFest,” and select download.

Opening Reception: In Place of An Index
Thursday, September 2 | 5:30–7:30PM
Silver Street Studios, 2000 Edwards St., Houston, TX 77007

Exhibition Tour
Thursday, September 2 | 6PM
Silver Street Studios, 2000 Edwards St., Houston, TX 77007

Exhibition Tour with Max Fields
Wednesday, September 15 | 6PM
Silver Street Studios, 2000 Edwards St., Houston, TX 77007

Reading: Annette Lawrence
Wednesday, October 13 | 6PM
Live via Zoom and YouTube Live; Registration required

Artist Talk: Adam Marnie and Aura Rosenberg
Wednesday, October 20 | 6PM
Live via Zoom and YouTube Live; Registration required

Artist Talk: Regina Agu in conversation with Nora N. Khan
Wednesday, October 27 | 12PM
Live via Zoom and YouTube Live; Registration required

Film Screening: Tay Bulter, Ryan Hawk, Stephanie Conception Ramirez
Thursday, November 4 | 6PM
Live via Zoom and YouTube Live; Registration required

Artist Talk: Ryan Hawk in conversation with Dylan Rodríguez
Saturday, November 6 | 2PM
Live via Zoom and YouTube Live; Registration required

Travis Boyer: Bidi Bidi Pom Pom
Saturday, November 13 | 12PM
Silver Street Studios, 2000 Edwards St., Houston, TX 77007

Additional events and programs are to be announced.

About the artists
Regina Agu was born in Houston, TX. She lives and works in Chicago, IL, and her practice is deeply rooted in the Gulf South. Her work has been included in exhibitions, public readings, publications, and performances internationally. Her first solo museum installation, Passage, was presented at the New Orleans Museum of Art (2019-2020). Agu was awarded a Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts + Project Row Houses fellowship at the University of Houston for her research on Emancipation Park, and a residency at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans through a partnership with For Freedoms. Agu received a 2017 Artadia Houston award and was a 2016-2017 Open Sessions participant at The Drawing Center in NYC. From 2014-2017, Agu was the co-director of Alabama Song, a collaboratively-run art space in Third Ward, Houston, which received a 2016 SEED grant from The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Agu is the founder of the Houston-based WOC Reading Group, and her other collaborative projects include Friends of Angela Davis Park and the Houston-based independent small press paratext.

Travis Boyer (born 1979, Fort Worth, Texas) received his MFA from Bard College in 2012. Boyer’s practice employs a range of media and methods: from painting, textile, sculpture, cyanotypes and video, to idiosyncratic collaborative projects. While diverse in form, this body of work is fundamentally grounded in performance. By drawing structure from familiar contexts (such as craft workshops, drinking games, and group fitness), Boyerʼs performative works dissolve the barriers separating the private and the public, the intimate and the unknown. Boyer has exhibited internationally at museums and institutions including The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; The New Museum, New York; Kunstverein, Amsterdam; The Goethe Institut, New York; High Desert Test Sites, Joshua Tree, California, SOMA Arts, San Francisco; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; Participant Inc., New York; Dumbo Arts Center, New York; Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, as well as Galleria Glance, Torinoand Piso 51, Mexico City, among others. He was among the first artists awarded the Fire Island Artist Residency. Boyer has been invited as guest lecturer and performer at Yale University's MFA program, California College of the Arts, Oakland and Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. Boyer lives and works in New York City.

Tay Butler is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Houston, TX, while teaching and studying in Fayetteville, AR. Currently an MFA candidate of the University of Arkansas’ Photography and Studio Art program, he received his BFA in Photography and Digital Media from the University of Houston. Tay's work utilizes photography, collage, video, music, installation and performance to identify and confront history, migration, memory and identity. He begins with literature, folklore, national and local media, ephemera and historical documents. This content is then digitized, photographed, cut, clipped, extended, collaged, shrunk, enlarged, exposed, uncovered, repeated or redacted and placed into a new context. Constructing revisionist histories that are fictional but true, authentic yet imagined, the stories and scenes created act like braids and weave together a rich tapestry that can last longer than human memory. 

