An independent survey of contemporary art in Texas.

Opening Fall 2024

In partnership, Big Medium, the Blaffer Art Museum with KADIST San Francisco, and DiverseWorks are thrilled to announce the Texas Biennial 2024 Curators and Open Call!

Erika Mei Chua Holum, Ashley DeHoyos Sauder, and Coka Treviño will co-curate the 2024 Texas Biennial through a collaborative and non-hierarchical approach. Selected through invitations and an Open Call, artist projects, works, and programming will be featured at the Blaffer Art Museum and host venues in Houston and the Texas Coast.

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. The eighth edition of this program will take place in 2024, making the Texas Biennial 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.

Thank you to everyone who has submitted projects to the 2024 Texas Biennial Open Call!
We are honored and overwhelmed by the number of responses we received by the March 31st deadline.
In an effort to increase access and additional opportunities to be considered, we are extending the deadline until May 1st, 2024. 

Please continue to spread the word! We would like to especially encourage performances, activations, and other time-based artistic expressions.

For Applicants Consideration

In its eighth edition, the 2024 Texas Biennial Open Call invites artists based in Texas or those with strong ties to the state to apply, regardless of their current location worldwide. Artists are encouraged to submit proposals for works or projects created between 2020 and 2024, aligning with the biennial and related programming themes.

Works selected through the Open call could be presented alongside projects in upcoming exhibitions River on Fire and Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions as part of programming or exhibitions in partner spaces such as Lanecia Rouse Tinsley Gallery at Holy Family HTX, Sawyer Yards, The Journey HTX, Big Medium, Throughline Collective, Anderson Center for the Arts, Houston Climate Justice Museum, DiverseWorks, and Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston.

The curators consider proposals situating Texas as a fluid, ever-changing site of knowledge, producing cultural participation and cross-pollination, transmuting borders, regional identity, and marginalized histories.

Faced with economic, cultural, and environmental shifts in the last few years, many creative practitioners have evaluated basic needs from food, shelter, medicine, music, and art, as well as relationships with each other and our environment, reminding us of the value of what we already have…or what we might solely need to flourish.  

As the organizers survey various practices, including dinners, performances, and artist projects, they view this year's event as an opportunity to explore sustainable models for presenting and producing work in Texas.

“Texas is a constructed territory. The inflows and outflows of changing borders, occupations, and boundaries shape the formation of communities and their participants. The 2024 Texas Biennial explores the overlapping and amorphous forms of cultural production and cross-pollination through the rising and falling of systems and structures drawn across people, land, and water. With particular attention to artistic process, practice, and participation, the biennial centers on performance, gathering, poetry, cultural preservation, and visual art shaped by collectives and community involvement. We look to artists to articulate a means of liberation.” 

Curators

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.

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.

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 Director of Programming 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 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.