exhibitions

BUMuo: rebuilding the filipino body

June 29 - July 27, 2024
MASS Gallery — Austin, TX
independent curatorial debut

bumuô (Tagalog, v.): to put together
derived from the root word buo (adj.) which means “whole”

After enduring almost 400 years of colonization under Spain and subsequently the United States, what does being “whole” mean for a 7,600-island archipelago; a tenth of our people untethered from our land and scattered across the entire globe?

Through BUMUO: Rebuilding the Filipino Body, six artists come together and chart a path between the still-red scars of our history to honor our persistent resistance and envision a healed future as kapwa. This multimedia exhibit presents a progressive exploration of the truths we must amplify, the manipulations we must reject, and how the individual empowers the collective through new bodies of work from Filipino artists Himaya, Intel Lastierre, Joi Conti, Lee Paje, Ms Cashmere, and PJ Raval. 

what i carry by riley holloway

July 19 - October 11, 2025
George Washington Carver Museum — Austin, TX
lead curator and installer

Within the white supremacist foundation of American society, even the human inevitability to experience emotions—such as nostalgia—has historically been segregated. In asserting that descendants of Africa are incapable of the same complex inner world as white citizens, the slave-owning class justified the inhumane subjugation of those they considered property. 

The stark contrast in who can access nostalgia extends to the present day. While white political leaders can harken to a time when America was “great” to successfully advance an oppressive platform, the successors of enslaved people are hard-pressed to identify an era in the United States’ history that isn’t dominated by memories of violence. In response, dean of Oxford College of Emory University Dr. Badia Ahad coined Afro-nostalgia “to consider nostalgia as a relevant and meaningful concept in constructing new narratives of Black life that resist, complicate, and complement dominant traumatic framing.” 

By “drawing deeply from family photo albums, church gatherings, reunions, and quiet, personal moments,” Riley Holloway answers Ahad’s call for artists to “materialize nostalgic pasts that unmoor, through imaginative invention, the traumatic roots of the Black historical past.” Holloway utilizes portraiture and collage to translate the personal to the universal, to pursue his family’s generational work of art as an observant offering to his people and his culture. 

second sight

February 8 - June 21, 2025
George Washington Carver Museum — Austin, TX
lead curator and installer

In 1897, philosopher and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois introduced the concept of double consciousness, contextualizing language around the African-American experience for generations to come.

Now, 125 years on, we are no longer just the “Negro in America.” The hyper-connectivity of our time is a double-edged sword; though we can unite over ideas, culture, and experiences at the speed of light, simultaneously we are protecting ourselves from an international surveillance state that violently polices Black and brown bodies. Wherea Du Bois only imagine the merging of the Black “double self” to a “better and truer self,” our current reality necessitates collective understanding and action in the universal battle for liberation.

What does it mean to be Black on Earth? How do we determine a path forward that acknowledges our identity as a marginalized group, but what leverages our power as members of the Global North?

Through Second Sight, Austin-based artists Jonathan “Chaka” Mahone, Hailey Gearo, Brian “Bydeeman” Joseph, and Samara Barks present new bodies of work investigating the coalescence of their Black identity.

small black museum residency project vol. 3

May 16 - October 5, 2024
George Washington Carver Museum — Austin, TX
associate curator and residency project manager

Founded to uplift emerging Texas-based artists of African descent, the Small Black Museum Residency Project celebrates the culmination of its third year with an exhibition of works by taylor barnes, Nitashia Johnson, and Corey De’Juan Sherrard, Jr. Curated as a progressive fulfillment of the previous cohort’s intent to collaborate, this year’s artists have created a profoundly synergistic body of work that serves as a mediation on the here and now, the in-between, and the future after.

The work of this year’s cohort is arranged like an epic poem that concludes with a call and response: to fortify ourselves, our community, and the earth so that we can make “just and liberated futures irresistible.” By extrapolating the prosaic into an ancestral calling, the work of barnes, Johnson, and Sherrard remind us that even a single ripple can grow into a tsunami of joy and radical action, that at any point we can transform ourselves from witness to protagonist.