Ja’Tovia Gary is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist working across documentary, avant-garde video art, sculpture, and installation. Gary is concerned with re-memory and employs a rigorous interrogation and reapprehension of the archive in much of her work. The artist seeks to trouble notions of objectivity and neutrality in nonfiction storytelling by asserting a Black feminist subjectivity, and applies what scholar and cultural critic bell hooks terms “an oppositional gaze” as both maker and critical spectator of moving image works. Intimate, often personal, and politically charged, her works aim to unmask power and its influence on how we perceive and formulate reality. Gary’s films and installations serve as reparative gestures for the distorted histories through which Black life is often viewed. Black sociality, familial bonds, the interiority of Black women and femmes, and the global efforts towards liberation often pull focus in Gary’s multivalent works. 

Ryan Hawk is a visual artist using video, sculpture, and site-specific installation to imagine alternative corporealities and forms of embodiment. Hawk has presented solo exhibitions at Gray Contemporary, Lawndale Art Center, The Umlauf Sculpture Garden and Museum, and The Museum of Human Achievement. His work has also been included in group exhibitions, screenings, and festivals such as Perform Chinatown, Los Angeles; Grace Exhibition Space, Brooklyn; the Museum of Fine Arts in Nagoya, Japan; Jonathan Hopson Gallery, Houston; and many more. Notable awards include an SMFA Traveling Fellowship, The Arch and Anne Giles Kimbrough Fund from the Dallas Museum of Art, and a two-year fellowship with the Core Residency Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Hawk holds a BFA in studio art from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and an MFA in studio art from the University of Texas at Austin.

Baseera Khan was born in Denton, Texas and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Selected solo and two-person exhibitions include: Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Ohio (2022, forthcoming); Moody Center For The Arts, Rice University, Houston, Texas (2022, forthcoming); Brooklyn Museum, New York (2021, forthcoming); Public Art Fund, New York (2021, forthcoming); Atlanta Contemporary (2020); The Kitchen, New York (2020); Simone Subal Gallery, New York (2019); Jenkins Johnson, New York (2019); Colorado Springs Fine Art Centers (2018); Texas Christian University College of Fine Arts, Fort Worth, Texas (2017); Participant Inc., New York (2017). Baseera Khan has been awarded numerous grants and fellowships including UOVO Prize (2020); BRIC Colene Brown Art Prize (2019); Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant (2019); and Art Matters (2018). Artist residencies include: LUX Art Institute, California (2021); Pioneer Works, New York (2018); AIRspace, Abrons Art Center, New York (2016); and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Program, Maine (2014). Baseera Khan’s work is part of the following public collections: Kadist, Paris and San Francisco; Providence College, Providence, RI; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN.

Autumn Knight is an interdisciplinary artist working with performance, installation, video and text. Her performance work has been on view at various institutions including DiverseWorks Artspace, Art League Houston, Project Row Houses, Blaffer Art Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum, Skowhegan Space (NY), The New Museum, The Contemporary Art Museum Houston, Optica (Montreal, Canada), The Poetry Project (NY) and Krannart Art Museum (IL), The Institute for Contemporary Art (VCU), Human Resources Los Angeles (HRLA) and Akademie der Kunste, (Berlin). Knight has been an artist in residence with with In-Situ (UK), Galveston Artist Residency, YICA (Yamaguchi, Japan), Artpace (San Antonio, TX) and a 2016-2017 artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem (NY). Knight is the winner of a 2021-2022 Rome Prize and the recipient of an Artadia Award (2015) and an Art Matters Grant (2018). She has served as visiting artist at Montclair State University, Princeton University and Bard College. Her performance work is held in the permanent collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2016) and holds an M.A. in Drama Therapy from New York University.

Annette Lawrence Originally from New York, Lawrence lived and worked in Denton, Texas and was a Professor of Studio Art in the College of Visual Arts and Design at the University of North Texas until recently. In May 2021, the Texas Commission on the Arts (TCA) announced the Texas State Legislature’s 2021 and 2022 appointment of Annette Lawrence as State Artist of the year, Visual Artist, 2D. She is currently serving as Visiting Faculty at Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont.

Adam Marnie (b. 1977, Minneapolis, MN, lives and works in Houston, Texas). Recent exhibitions of his work include: New Constructions, Bad Reputation, Los Angeles, Dragon Polishes the Pearl, Arturo Bandini, Los Angeles, and Construction/ Destruction, Galerie Almine Rech, Paris. He is publisher and editor-in-chief of F Magazine, a biannual self-published art magazine based in Los Angeles, Houston, and New York, a project around which he has organized group exhibitions such as The Garden of Forking Paths at Magenta Plains, New York.

