Through a collaborative and non-hierarchical approach, Erika Mei Chua Holum, Ashley DeHoyos Sauder, and Coka Treviño co-organized the eighth iteration of the Texas Biennial through friendship, reciprocity, and mutual support. With trifold dreams and visions, the co-curators selected works and artist projects through the 2024 Texas Biennial Open Call. Presented across venues along the Texas Gulf Coast, The Last Sky activates amorphous and overlapping forms of cultural production–performance, cultural preservation, and visual art–shaped and cross-pollinated by collectives and community participation. Through this survey of contemporary art, we looked at artistic acts of continuance and survival.

Erika Mei Chua Holum is the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Assistant Curator at the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston. Recent and forthcoming projects at the Blaffer Art Museum include Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions with KADIST San Francisco (2024), and solo exhibitions with John Guzman (2023), Reynier Leyva Novo (2024), and Cian Dayrit (2024). She organizes Ecofictions and Understories (2023-24), a city-responsive curatorial program to speculate potential worlds for gathering, resisting, and regeneration in artistic practices in conjunction with the exhibition Climate Migration with the Houston Climate Museum supported by the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts. With support from the Idea Fund, Erika launched the Sahara Dust Residency in 2024, a summer residency program activated by forms of knowledge-sharing across the temporary and migratory region created by Saharan dust clouds. They have contributed to projects and exhibitions globally, such as Majority Rule: Myth-making and survival strategies from AAPI artists at Sanman Studios (2023), makibaka! Fifty Years of Filipino-American Youth Activism at Alief Art House (2021), Duro Olowu: Seeing Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2020), the Second Edition of the Lagos Biennial in Nigeria (2019), and Obscura Festival of Photography in Malaysia (2018). Erika holds an MA in Museum and Exhibition Studies from the University of Illinois Chicago, a Masters in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and is completing a PhD in Art History at Rice University.

 
 

  • The co-organizing and planning for the 2024 Texas Biennial emerges from an urgent plea to unearth more questions from the ever-ripping seams of silence. As devices meditated intersectional and overlapping atrocities across Sudan, Congo, and Gaza, I entered the New Year craving poetry. Poetry that lived inside of me, around me, perhaps unseen or unremarked upon. Thousands of poems on loose papers across my desk, a few words penned urgently in the margins of a book, or the accumulation of dust after several weeks of travel. Somewhere in a pile of unwashed clothing, or an overdue conversation with a friend. I sought poetry wondering what to do with the grief.

    There are times in my life, and in the life of the world, where only a poem — perhaps in the form of the lyrics of a song, or a half sentence we ourselves write down — can reach the precise contours of a question that can’t be fully articulated. When I find myself in conversation with an artist, a poet, a prophet, or a griot — it is not only to talk of their work, but to delve into ways words, breath, sound, and silence teach us about being fully human — and staying human — in all that is treacherous, heartbreaking, revelatory, and wondrous.

    I come with a belief we can articulate our questions and doubts in art, poems, stories, or stillness. To learn from the shadows we cast when standing in the sun. To call for the children playing in the clouds. To sweep the lingering dust long after the masses marched. Or watch the bowing arch of a tree firmly rooted during a hurricane.

    It is my hope the participating artists, poets, chefs, and cultural stewards brought together through the 2024 Texas Biennial become the poem we need to hear at this moment. The voices of those speaking the same questions, singing their grief, or creating from sacred outrage. From inside of us and all around us, the work brought together becomes the chorus of voices to bury the dead and summon the living. With each collective breath, I believe we have what we need to rise, and rise again.

    We’ve come this far, survived this much.

    What would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?

    What if we stood up with our synapses and flesh and said, No.

    No, to the rising tides.

    Ada Limón, “Dead Stars”

 

Ashley DeHoyos Sauder is a curator at DiverseWorks, where she organizes a full range of visual, performing, and public arts programming. Her focus is on intersectional artists and speculative futures as they relate to history and the environment. Recent projects include; A Portrait of Houston a film and performance collaboration with French artists Jocelyn Cottincin, and French Choreographer Emmanuelle Huynh, Installation and performance of Lisa E. Harris: D.R.E.A.M Away to Afram, Overlapping Territories, Virginia Grise: Rasgos Asiaticos, online projects Visionary Futures, Sarah Dittrich: The Tender Interval, and the performance Jefferson Pinder: Fire & Movement. 

DeHoyos Sauder received a BFA from Sam Houston State University (2013) and MFA in Curatorial Practice from Maryland Institute College of Art (2016). Outside of her curatorial role, DeHoyos Sauder enjoys teaching Museum and Gallery Management as part of the Museum Certificate program at University of Houston's MA in Art Leadership program and serving as steering committee member for Houston's BIPOC Arts Network and Fund, and as a 2023 - 2024 National Performance Network Partner Advisory Council. She is a recipient of the Andy Warhol Curatorial Research Fellowship, Teiger Foundation, and Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation for curatorial lead research and programs. Her upcoming projects include a performance Memory Fleet: A Return to Matr by Houston-based artists Jasmine Hearn, and group exhibition River on Fire.

