About the artists

Bennie Flores Ansell is an installation artist living in Houston, Texas. Ansell received her B.A. (1989) in photography from The University of South Florida, Tampa, and her M.F.A. (1999) in photography from the University of Houston. She was an American Photography Institute National Graduate Seminar fellow (1999) at New York University.

In 2004, Ansell’s work was included in two traveling exhibitions. Only Skin Deep, curated by Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis, was exhibited at the International Center for Photography, New York, New York; Seattle Art Museum, Washington; and San Diego Museum of Art, California. Inside Outside: Texas Women Photographers, curated by Anne Wilkes Tucker and Clint Willour, was exhibited in Texas at the Houston Center for Photography; The Grace Museum, Abilene; Galveston Arts Center; and Women & Their Work, Austin. Other select exhibitions that have included her work are Bug Out of the Box: A New Look at the Contemporary Art, History, and Science of Bugs (2006), Berkshire Museum, Pittsfield, Massachusetts; Crossroads (2006), Galveston Arts Center, Texas; The 24th International Juried Exhibition (2010), Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, Summit, juried by Susan Kismaric, then photography curator for The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; and Silver (2006), the Houston Center for Photography’s 25-year retrospective exhibition. In 2016, Ansell created a site-specific installation at the Daegu Photo Biennale in Korea. Her most recent site-specific installation was at Uno Art Space, Stuttgart, Germany (2017). Also in 2017, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston commissioned her to design a piece in collaboration with museum visitors in its ART LAB. The installation, Fish Out of Water, looks at journeys and immigration using hand-colored flying fish cut from acetate. Ansell currently teaches photography at the Houston Community College Central Campus.

Kalee Appleton is a photography-based artist living in Dallas, Texas. Originally from Hobbs, New Mexico, she attended Texas Tech University in Lubbock and received a B.F.A. (2005) in photography. Shortly after graduation, she worked as a corporate and aviation photographer, and she later attended Texas Woman’s University in Denton, where she received an M.F.A. (2014) in photography. Appleton’s work deals with digital technologies and their effects on society, as well as with the nature of photography, specifically landscape photography. Appleton is currently president of the oldest art collective in Texas, 500X. She exhibits her work regionally at Erin Cluley Gallery in Dallas and has exhibited nationally at Filter Photo, Chicago, Illinois; Spiva Center for the Arts, Joplin, Missouri; Whatcom Museum, Bellingham, Washington; and The Rourke Art Gallery + Museum, Moorhead, Minnesota.

Drew Bacon grew up in Houston, Texas. While attending Lamar High School, he took art classes and began to work as an assistant in Angelbert Metoyer’s studio.  He earned a B.F.A. (2012) in painting and drawing from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York.  He moved back to Houston and began to create animations based in his painting and drawing practice.

Born in Germany, Rabéa Ballin was raised in southern Louisiana and attended McNeese State University where she earned her B.F.A. in design. While pursuing her undergraduate degree, she returned to Germany and matriculated at the Goethe Institut. She also studied art history in Rome and Florence, Italy. Eventually, Rabéa migrated from Louisiana over to Houston to pursue her M.F.A. in drawing and painting at the University of Houston. Currently a professor of fine arts, she is living and working in Houston’s historical Third Ward community and exhibiting nationally.

Rachel Cox lives and works in Dallas, Texas. Prints from the series shown here have recently been presented at the Centro National de las Artes, Mexico City, Mexico (2016); Baijia Lake Museum, Nanjing, China (2016); Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland (2015); Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico (2015); and PHOTO London fair, United Kingdom (2016). Cox has shown work nationally at the Houston Center for Photography, Texas (2013); Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, Pennsylvania (2013); and Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Georgia (2014).   

 In 2016 Cox’s project Shiny Ghost was awarded first place in LensCulture’s international Portrait Awards competition. Additionally, her work was nominated by Foam (Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam) in the Netherlands for the Foam Paul Huf Award, an international photography prize open to artists under age thirty-five. In 2015 Cox was selected as a participating artist, one of only three from the United States, in reGeneration3: New Perspectives in Photography, an international survey of contemporary photography selected from a group of fifty artists. Cox’s work has recently been published in Vice Magazine, The Guardian, HuffPost, and British Journal of Photography. Cox’s monograph Shiny Ghost was published in December 2016 through Aint–Bad Editions, Savannah, Georgia.

Joe Harjo holds a M.F.A. from the University of Texas at San Antonio and a B.F.A. from the University of Central Oklahoma, Edmond. Recent exhibitions including his work are CAM Perennial 2017: Memory and Landscape (2017), at the Southwest School of Art, San Antonio, Texas; and Homage (2017), at Blue Star Contemporary, San Antonio. He recently curated a series of films created by Native Americans at the Briscoe Western Art Museum, San Antonio. Harjo is a board member of the Muscogee Arts Association, a nonprofit organization that advocates for living Muscogee artists, and he teaches photography and visual literacy at the Southwest School of Art.

Born in Cameroon and educated in the United States, Rosine Kouamen is a 21st-century artist in the sense of being both multilingual and multicultural. She brings with her a unique view of cultural production and the role of the artist in society, views informed by her global experiences. She received a M.F.A. (2012) in photography and digital media from the University of Houston, a B.F.A. (2008) in photography from the San Francisco Art Institute, and a B.A. (2005) from Washington and Lee University.  She has exhibited at venues in Houston, Texas, including the University Museum at Texas Southern University, Project Row Houses, Lawndale Art Center, the Texas Contemporary art fair, DiverseWorks, and Art League Houston. She is currently dividing her time between Houston and Havana, Cuba.

