International Discoveries VI

About the artists

Tad Beck was born in Exeter, New Hampshire. He earned his B.F.A. in photography from the School of Visual Arts, New York, in 1991, and his M.F.A. from ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, California, in 2003. He lives and works in New York City and Vinalhaven, Maine.

Mr. Beck’s work has been shown in solo exhibitions since 1989, most recently at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2010); The Fisher Center at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (2013); Samuel Freeman Gallery, Santa Monica (2011); as well as exhibitions of collaborative works: Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions with Jennifer Locke (2012); VOLUME, Los Angeles with taisha paggett and Yann Novak (2016); Theodore: Art, Brooklyn with Diana Cherbuliez (2013).

Beck’s work is represented in the collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Worcester Art Museum, Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts; the Sweeney Gallery at the University of California Riverside, and the Portland Museum of Art, Maine, among others.

Ilana Bar earned her B.A. in photography, in 2010, from Senac University Center, São Paulo, Brazil, where she currently lives and works. She was brought up in a rural area of the city of Atibaia, near São Paulo, SP, Brazil. Her work often focuses on her own family including her twin uncles and her brother, who were born with Down syndrome. In Transparências de lar [Transparencies of home], Ilana Bar photographs her family’s daily life in their multi-generational home. In 2010, she was awarded first place at the Eighth International Festival of Photo Image in Atibaia for this series.

Ilana Bar’s work has been shown in several group shows and fairs in São Paulo and Atibaia. She continues to study at the University of São Paulo.

Paola Dávila was born in Oaxaca, Mexico, in 1980. She earned her B.A. from the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plasticas, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Mexico City in 2002.

She has had eight solo exhibitions since 2002 including: Casa de Cultura Azcapotzalco, México City (2002); Centro Fotográfico Álvarez Bravo, Oaxaca (2004); Galería Medellín 174, Mexico City (2010); Patricia Conde Galería, Mexico City (2016) and more than thirty group exhibitions in Mexico, the U.S., Poland, and China. She has been awarded two residencies through Mexico’s Foreign Residencies and Exchanges Grant Program and National Fund for Culture and Arts (FONCA). In 2009, she was an artist-in-residence at the Banff New Media Institute at the Banff Centre of Canada and in 2014, at the Land-Salzburg Künstlerhaus, Austria. A Tierney Family Foundation Fellowship to create new work allowed her to spend 2010 working on Interior Seasons, a study of water and its relation to time.

Paula Dávila is a three-time recipient of FONCA’s National Young Artists Grants and has received Arts Everywhere Grants from the Department of Culture of the Government of Mexico City twice. In 2002, she received the National Photography Award at the Visual Arts Biennial of Yucatan.

Qian Jin was born in 1960 in Shaoxing, Zhejiang, China, and currently lives in Beijing. He graduated from Zhejiang Sci-Tech University majoring in visual communication design and learning photography. Qian has worked as a magazine editor and as a commercial photographer. In 2015, he changed his focus to fine art photography. He is a member of the China Photographers Association, vice president of the China Textile Photography Association, and is the chief representative of the Images Copyright Society of China.

Zhang Kechun was born in 1980 in Sichuan, China, and started painting when he was a child. He studied art and design and worked as a designer in Chengdu before becoming interested in photography. His first series, The Yellow River, documented the effects of modernization along the second-longest river in Asia, which is also known as Huang He. Zhang’s second series, Seascapes, is an homage to Hiroshi Sugimoto’s famous series by the same title.

Zhang Kechun won the Discovery Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles for The Yellow River in 2014. Working with the agency Most, he also undertakes editorial and advertising commissions. He won the National Geographic Picks Global Photo Contest in 1998 and was shortlisted at the World Photography Awards in 2013. He has been exhibited at Photoquai, Paris; the Beijing Photo Biennale; and the Delhi Photo Festival, India.

Jung A Kim was born in 1978 in Incheon, Korea. She lives and works in Berlin and Seoul. In 2013, she studied at The Berlin University of Design (BTK) and in 2014 earned her B.A. in photography from Chung-Ang University, Seoul.

She was an artist-in-residence at Cultural Affairs, City of Tampere, Finland (2014) and Studio Vortex by Antoine d’Agata, Arles, France (2015). Jung A. Kim was awarded First Prize for best portfolio at The 6th European Month of Photography Portfolio Review (2014) in Berlin and was selected by the Musée de l’Élysée, Switzerland as one of the fifty emerging photographers (2015). Recently, Reminiscence. A Walk through the Other Side of my Mind was published by Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg, Germany. Her work has been shown internationally with group and solo exhibitions in Germany, Finland, Switzerland, Japan, and others.

Korean artist Hyunmoo Lee studied photography at Kyungil University, Gyeongsan City Korea, and Dawson College, Westmount, Quebec. In 2014, he received Gachang Art Studio Seoul’s Amado Art Space Photography Award and had his first solo exhibition there, V escape. Since then, he has exhibited his work at various spaces including the Hongik Museum of Art, Hongik University, Seoul; Jung Gallery, Seoul; and Space Gachang, Daegu, Korea. He is also the recipient of a 2016 artist residency at Gachang Art Studio, Daegu Foundation for Culture, Korea. His photographs have been published in several magazines including Photography Masterclass Magazine, Monthly Photography, Misulesegye, Photo Dot, and Artist Portfolio Magazine.