 

  • Arriving at this moment to co-organize the 2024 Texas Biennial comes with mixed feelings. There are waves of anxiety, sparks of curiosity, and a craving for a new rhythm of creating and engaging with art. There is also this call to sit in silence and reflect on all that has happened over the last couple of years. But, even amid all these feelings, the call I keep hearing is for questions to be answered and for new futures to be foraged out of those responses.

    I am constantly thinking about the role artists play in times of crisis and what that means for the future generations of creatives. I keep thinking about topics like…What does it mean to be a creative in Texas? Perhaps the question is more like this— What does it mean to be A human in Texas?

    I’m interested in questions about how we carry time and how we are carried by time. Understanding that each act, while completely similar, can be vastly different and offer unique experiences. We understand that time can be repetitive and call to us frequently to acknowledge the world around us and how we managed to get here or rather there. —Wherever there might be.

    I wonder, what does it look like to be in opposition to time? What rhythm or rituals exist to help us understand how we might be able to manipulate it as we move in the world?

    As curators, we have been taught to mitigate crises and find solution-oriented pathways. We work with artists and for artists who are trying to find creative solutions in the name of creative expression, often indirectly related to acts of survival.

    I wonder why we call it survival? The dictionary defines survival as a state or fact of continuing to live or exist, typically despite an accident, ordeal, or difficult circumstances. It sounds connected to what it means to be resilient in Texas. How do we individually and collectively survive in systems of oppression, outdated values, and ways of being?

    I wonder what it would look like for us to put together a manual for the future? What might be outlined as different ways of surviving? What creative solutions would build new systems and what might be born out of spite?

    In my curatorial practice, I think a lot about the legacies we inherit and carry with us. There are so many hidden layers of stories deeply embedded across Texas. Stories waiting to be told and retold. Stories of love and survival. Stories of unsung heroes and histories. Stories of poetry and paradise.

    I’m interested in how these stories come alive. How artists create spaces of belonging and how we might begin to re-imagine our surroundings. Some call it speculative fiction, others call it world building but what if it's merely re-examining all that we already have?

Coka Treviño is the Founder and Curator of The Projecto, an Austin-based organization fostering cultural connections between Latin America and the US. She is the Curator and Artistic Director at Big Medium, an Austin-based nonprofit art organization dedicated to advancing artists' careers. Additionally, she does Arts Programming at Soho House Austin. Her curatorial practice focuses on uplifting diverse artistic communities with an innovative and respectful approach to culture and contemporary social issues. Her work attempts to intertwine art, music, and social perspectives as often as possible, always with diversity, equity, and inclusion at the forefront of the projects.

Coka has worked with ArtPrize as a Curator and Outreach Specialist. She has co-curated events for the Blanton Museum and exhibitions for the Mexican American Cultural Center, the SXSW Art Program, and the Gallery at Austin’s Central Library. Previously, she supported the Exhibition department at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Monterrey, managed and curated exhibitions from the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León art collection in Monterrey, and served as a Curatorial Assistant for the Universal Forum of Cultures in Monterrey. She co-curated a concert with the Austin Symphony, highlighting women of color composers adding these pieces to the Symphony’s repertoire. She co-produced the project Translating Community History, a set of two books and hours of storytelling by Black and Latinx neighborhoods in Austin, which was recognized by the Preservation Merit Awards in 2023. Her Spanglish Series was featured by the Mexican American Cultural Center. She co-curated and managed Golden Hornet’s MXTX, a gender-balanced album, concert series, and open-source audio sample library to build cultural bridges between the US and Mexico.

 
 

  • When thinking about a new Biennial, post-pandemic (kind-of), after a very successful run in 2021, and feelings of constant stress, unstable environments, and transitions, the only thing that kept coming to mind was that we needed to go “back to basics.” Back to basics meant to strip down the program, weed out the superfluous, and focus on the voices of artists and how they are navigating this moment in time—an austere approach for the Texas Biennial.

    Unlike its name, the Texas Biennial doesn’t necessarily happen every two years. The leadership and vision change with every edition, making change the only constant, similar to the state we call home and what it means to be in the arts in Texas. To me, the only way to make it happen successfully for everyone involved is by planning it “In Community,” leaning on others, trusting, and holding each other with kindness and good faith. What we’ve been going through collectively has dramatically impacted how we behave and perceive reality and connectivity. We’re all doing our best to move at our own pace, however long it takes. This made me especially interested in the importance of making time and space to process, breathe, be quiet, cry, or close cycles. Thoughtfulness, intentionality, and dedication only to the necessary, what we have at hand, what we’ve kept close in our hearts despite the violence and upheaval we’ve endured.

    Crossing paths with Erika at a critical moment was serendipitous and confirmed it was the right time for a new edition of the Biennial. Our passion and dedication to our cities, artists, and art influenced by Texas and current affairs ignited a strong partnership, and it didn’t take long for us to start daydreaming and expanding the scope of what we might do with this Biennial. Ashley was quickly invited as a collaborator to bring the co-organizing team together and solidify our vision for the 2024 Texas Biennial in an experimental and organic form with all the possibilities to be just what we individually and collectively need. One that makes us feel embraced and empowered to go out and proudly show how amazing our Texas artists are, share their voices, and provide a platform for them to lead the way.