Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions

A series of exhibitions and programming in San Francisco and Houston that examines the shifts in dilated time, ritual, memory-keeping, and community-building in artistic practices in the years 2020-2024

KADIST San Francisco: October 4, 2024 – February 15, 2025
Opening reception: October 3, 6-8 pm

Blaffer Art Museum: October 11, 2024 – March 9, 2025
Opening reception: October 11, 6-8 pm

Learn more about Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions at the Blaffer Art Museum

KADIST San Francisco exhibition comprises over 40 artists: Indira Allegra, Brook Andrew, Edgardo Aragón, Carmen Argote, Yoko Asakai, Saif Azzuz, Kent Chan, Tony Cokes, Moyra Davey, Jim Denomie, Jeneen Frei Njootli, Rahima Gambo, Juliana Góngora, Harry Gould Harvey IV, Claudia Gutiérrez Marfull, Gordon Hookey, Pao Houa Her, Every Ocean Hughes, Steffani Jemison, Kite and Corey Stover, Subash Thebe Limbu, Tessa Mars, Joe Namy, Eduardo Navarro, Antonio Obá, Juan Obando, Nour Ouayda, Prabhakar Pachpute, Antonio Pichillá, Michael Rakowitz, Jamel Robinson, Sherrill Roland, Asha Sheshadri, Rania Stephan, Kenneth Tam, Moses Tan, Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor, Kaylene Whiskey, Carmen Winant

Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions is a two-part exhibition, concurrently taking place in Houston at the Blaffer Art Museum and at KADIST San Francisco, which traces the cyclical nature of improvised, responsive, and sustained systems of mutual aid, information sharing, and embodied knowledge sets, as well as their intersectional, intimate, and enduring effects in the wake of the COVID-19 global pandemic. The exhibition includes public programs that examine time, ritual, memory keeping, and community-building practices between 2020 and 2024. The exhibition considers artists as prognosticators—forecasters of cultural shifts— and traces evolving artist practices and approaches as informed by activism—in particular, the creation of mutual aid networks spurred by lived experiences such as the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic, as well as the systemic inequities producing Black and Brown grief and the struggle towards liberation. The artists assume the role of narrators for mimetic memory, muffled silences, and informal archiving practices against power structures sanctioning conditions of personal isolation, cultural amnesia, and planetary extinction.

Amplifying the exhibitions, the public programs function as activations and timely engagements explicitly tied to current political circumstances in the final months of the 2024 U.S. presidential election cycle. Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions is a diary of experiences encompassing not only what has occurred in culture following COVID-19 but what never came to light in the ongoing process of remembering and recollecting as a form of ‘protest against forgetting.’

The year 2020 began with the onset of the COVID-19 global pandemic, which continues to expose systemic inequities disproportionately affecting historically marginalized communities. In their 2022 book What World Is This?: A Pandemic Phenomenology, Judith Butler advocates for intertwinement as a “collective effort to find or forge the best form of ‘interdependency’ as one that most clearly embodies the ideals of radical equality.” The exhibitions and related programming in Houston and San Francisco are guided by an ethics of entanglement in order to disentangle the logic of sustained solidarity economies, maintaining liberation as an ultimate goal.

Programs
Public programs affiliated with Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions continue the exhibitionary desire for knowledge-sharing and the potential of collectivity and collaboration on the local and global level. The pandemic exposed systemic inequities disproportionately affecting marginalized groups. Extending this reckoning across arts and cultural institutions, many workers, especially frontline employees, were furloughed, while others were tasked to envision new forms of engagement to welcome new publics to their online and hybrid programs.

The programs in San Francisco are titled Open Bodies and extend across the city in collaboration with arts and cultural organizations. The series is conceived as a collective body that tends to various organs, perceptive faculties, and phenomenologies: sound/listening, body/movement, and language. Acting as the ears, the limbs, the and tongue to the exhibition body, Open Bodies reflects on the transformation of physical and social bodies through sound, dance/choreography, and the reverberation of familial and collective language.

Learn more about Open Bodies

Artworks by Gabriel Martinez, and Gil Rocha, selected through the 2024 Texas Biennial Open Call, are embedded and intertwined in Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions. The 2024 Texas Biennial The Last Sky activates overlapping and amorphous forms of cultural production and cross-pollination shaped by artist collectives and community involvement. It is an iterative space in the center of the museum—reverberating like the pulses of a beating heart—with artistic responses to the question: what happens after the last border is drawn? The Last Sky is a phrase borrowed from Mahmoud Darwish’s poem ‘Earth Presses Against Us’, and also references the 1999 book After the Last Sky by Edward Said.

Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions at the Blaffer Art Museum is co-organized by Erika Mei Chua Holum (Cynthia Woods Mitchell Associate Curator at the Blaffer Art Museum and co-curator of the 2024 Texas Biennial), Lindsay Albert (Program Manager, KADIST San Francisco), and Jo-ey Tang (Director, KADIST San Francisco). The co-institutional partnership and curatorial research for Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions was initiated by Joseph del Pesco (International Director, KADIST) and Steven Matijcio (Former Jane Dale Owen Director & Chief Curator at the Blaffer Art Museum). The 2024 Texas Biennial The Last Sky is co-curated by Erika Mei Chua Holum, Ashley DeHoyos (Curator, DiverseWorks), and Coka Treviño (Curator and Artistic Director at Big Medium and Founder and Curator of The Projecto).

Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions at KADIST San Francisco is co-curated by Lindsay Albert (Program Manager, KADIST San Francisco), Joseph del Pesco (International Director, KADIST), and Jo-ey Tang (Director, KADIST San Francisco).

Founded in 1973, the Blaffer Art Museum endeavors to further the understanding of contemporary art through exhibitions, publications, and public programs. As the gateway between the University of Houston’s Central campus and the City of Houston, Blaffer Art Museum is a catalyst for creative innovation, experimentation, and scholarship. Its exhibitions and programs are free and open to the public, create community through dialogue and participation, and inspire an appreciation for the visual arts as a vital force in shaping contemporary culture.

The Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at the University of Houston is the interdisciplinary arts resource for students, faculty and staff, and the general public. In order to bridge disciplines, stimulate dialogue and support the creation of innovative work, the Mitchell Center supports a variety of programs such as lectures and workshops, performances and exhibitions, scholarships, residencies and visiting artists.

The Texas Biennial is a geographically-led, independent survey of contemporary art in Texas. 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. In its eighth edition, the Texas Biennial is the longest-running state biennial in the country. Since its inception, the program has brought the work of over 300 artists to new audiences, springboarding many artists’ careers and underscoring the diversity of contemporary practice in Texas.