Stephanie Concepcion Ramirez is a Salvadoran-American artist from Prince George's County, Maryland. She has had the privilege to attain her BFA at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA and her MFA at the University of Texas at Austin. Ramirez’ practice combines the language of photography with site-specific installations and text. Her work is based on notions of memory, personal and historical amnesia that trace the veins of the Central American diaspora. In an attempt to reconcile with her personal and cultural histories and memories, she creates work to validate truth, false memories, filtered history and fantasy. Ramirez currently works and lives in Pearland, Texas.

Aura Rosenberg received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and her MFA from Hunter College, NY as well as attending the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. Rosenberg’s work probes sexuality, gender, childhood, artistic identity and historical construction. Her diverse practice draws on photography, video, painting, sculpture, installation and performance. Rosenberg’s work has been exhibited at, among others, the Kiev Biennale, the Berlin Biennale, Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, Lehnbachhaus, Munich, Le Magasin / Centre D’art Contemporain, Grenoble, MoMA PS1, Long Island City, Institute of Contemporary Art / ICA, Philadelphia, Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, Hamburger Banhof, Berlin, MAMCO / Musee d'art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva, The Swiss Institute, New York; The Sculpture Center, Long Island City, JOAN, Los Angeles and Galeria Studio, Warsaw. Recently her work has been featured in the exhibitions Ecstasy at Kunstmuseum Stuttgart which travelled to the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Switzerland, Straying From The Line, Schinkel Pavilion, Berlin, Face It! In the Soliloquy With The Other at the Kunstmuseum Ravensburg, Germany and Up To And Including Limits at the Muzeum Susch, Zernez, Switzerland. Rosenberg lives in New York City and Berlin. She is represented by Meliksetian | Briggs in Los Angeles and Martos Gallery in New York City and teaches at Pratt Institute and The School of Visual Arts, New York.

Kara Springer is particularly concerned with armature—the underlying structure that holds the flesh of a body in place. She works with photography, sculpture, and site-specific interventions to explore systems of structural support through engagement with architecture, urban infrastructure, and systems of institutional and political power. Springer holds degrees from the University of Toronto, ENSCI les Ateliers in Paris, and the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. Her work has been exhibited at the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art, the National Gallery of the Bahamas, the National Gallery of Jamaica, and the Frankfurt Museum of Applied Arts. She is an alum of the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art and currently holds a fellowship with the Museum of Fine Arts Houston Core Program. 

About the Texas Biennial
Produced by Big Medium, the Texas Biennial is a geographically-led, independent survey of contemporary art in Texas. The 2021 Texas Biennial: A New Landscape, A Possible Horizon is the seventh iteration of the program, making the Texas Biennial the longest-running state biennial in the country. The program was founded in 2005 by Austin nonprofit Big Medium to provide an exhibition opportunity open to all artists living and working in the state. Since its inception, the Texas Biennial has brought the work of over 300 artists to new audiences, springboarding many artists’ careers and underscoring the diversity of contemporary practice in Texas. The 2021 Texas Biennial is curated by Ryan N. Dennis and Evan Garza, and produced in partnership with Fotofest, Artpace, Ruby City, the McNay Art Museum, and the San Antonio Museum of Art. To learn more, visit texasbiennial.org.

About FotoFest
FotoFest, a platform for art and ideas, presents the first and longest-running international Biennial of photography and new media art in the United States. A cultural non-profit organization based in Houston, Texas, FotoFest organizes year-round exhibitions and a classroom-based learning program, Literacy Through Photography that uses photography as a tool to strengthen student writing and learning skills. Co-Founded by photojournalists Frederick Baldwin and Wendy Watriss in Houston in 1983, FotoFest promotes international awareness of museum-quality photographic and new media art. The FotoFest Biennial takes place citywide in Houston with participation from leading art museums, art galleries, nonprofit art spaces, universities, and civic spaces. To learn more visit: www.fotofest.org.

About Big Medium
Big Medium is a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting artists and building community through the arts in Austin and across Texas. We provide opportunities for artists to create, exhibit, and discuss their work and connect to an engaged and diverse audience. We strive to make art a part of everyday life. To learn more, visit bigmedium.org.

