The state’s largest contemporary art show is seeing a few changes this year, with one of them being that the show is debuting in San Antonio and Houston.
Big Medium, an Austin nonprofit “dedicated to supporting artists and building community through the arts in Austin and across Texas,” announced 51 participating artists and five museum partners of the 2021 Texas Biennial: A New Landscape, A Possible Horizon.
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In its seventh iteration, and for the first time ever, the art show will be distributed across five Texas museums, featuring exhibitions, programs, and works of public art in San Antonio and Houston from September 1, 2021, through January 31, 2022.
San Antonio will host the majority of the art show, according to Big Medium, and will run through Jan. 31, 2022. The schedule is listed below:
- San Antonio: Artpace (August 5–December 26, 2021)
- McNay Art Museum (September 1, 2021–January 9, 2022)
- Studio at Ruby City (August 1, 2021–January 30, 2022)
- San Antonio Museum of Art (August 19–December 5, 2021)
Additionally, the Biennial curators also broadened the scope of the project to include Texas natives and artists with deep roots in the Lone Star State who are now working or living in other parts of the world. For the first time also, the Texas Biennial will feature international artists use the state and its history as subject matter in their art.
“Intentionally broad in its scope and organized throughout the pandemic. The 2021 Texas Biennial is spread across San Antonio and Houston in order to realize a diversity of practices and explore a vast landscape of disciplines, themes, and historical events relevant to both Texas and contemporary global discourse,” Garza said in a release. “Principal themes of the project––the mutable histories contained within objects and people, activism and issues of racial and social justice, and narratives unique to the history and land of Texas––are examined in multiple creative disciplines and across multiple sites.”
According to a news release by the group, the curators of the event selected artists from more than 850 considerations over the last 18 months.
“Although we were faced with several limitations in the last eighteen months, connecting with artists virtually during the pandemic gave us the opportunity to get to know some folks intimately and also consider how to expand the Biennial in several ways,” the group said in a statement. “Our desire to partner with incredible museums in San Antonio and Houston, and the need to make decisions based on public health guidelines, led us to organize a project that is iterative in form and expansive in scale.”
For more information and a full list of artists and groups involved in the event, click here.
Big Medium is pleased to announce the 51 participating artists and five museum partners of the 2021 Texas Biennial: A...
Posted by Texas Biennial on Friday, May 7, 2021