About the artists

Lynsey Addario is an American photojournalist who regularly works for The New York
Times, National Geographic, and Time magazine. Her work has received numerous awards. In 2009, Addario received a MacArthur Fellowship and was part of The New York Times team that won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. She received the Olivier Rebbot Award from the Overseas Press Club in 2010 for her series “Veiled Rebellion: Afghan Women.” In 2015, American Photo Magazine named Addario one of the five most influential photographers of the past 25 years.

In 2015, Addario released her first book, a memoir. It’s What I Do, a New York Times best-seller chronicles her personal and professional life as a photojournalist coming of age in the post-9/11 world.

Omar Victor Diop lives in Dakar, Senegal, where he was born. In 2010, while working in corporate communications, he began to experiment with street photography. In 2011, his first conceptual project - Fashion 2112, the Future of Beauty - was selected for the Pan-African Exhibition of Bamako Encounters, a prestigious showcase of African photography. Encouraged by the positive reception to his work, Diop left the corporate world to focus on a career in photography.

Diop’s images are both historical and up to the minute, chronicling the diversity of African societies both in and out of Africa. His body of work includes conceptual projects, staged portraiture and self-portraiture, with visual references ranging from classical European paintings to postcolonial African photography. His creative practice also involves costume design, textile research and creative writing.

Diop’s work has been shown at numerous photography fairs and festivals, including Paris Photo, Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain (FlAG), the Arles Photography Festival and 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair (in both New York and London).

Tom Stoddart has been a constant witness to history. He has documented such historic events as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Romanian revolution, the Rwandan genocide and the election of South African President Nelson Mandela.

Stoddart began his photographic career for a local newspaper in his native North East of England. By the 1980s, he was living in London and shooting extensively for The Sunday Times.

In 1991, Stoddart traveled to Sarajevo to report on the civil war in Yugoslavia. His riveting photos were seen all over the world. It was not without risk, however. He was seriously injured in heavy fighting around the Bosnian Parliament buildings. It took him
a year to recover, but by 1993, he was back in Sarajevo, returning a dozen more times before the 1995 Dayton Peace Accord.

Stoddart has documented humanitarian crises worldwide, often working closely with nonprofit organizations. His in-depth work on the HIVIAIDS pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa has been exhibited and published extensively. In 2012, he photographed refugees
in South Sudan and their desperate struggle to find water.

Stoddart’s work has received numerous honors, including multiple awards from World Press Photo and Pictures of the Year International (POYi). In 2006, he was awarded an Honorary Fellowship by The Royal Photographic Society.

Graciela Iturbide was born in 1942 in Mexico City. In 1969, she went to film school to become a film director. She was soon drawn to the art of still photography and became an assistant to the famed Mexican Modernist photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo.

Iturbide was quickly recognized for her talent. By 1975, her work had been shown in more than 60 exhibitions in Mexico, the United States, France, Ecuador, Cuba, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Germany, Sweden, Poland, Nicaragua, India and Japan.

Over the decades, her work has been recognized in many solo exhibitions, including at the Centre Pompidou (1982), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1990), the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1998), the J. Paul Getty Museum (2007) and many others.
Her images of Mexico’s indigenous people-the Zapotec, Mixtec and Seri-are poignant studies of lives within the bounds of traditional ways of life, confronted by the contemporary world.

Among Iturbide’s many awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1988, the National Prize of Arts and Sciences in Mexico in 2008 and the International Center of Photography’s Cornell Capa Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015. Iturbide lives in Mexico City.

Martin Schoeller is an award-winning portrait photographer renowned for extreme close-up portraits. Familiar faces are treated with the same level of scrutiny as the un-famous. Schoeller’s portraits emphasize the facial features of his subjects - who
range from the unknown to the too-well-known - leveling them in an inherently democratic fashion.

Growing up in Germany and studying at Lette Verein in Berlin, Schoeller was deeply influenced by August Sander’s portraits of Germans from all strata of society, as well as by Bernd and Hilla Becher, who s awned a school known as the Becher-Schüler.

Schoeller worked as an assistant to Annie Leibovitz from 1993 to 1996. Since 1998, his distinctive work has appeared in publications such as Rolling Stone, National Geographic, Time, GO, Esquire, Entertainment Weekly and The New York Times Magazine. In 1999, Schoeller joined Richard Avedon as a contributing portrait photographer at The New Yorker, where he continues to produce award-winning images.

Schoeller’s portraits are exhibited and collected internationally, including several solo exhibitions in Europe and the United States, and are included in the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. He lives and works in New York City.

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.