About the artists
Regina Agu was born in Houston, TX. She lives and works in Chicago, IL, and her practice is deeply rooted in the Gulf South. Her work has been included in exhibitions, public readings, publications, and performances internationally. Her first solo museum installation, Passage, was presented at the New Orleans Museum of Art (2019-2020). Agu was awarded a Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts + Project Row Houses fellowship at the University of Houston for her research on Emancipation Park, and a residency at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans through a partnership with For Freedoms. Agu received a 2017 Artadia Houston award and was a 2016-2017 Open Sessions participant at The Drawing Center in NYC. From 2014-2017, Agu was the co-director of Alabama Song, a collaboratively-run art space in Third Ward, Houston, which received a 2016 SEED grant from The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Agu is the founder of the Houston-based WOC Reading Group, and her other collaborative projects include Friends of Angela Davis Park and the Houston-based independent small press paratext.

Travis Boyer (born 1979, Fort Worth, Texas) received his MFA from Bard College in 2012. Boyer’s practice employs a range of media and methods: from painting, textile, sculpture, cyanotypes and video, to idiosyncratic collaborative projects. While diverse in form, this body of work is fundamentally grounded in performance. By drawing structure from familiar contexts (such as craft workshops, drinking games, and group fitness), Boyerʼs performative works dissolve the barriers separating the private and the public, the intimate and the unknown. Boyer has exhibited internationally at museums and institutions including The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; The New Museum, New York; Kunstverein, Amsterdam; The Goethe Institut, New York; High Desert Test Sites, Joshua Tree, California, SOMA Arts, San Francisco; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; Participant Inc., New York; Dumbo Arts Center, New York; Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, as well as Galleria Glance, Torinoand Piso 51, Mexico City, among others. He was among the first artists awarded the Fire Island Artist Residency. Boyer has been invited as guest lecturer and performer at Yale University's MFA program, California College of the Arts, Oakland and Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. Boyer lives and works in New York City.

Tay Butler is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Houston, TX, while teaching and studying in Fayetteville, AR. Currently an MFA candidate of the University of Arkansas’ Photography and Studio Art program, he received his BFA in Photography and Digital Media from the University of Houston. Tay's work utilizes photography, collage, video, music, installation and performance to identify and confront history, migration, memory and identity. He begins with literature, folklore, national and local media, ephemera and historical documents. This content is then digitized, photographed, cut, clipped, extended, collaged, shrunk, enlarged, exposed, uncovered, repeated or redacted and placed into a new context. Constructing revisionist histories that are fictional but true, authentic yet imagined, the stories and scenes created act like braids and weave together a rich tapestry that can last longer than human memory. 

Stephanie Concepcion Ramirez is a Salvadoran-American artist from Prince George's County, Maryland. She has had the privilege to attain her BFA at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA and her MFA at the University of Texas at Austin. Ramirez’ practice combines the language of photography with site-specific installations and text. Her work is based on notions of memory, personal and historical amnesia that trace the veins of the Central American diaspora. In an attempt to reconcile with her personal and cultural histories and memories, she creates work to validate truth, false memories, filtered history and fantasy. Ramirez currently works and lives in Pearland, Texas.


Ja’Tovia Gary is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist working across documentary, avant-garde video art, sculpture, and installation. Gary is concerned with re-memory and employs a rigorous interrogation and reapprehension of the archive in much of her work. The artist seeks to trouble notions of objectivity and neutrality in nonfiction storytelling by asserting a Black feminist subjectivity, and applies what scholar and cultural critic bell hooks terms “an oppositional gaze” as both maker and critical spectator of moving image works. Intimate, often personal, and politically charged, her works aim to unmask power and its influence on how we perceive and formulate reality. Gary’s films and installations serve as reparative gestures for the distorted histories through which Black life is often viewed. Black sociality, familial bonds, the interiority of Black women and femmes, and the global efforts towards liberation often pull focus in Gary’s multivalent works. 

Ryan Hawk is a visual artist using video, sculpture, and site-specific installation to imagine alternative corporealities and forms of embodiment. Hawk has presented solo exhibitions at Gray Contemporary, Lawndale Art Center, The Umlauf Sculpture Garden and Museum, and The Museum of Human Achievement. His work has also been included in group exhibitions, screenings, and festivals such as Perform Chinatown, Los Angeles; Grace Exhibition Space, Brooklyn; the Museum of Fine Arts in Nagoya, Japan; Jonathan Hopson Gallery, Houston; and many more. Notable awards include an SMFA Traveling Fellowship, The Arch and Anne Giles Kimbrough Fund from the Dallas Museum of Art, and a two-year fellowship with the Core Residency Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Hawk holds a BFA in studio art from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and an MFA in studio art from the University of Texas at Austin.

