Sarofim School of Fine Arts’ Studio Art Department Presents

Brown Symposium XLI: Irresistible Revolutions Exhibition

Irresistible Revolutions celebrates collective rest, dreaming, play, pleasure, and care as empowering, embodied practices that actively create the worlds we truly desire to live in together. The exhibition features artists whose works point to mindsets, rituals, and relationships that resist the everyday violence of white supremacy, capitalism, and cisheteropatriarchy, shifting us toward paradigms of healing and connection.

Irresistible Revolutions opens on January 31, 2023 and closes on March 10, 2023. The exhibition reception will be held on February 22, 2023 from 4:00 p.m. - 5:15 p.m. in the Wood Avant Foyer outside of the Fine Arts Gallery, located in the Alma Thomas Fine Arts Center. E. Rutersville Rd, Georgetown, TX 78626. The Gallery is free and open to the public Tuesday - Sunday from 12:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.

About the curator/artists

Kelly Johnson, photo credit Christopher Beer Kelly Johnson, photo credit Christopher Beer

Curator Kelly Johnson ’12 (she/they) is an arts and cultural worker, curator, and writer from Houston, TX. Her projects expand on the interconnected concepts of embodiment, power dynamics, language, environment, and spirituality, taking varied forms including events, exhibitions, zines, and collages. Kelly is the Director of Public Programs at the Rothko Chapel, a sacred art space dedicated to community engagement through contemplation and action at the intersections of art, spirituality, and social justice. Their writings have been featured in exhibition catalogs including the Station Museum’s Cassils: Solutions, and reviews in ART PAPERS and Bmore Art, among others. She earned an MFA in Curatorial Practice from Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD, and a BA in Art History from Southwestern University in Georgetown, TX. Kelly is a board member for Houston’s Center for the Healing of Racism and collaborator with Houston queer art collective 3 of Cups, and they were a Fellow in the 2022 New Leaders Council (NLC) Houston cohort. kellymjohnson.net

 

JooYoung Choi JooYoung Choi

JooYoung Choi was born in Seoul, South Korea. She completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and received her Master of Fine Arts from Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. Choi’s artwork has exhibited in such venues as Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; The Crow Museum of Asian Art, Dallas, TX; Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY; The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, TX; Project Row Houses, Houston, TX; The Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience, Seattle, WA; The National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago, IL; and The Art Museum of South East Texas, Beaumont, TX. Choi has received grants from Artadia, Idea Fund, and The National Endowment for the Arts. She has also participated in the Lawndale Artist Residency in Houston, TX, and the Harvester Artist Residency in Wichita, KS. Choi’s work has been featured by numerous media groups and publications, including the PBS Digital Studios Art Assignment, Korean Global News Network YTN, LA Times, New American Paintings, Arts+Culture Magazine, Texas Monthly, Houston Chronicle, Glasstire, PaperCity Magazine Houston, and The Huffington Post. jooyoungchoi.com. 

Instagram: @jooyoungchoiwow

 

Beatriz Cortez, photo credit Ruben Diaz Beatriz Cortez, photo credit Ruben Diaz

Beatriz Cortez (b. San Salvador, El Salvador, 1970) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Her work explores simultaneity, life in different temporalities, the untimely, and speculative imaginaries of the future. She has exhibited her work at Pitzer College Art Galleries in Claremont, CA; Rockefeller Center, New York; Craft Contemporary Museum, Los Angeles; Clockshop, Los Angeles; Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; BANK/MABSOCIETY, Shanghai, China; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Centro Cultural Metropolitano, Quito, Ecuador, among others. Currently, her work is on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art in San Diego and at the Museo MARTE in El Salvador. Cortez has received numerous awards including the Borderlands Fellowship at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics in New York (2022-2024); Atelier Calder artist residence in Saché, France (2022); California Studio Manetti Shrem artist residence at UC Davis (2022); Longenecker-Roth artist residence at UCSD (2021); Artadia Los Angeles Award (2020); Frieze LIFEWTR Inaugural Sculpture Prize (2019); Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2018); and California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2016), among others. She holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and a doctorate from Arizona State University. beatrizcortez.com.