Born in 1948, Peter Leighton was raised in a small rural community in north-central Texas. After earning a university degree in 1970, he met a photographer who had recently received a National Endowment for the Arts grant and was teaching at the Southwest School of Art in San Antonio. In time, Leighton became his assistant in both the darkroom and the classroom. His latest series, Man Lives Through Plutonium Blast, is a digitally manipulated exploration of his coming-of-age in the twentieth century, infused with historical, political, and photographic references from that time.

Considered pioneers of digital imaging, Suzanne Bloom and Ed Hill (MANUAL) began their artistic collaboration in 1974. Recipients of numerous grants, including four National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, they have shown their photographs, videos, multimedia projects, and installations widely, both internationally and throughout the United States. Their work is included in many permanent collections.  A retrospective of their work was organized by and exhibited at the International Center of Photography, New York, New York, in 2002 and traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, for exhibition in 2004. MANUAL is represented by Moody Gallery, Houston, who was the first to show their seminal project, VIDEOLOGY, in 1974.

Mark Menjivar is an artist and assistant professor in the School of Art and Design at Texas State University, San Marcos. His work explores diverse subjects through photography, archives, oral history, and collections of objects. Menjivar received a B.A. in social work from Baylor University, Waco, Texas, and a M.F.A. in social practice from Portland State University, Oregon.

Menjivar has engaged in projects at venues including the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, Nebraska; Houston Center for Photography, Texas; San Antonio Museum of Art, Texas; National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts & Culture, Chicago, Illinois; Blue Star Contemporary, San Antonio, Texas; and Krannert Art Museum, Champaign, Illinois. His work has been featured in National Geographic, Artforum, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Slate, Good Magazine, The Village Voice, Gastronomica, and Orion Magazine, as well as at TEDxSanAntonio and on National Public Radio (NPR).

Bucky Miller is an internationally exhibited artist and writer who was born in Phoenix, Arizona in 1987. He has an M.F.A. in studio art from the University of Texas at Austin and a B.F.A in photography from Arizona State University, Tempe. In 2015 he completed a residency in London as part of an exchange with the Royal College of Art Program in Sculpture. Prior to that, he participated in the Little Brown Mushroom Camp for Socially Awkward Storytellers in St. Paul, Minnesota. His work has been featured in N+1 Magazine, The Believer Logger, and Der Greif. His self-published book, The Picture of the Afghan Hound, was selected as one of Photo-Eye's best photobooks of 2016.

Bucky has a small collection of miniature chairs. He currently resides in Austin.

Emily Peacock is an artist who lives and works in Houston, Texas. She received her M.F.A. at the University of Houston, with an emphasis in photography and digital media. Her interests mainly lie in photographing and making short videos of her family. Peacock was a 2013–2014 Lawndale Artist Studio Program artist-in-residence in Houston, and she recently received a Houston Arts Alliance Individual Artist Grant for 2016. She has exhibited her work throughout the United States, in Vienna, Austria, and in the United Kingdom. Peacock’s work is included in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston photography collection.

Molly Shigemoto is a visual artist working in photography and mixed media. Her work centers on themes of family and her examination of cultural identity. She received her B.F.A. in photography at the University of North Texas, Denton, and is currently living and working in Texas. In 2015 she was selected as a Contemporary Art Dealers of Dallas (CADD) Fund finalist, and she has shown her work in several galleries across Texas.

Sherwin Rivera Tibayan, born in Subic Bay, the Philippines, in 1982, is an artist based in Austin, Texas, whose works address our shifting encounters with the history of photographic images. His works have been exhibited widely, most notably at The Reading Room, Dallas, Texas (2015); Mixed Greens, New York, New York (2013); the festival KAUNAS PHOTO, Lithuania (2012); XL Art Space, Helsinki, Finland (2011); and Matèria, Rome (2016). He has received recognition from the Magenta Foundation, Photolucida, Artpace, and the Society for Photographic Education. He received his M.F.A. from the University of Oklahoma, Norman (2012), and has held residencies at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, New York (2012); ACRE (Artists’ Cooperative Residency and Exhibitions), Chicago, Illinois (2015); and Triple Canopy, New York, New York (2014).

Kevin Todora is a photographer based in Dallas, Texas. He received his B.A. from the University of Texas at Dallas (2005) and his M.F.A. from Southern Methodist University, Dallas (2009). A solo exhibition of his photographic work, birchpleeze (2013), was shown at the Dallas Contemporary. He is represented by Erin Cluley Gallery, Dallas, and has had two solo exhibitions there: new photographic works (2015) and gaslight (2016).

Nick Vaughan and Jake Margolin are based in Houston, Texas. where they have had solo shows at Devin Borden Gallery, Art League Houston, Houston Community College Central, and Houston Community College Southeast.  In Brooklyn, New York they exhibit at The Invisible Dog Art Center.  They are currently developing 50 States: Arkansas & Louisiana for The Invisible Dog, 2019, and 10 Political Gestures, an experimental film commissioned by Aurora Picture Show.

The artists are recipients of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, a Tulsa Artist Fellowship, and grants from the MAP Fund, The Idea Fund, and the Houston Arts Alliance. They are members of the internationally acclaimed, Brooklyn-based experimental theater company The TEAM, and they frequently collaborate as visual designers with the choreographers Faye Driscoll and Yoshiko Chuma. Also members of Houston’s BOX 13 Artspace, the artists are represented by Devin Borden Gallery, Houston.

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.