Autumn Knight is an interdisciplinary artist working with performance, installation, video and text. Her performance work has been on view at various institutions including DiverseWorks Artspace, Art League Houston, Project Row Houses, Blaffer Art Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum, Skowhegan Space (NY), The New Museum, The Contemporary Art Museum Houston, Optica (Montreal, Canada), The Poetry Project (NY) and Krannart Art Museum (IL), The Institute for Contemporary Art (VCU), Human Resources Los Angeles (HRLA) and Akademie der Kunste, (Berlin). Knight has been an artist in residence with with In-Situ (UK), Galveston Artist Residency, YICA (Yamaguchi, Japan), Artpace (San Antonio, TX) and a 2016-2017 artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem (NY). Knight is the winner of a 2021-2022 Rome Prize and the recipient of an Artadia Award (2015) and an Art Matters Grant (2018). She has served as visiting artist at Montclair State University, Princeton University and Bard College. Her performance work is held in the permanent collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2016) and holds an M.A. in Drama Therapy from New York University.

Baseera Khan was born in Denton, Texas and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Selected solo and two-person exhibitions include: Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Ohio (2022, forthcoming); Moody Center For The Arts, Rice University, Houston, Texas (2022, forthcoming); Brooklyn Museum, New York (2021, forthcoming); Public Art Fund, New York (2021, forthcoming); Atlanta Contemporary (2020); The Kitchen, New York (2020); Simone Subal Gallery, New York (2019); Jenkins Johnson, New York (2019); Colorado Springs Fine Art Centers (2018); Texas Christian University College of Fine Arts, Fort Worth, Texas (2017); Participant Inc., New York (2017). Baseera Khan has been awarded numerous grants and fellowships including UOVO Prize (2020); BRIC Colene Brown Art Prize (2019); Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant (2019); and Art Matters (2018). Artist residencies include: LUX Art Institute, California (2021); Pioneer Works, New York (2018); AIRspace, Abrons Art Center, New York (2016); and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Program, Maine (2014). Baseera Khan’s work is part of the following public collections: Kadist, Paris and San Francisco; Providence College, Providence, RI; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN.

Annette Lawrence’s work has been widely exhibited and is held in museums, and private collections including The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Dallas Museum of Art; The Rachofsky Collection, Dallas; ArtPace Center for Contemporary Art, Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, American Airlines and the Art Collection of the Dallas Cowboys. She received a 2018 MacDowell Fellowship, the 2015 Moss/Chumley Award from the Meadows Museum, and the 2009 Otis and Velma Davis Dozier Travel Award from the Dallas Museum of Art. Her work was included in the 1997 Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. She is an alumnus of the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Skowhegan School. She received a BFA from The Hartford Art School and an MFA from The Maryland Institute College of Art. Originally from New York, Lawrence lives and works in Denton, Texas and is a Professor of Studio Art in the College of Visual Arts and Design at the University of North Texas. In May 2021, the Texas Commission on the Arts (TCA) announced the Texas State Legislature’s 2021 and 2022 appointment of Annette Lawrence as State Artist of the year, Visual Artist, 2D.

Adam Marnie (b. 1977, Minneapolis, MN, lives and works in Houston, Texas). Recent exhibitions of his work include: New Constructions, Bad Reputation, Los Angeles, Dragon Polishes the Pearl, Arturo Bandini, Los Angeles, and Construction/ Destruction, Galerie Almine Rech, Paris. He is publisher and editor-in-chief of F Magazine, a biannual self-published art magazine based in Los Angeles, Houston, and New York, a project around which he has organized group exhibitions such as The Garden of Forking Paths at Magenta Plains, New York.

Aura Rosenberg received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and her MFA from Hunter College, NY as well as attending the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. Rosenberg’s work probes sexuality, gender, childhood, artistic identity and historical construction. Her diverse practice draws on photography, video, painting, sculpture, installation and performance. Rosenberg’s work has been exhibited at, among others, the Kiev Biennale, the Berlin Biennale, Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, Lehnbachhaus, Munich, Le Magasin / Centre D’art Contemporain, Grenoble, MoMA PS1, Long Island City, Institute of Contemporary Art / ICA, Philadelphia, Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, Hamburger Banhof, Berlin, MAMCO / Musee d'art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva, The Swiss Institute, New York; The Sculpture Center, Long Island City, JOAN, Los Angeles and Galeria Studio, Warsaw. Recently her work has been featured in the exhibitions Ecstasy at Kunstmuseum Stuttgart which travelled to the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Switzerland, Straying From The Line, Schinkel Pavilion, Berlin, Face It! In the Soliloquy With The Other at the Kunstmuseum Ravensburg, Germany and Up To And Including Limits at the Muzeum Susch, Zernez, Switzerland. Rosenberg lives in New York City and Berlin. She is represented by Meliksetian | Briggs in Los Angeles and Martos Gallery in New York City and teaches at Pratt Institute and The School of Visual Arts, New York.

