2024 Texas Biennial Programs

Where should the plants sleep after the last breath of air?

We write out names with crimson mist!

We end the hymn with our flesh.

Mahmoud Darwish “Earth Presses aganist Us”

Date(s):

Thursday, October 17-Saturday, October 19

Performance and Music Nights

From October 17–19, 2024, the Blaffer Art Museum will host the 2024 Texas Biennial Performance and Music Nights organized by Goodnews Nwankwo, Texas Biennial Curatorial Assistant.

Thursday, October 17, 2024, 6-9pm

This performance evening features a Violin Duo with Jasmine Lin and Mann-Wen Lo along with performances from S Rodriguez, X’ene Sky, and Isabella Vik.

Jasmine Lin, violin

“Jasmine Lin is a magnificent player with superb tone and strong interpretive powers” and “a violinist of remarkable intensity,” maintain American Record Guide and Chicago Tribune. As a member of Formosa Quartet and In Triplicate, faculty member at Roosevelt University and Music Institute of Chicago, Curtis Institute of Music alumna, confidante to a Cremonese violin, arranger of Grappelli tunes, prizewinner in the Naumburg and Paganini competitions, Grammy nominee, and recording artist on Con Brio, EMI, and New World Records, Jasmine likes to solicit magnificence and intensity while leaving raindrops on her nose un-wiped-off. Her biography contains precisely one hundred words.

Mann-Wen Lo, violin

Violinist Mann-Wen Lo has appeared as a soloist with the Taipei Symphony, Academy of Taiwan Strings, Tokyo Geidai Strings Ensemble, and American Contemporary Ballet in Los Angeles. She has served as guest concertmaster for Pasadena Opera, American Contemporary Ballet, and Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra, and has recorded for Warner Classics, Navona Records, and CMH Label Group. Currently, Mann-Wen is Professor of Practice in Violin at the University of Houston’s Moores School of Music and a founding member of Trio Magnoliana. She is a recurring faculty member at summer music festivals, including the Deutsch-Polnische Festival für junge Musiker in Bremen, the Montecito International Music Festival, and the Texas Music Festival. Outside music, she enjoys nature walks, drawing, films, playing Go, and experimenting with cameras.

S Rodriguez

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X’ene Sky

X’ene Sky is a pianist, vocalist, composer and cultural worker in the lineage of Zora Neale Hurston. Her interests include slavery and the interstices of queerness, inheritance, climate change and musical repetition as a way to access trance-like states and other modalities represented in the material and immaterial. She is concerned with questions of personality and who we are outside of our name, class and education.

Isabella Vik

Isabella Mireles Vik is a trans-disciplinary artist based in Houston, Texas with a focus on contemporary dance, improvisation methodologies and body performance. Vik uses these elements to find the intersections in movement and experimental performance to create work questioning the human condition and societal struggles. Over a span of three years, Vik has self-produced and performed in numerous projects for both film, stage, galleries and impractical spaces. Their work has been greatly influenced by their international and national research in performance and movement with artists such as Laja Field, Victor Rottier, Lewis Wilkins, Satoshi Kudo, Jozef Fruček, Horacio Macuacua, Edivaldo Ernesto, Peter Jasko, Cree Barnett Williams, Lisard Tarnis and Sidra Bell. In 2023 Vik formed their ensemble, Aufheben, as an extension of their work and a container for experimental performance research instigating new training opportunities in Houston.

Aufheben is focused on experimentation, radical authenticity and a constant research of body performance. To be in contradiction within ourselves and finding the states between individuality, shedding independence for the whole and fractaling back to oneself. Movement and body arts through the ensemble is meant to provoke visceral reactions, instigate interpersonal reflection and challenge the viewer as well as the artist. Displaying raw experimental work to push the boundaries of performance.

Friday, October 18, 2024, 6-9pm

This performance evening features performances from Corey De’Juan Sherrard Jr., Mashal Awais, and Ryan Hollaway with Open MFA Artist Collective

Corey De’Juan Sherrard Jr.

Corey De’Juan Sherrard Jr (born 1996, Houston, TX) engineers a developing system for composing songs and generating objects that respond to the deficit of black radical propaganda within a world culture. He is a University of Houston alum, a School for Poetic Computation alum, and currently consults at the Kinder High School for Performing and Visual Arts. Sherrard has shown at Sanman Studios, Sabine Street Studios, Houston Endowment, Cleve Carney Museum of Art, and George Washington Carver Museum and Cultural Center, and is a recipient of the 2023 Jones Artist Award.

Mashal Awais

Mashal Awais is from Lahore Pakistan and has been based in Texas since 2008. She is a student of the bansuri, a traditional bamboo folk instrument from South Asia under the mentorship of the renowned living legend, Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia. She also works as the Community Science Manager at Bayou City Waterkeeper, where she supports ensuring equitable access to nature and clean water.

Ryan Hollaway, Open MFA Artist Collective

California-born and Texan-raised, Ryan Hollaway is an artist whose work transcends conventional boundaries. His creations are intended to introduce an element of the unfamiliar into familiar spaces, inviting viewers to explore the nuances of their surroundings. Hollaway draws inspiration from his environment and taps into his emotional senses, creating a body of work that serves as a multi-sensory experience.

Delving into the visual, auditory, and olfactory realms, Hollaway’s pieces are crafted to engage viewers on a holistic level. His art is more than a visual spectacle; it’s an invitation to immerse oneself in an all-encompassing encounter with the senses.

Saturday, October 19, 2024, 3-4:30pm

Migration Stories Workshop with Stacey Allen

Stacey Allen is a performance artist, curator, and advocate for arts education, educational equity, and reproductive justice all while being a wife and mother to three beautiful children. Maintaining her artistic practice while navigating Motherhood has come with challenges, but integrating the art of mothering with her insistence on telling Black stories through movement and material culture has been worth the while. From starting with Urban Souls Dance Company to co-founding Pretty Cultured to founding and directing Nia’s Daughters Movement Collective, her work is to be delivered back to the people. Nia’s Daughters Movement Collective received a Congressional Recognition for their mission aligned work of creating and supporting art and wellness initiatives through the lens of Black women and girls. Stacey wrote the children’s book “A Little Optimism Goes a Long Way ” and created “The Fairytale Project,” a dance theater production centering the Texas Freedom Colony, Shankleville, that is currently touring. Other recent works include “Formed in My Grandmother’s Womb” (2019), “A Single Thread Weaves a Future” (2021), and “it’s about our FREEDOM” (2022), “Aesthetic Inheritances” (2023) and more. Stacey Allen, based in Houston, TX, holds a BA in Dance from Sam Houston State University and an MA in Cross Cultural Studies from University of Houston-Clear Lake.

Location:

Blaffer Art Museum