Tuany Lima was born in San Jerónimo, Brazil in 1990. She discovered photography as a young teenager, curious to see beyond the obvious and then record what she saw. Her photography guided her choice of profession; she earned degrees in advertising and graphic design. After working for seven years in advertising and graphic design she combined all her professional knowledge with her experience in photography to create Áurea, a series of photographs of women, each notated and enhanced with Photoshop to show what the women wanted to have done to change the way they look in their photographs. Lima calls these changes “aesthetic absurdities of (the) current times.” Áurea was selected for Discovery Awards Projection at Encontros da Imagem 2016 in Braga, Portugal. The Discovery Awards Projection features thirteen artists under 30 years of age. At the IV Latin American Photography Forum, São Paulo her work was selected as one of the seventy-five best portfolios. Images from Áurea and an interview with Lima appear in OLD/revista fotográfica magazine in issue 59 and will be included in Convention 143 published by Beira/Movida Editorial Fotográfica, Porto Alegre in March 2017.

Eustáquio Neves is a self-taught photographer and video artist who studied chemistry and classical guitar. Since 1989 he has researched and developed alternative and multidisciplinary techniques, including the manipulation of negatives and prints, as well as electronic media, incorporating sequence and movement. He was born in 1955 in Juatuba, Minas Gerais, Brazil, an area that served as a refuge to fugitive slaves — the quilombos. From 1993 to 1997 he photographed a community of quilombos descendants in Minas Gerais to express his interest in the memory and identity of black Brazilians. In 1994 he was awarded the Marc Ferrez Photography Prize by Brazil’s National Foundation for the Arts (FUNARTE).

His work has been widely exhibited in Brazil and abroad including solo shows of his series Cartas ao Mar [Letters to the Sea]. He has exhibited this work at the Afro Brazil Museum in São Paulo and FotoRio in Rio de Janeiro (2015) Bahia Contemporary Art Museum, Salvador, Brazil (2014) The Pinacoteca Art Museum, Sao Paulo Brazil (1996). He has shown abroad in many group shows including AFRO-BRASIL, Fotografia Brasileira, Institute of Foreign Relations Gallery (IFA), Stuttgart, Germany (2013); Mythologies: Brazilian Contemporary Photography, Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo (2012), I Mostra Pan Africana of Contemporary Art, Bahia Art Modern Museum, Salvador (2005).

A self-taught Cuban photographer, René Peña earned his degree in English at the Instituto Superior Pedagógico de Lenguas Extranjeras (ISPLE) in Havana in 1978. He joined the Cuban artistic world at the end of the 1980s and the new trends in Cuban photography in the early 1990s. First dealing with interiors and domestic situations in Cuba, he later went deeper into themes like negritude, sexual ambiguity, and the influence of consumerism and the market through self-portraits.

René Peña developed his series through a conceptual and formal analysis, which is structurally different from most pre-established parameters, going from a brutal expressionism to a marked homoeroticism; in his work, he has included strong mystic elements and a certain theatrical treatment of the staging of his images.

René Peña has taken part in many exhibitions, individual, collective, and art fairs, inside and outside of Cuba, and his pictures are part of numerous permanent collections, private and public. With his work he has won a number of prizes and special recognition: among them are first prize at the IV Biennial of the Caribbean, Santo Domingo (2000) and the Distinción por la Cultura Cubana given by the Consejo Nacional de las Artes Plasticas y el Ministerio de Cultura de Cuba (2002).

Brazilian artist Fábio Del Re has been surrounded by photography since childhood. His father’s photographs, albums, and cameras were his constant companions. He moved to Boston when he was twenty and studied at the New England School of Photography (1988–1989) and received honors for his work in black and white. He spent six years in Boston and purchased his first Leica camera there. Returning to Brazil, he documented craftspeople and craftwork in places all over the country for many years. Then he had the opportunity to use his photography for the reproduction of artworks. Today, he is admired for his command of analog printing.

His photographs have been shown in solo exhibitions in Brazil including Decomposition, Photo Galería, Porto Alegre (2002); Gavetas e outros Eclipses, Fundação Cultural de Criciúma (2003); Morandi, Espaço Cultural, Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing (ESPM), Porto Alegre (2015) and Canela Workshops (2016). Since 2001, his work has been shown in several group shows in Brazil as an individual and with the Baita Professional, a group founded in 2008 by several friends who were brought together by photography. He was recently named Artist of the Year at Porto Alegre’s 10th Açorianos de Artes Plásticas Awards for Morandi at ESPM, which was also named as one of the best individual exhibitions of the year.

Marcel Rius was born in Barcelona, Spain in 1970, where he worked as an assistant for commercial photographers. Moving to Mexico City in the mid-2000s, he worked as a commercial photographer and later opened a gallery, Tingladography, in Oaxaca. He has since become interested in fine art photography and he continuously works on different personal projects.

His work has been featured in collective and solo exhibitions Spain and Mexico. In Fanatic Wars, Rius considers the motivations of Star Wars fans that dress in elaborate costumes, transforming themselves into their favorite character. For the fans their costumes do not just change them externally but internally as well, allowing them to become their dreams. His book Fanatic Wars was published by Trilce Ediciones, Mexico City in 2015.

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.