Kara Springer is particularly concerned with armature—the underlying structure that holds the flesh of a body in place. She works with photography, sculpture, and site-specific interventions to explore systems of structural support through engagement with architecture, urban infrastructure, and systems of institutional and political power. Springer holds degrees from the University of Toronto, ENSCI les Ateliers in Paris, and the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. Her work has been exhibited at the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art, the National Gallery of the Bahamas, the National Gallery of Jamaica, and the Frankfurt Museum of Applied Arts. She is an alum of the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art and currently holds a fellowship with the Museum of Fine Arts Houston Core Program. 

About the Texas Biennial
Produced by Big Medium, the Texas Biennial is a geographically-led, independent survey of contemporary art in Texas. The 2021 Texas Biennial: A New Landscape, A Possible Horizon is the seventh iteration of the program, making the Texas Biennial the longest-running state biennial in the country. The program was founded in 2005 by Austin nonprofit Big Medium to provide an exhibition opportunity open to all artists living and working in the state. Since its inception, the Texas Biennial has brought the work of over 300 artists to new audiences, springboarding many artists’ careers and underscoring the diversity of contemporary practice in Texas. The 2021 Texas Biennial is curated by Ryan N. Dennis and Evan Garza, and produced in partnership with Fotofest, Artpace, Ruby City, the McNay Art Museum, and the San Antonio Museum of Art. To learn more, visit texasbiennial.org.

About FotoFest
FotoFest, a platform for art and ideas, presents the first and longest-running international Biennial of photography and new media art in the United States. A cultural non-profit organization based in Houston, Texas, FotoFest organizes year-round exhibitions and a classroom-based learning program, Literacy Through Photography that uses photography as a tool to strengthen student writing and learning skills. Co-Founded by photojournalists Frederick Baldwin and Wendy Watriss in Houston, in 1983, FotoFest promotes international awareness of museum-quality photographic and new media art from around the world. As an international platform for photographic and contemporary art, the FotoFest has become known as a showcase for the discovery and presentation of important new work and talent from around the world. The Biennial takes place citywide in Houston with participation from leading art museums, art galleries, nonprofit art spaces, universities, and civic spaces. 

About Big Medium
Big Medium is a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting artists and building community through the arts in Austin and across Texas. We provide opportunities for artists to create, exhibit, and discuss their work and connect to an engaged and diverse audience. We strive to make art a part of everyday life. To learn more, visit bigmedium.org.

In Place of an Index Host Committee
Lee Anthony and J. Travis Capps Jr., Katy and Michael A. Casey, Ken Frederick, Carola Herrin, Anna and Hal Holliday, Marcia and Mike Nichols, Anne Wilkes Tucker.

FotoFest Major Institutional and Individual Support
The Brown Foundation, Inc.; Houston Endowment; National Endowment for the Arts; Texas Commission on the Arts; City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance; Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation; The Powell Foundation; The Wortham Foundation; WWW Foundation; Robert Rauschenberg Foundation; Judith and Gamble Baldwin; Wendy Watriss and Frederick Baldwin; Katy and Michael A. Casey; Martha and David Moore; Nina and Michael Zilkha; The FotoFest Board of Directors; Silver Street Studios; iLand Cloud Services.

Support of the FotoFest Annual Fund is provided by Julie and Andrew Alexander, Gay Block, Travis Capps, Anne Chao, Patricia Eifel, Ken Frederick, Carola Herrin, Rosalie and William Hitchcock, Frazier King, Carol Liffman, Sandy Jo Lloyd, Shazma and Arshad Matin, Guillermo Nicolas, Marilyn Oshman, Mary Sanger, Eliane Thweatt, Anne Tucker, Robert Westendarp and many other generous donors.

The FotoFest Mobile App is supported by Ken Anderson, Frederick Baldwin and Wendy Watriss, Kath Blanco, Thomas Damsgaard, Masud Haq, Carola Herrin, Bill Joor, Abigail Owen-Pontez, Greg Spier and Phuong Tranvan.

2021 Texas Biennial Support
The Texas Biennial is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and other private donors.