Instagram: @beatrizcortezflores

 

Alex de las Mareas Alex de las MareasAlex de las Mareas (she/they) is a Xicana sex educator, anarchafeminist, cancer sun, and queer interdisciplinary artist living in Huchuin Unceded Ohlone Land/Oakland, CA. Alex chooses her projects in constellation with pleasure brujeria, radical education, sex worker solidarity, and the sensual connection between the moon and the tides. Their work was shown in the 2022 National Queer Arts Festival and they have hosted workshops and knowledge shares about pleasure and sexuality for over 15 years primarily in the San Francisco Bay Area. Alex spends her time placing her feet into shallow ocean waves with her dog Milagro, strengthening her connection to Mexican cooking and kitchen curanderismo, vending their mano made queer sex magic supplies at local markets as Pleasure Brujita, and teaching as a professional pelvis to revolutionize clinical sexual health as patient centered and queer inclusive.

Instagram: @pleasurebrujita

 

Demian DinéYazhi Demian DinéYazhiDemian DinéYazhi ́ is a Portland-based Diné transdisciplinary artist, poet, and curator born to the clans Naasht’ézhí Tábąąhá (Zuni Clan Water’s Edge) & Tódích’íí’nii (Bitter Water). Their practice is a regurgitation of purported Decolonial praxis informed by the over accumulation and exploitative supremacist nature of hetero-cis-gendered communities post colonization. DinéYazhi´’s praxis interrogates normative spaces by refusing to settle or perform for exploitative galleries and publishers that act as gatekeepers to the lethargic, toxic legacy of Western paradigms. They are a survivor of attempted european genocide, forced assimilation, manipulation, sexual and gender violence, capitalist sabotage, and hypermarginalization in a colonized country that refuses to center their politics and philosophies around the Indigenous Peoples whose Land they occupy and refuse to give back. They live and work in a post-post-apocalyptic world unafraid to fail.

Instagram: @heterogeneoushomosexual

 

Khushboo Gulati Khushboo GulatiKhushboo Gulati (they/them) is a multi-disciplinary artist and designer born and raised on Tongva Land (Los Angeles). Their creations engage with the journeys of their flesh/spirit, time/less-ness, ritual, flower splendor, the elements, earth tending, challenging values of oppression, embodiment, rewriting internal & external narratives, detangling pain, dreams, and igniting wonder. They channel through painting, tattooing, graphic design, adornment making, drumming, sensation activation + curation, textiles, installations, and dance, imagining and creating lush worlds around saturated loving, healing, and existing…new ways of flowing, being, & seeing outside of white & Brahmanical paradigms & illusions. Their work is guided by shifting paradigms, land-based learning and justice work, community healing & transformation, metaphysical spiritual exploration, intuition, creating autonomous affirming spaces that center justice, liberation, love. fragrant-hawa.com.

Instagram: @fragrant_hawa

 

Kimi Hanauer Kimi HanauerKimi Hanauer (they/them) is a cultural- and media-based organizer, facilitator, artist, and a founding collective member of Press Press. In their practice, Kimi co-builds pragmatic-poetic initiatives and resources that aim to foster collective autonomy. In recent years, Kimi has co-organized projects such as Press Press’s Poetry for Persistence with Printed Matter and Toolkit for Cooperative, Collective, & Collaborative Cultural Work with Institute for Expanded Research. Their initiatives have engaged organizations including The Luminary and Counterpublic, Wendy’s Subway, GenderFail, Women’s Studio Workshop, ACRE Projects, Tufts University, Allied Media Conference, Southern Exposure, MoMA PS1, Virtual Care Lab, among others. Currently, Kimi is stewarding a slow process of emergence for the Center for Liberatory Practice & Poetry. Kimi earned an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles and a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art. kimihanauer.com.

Instagram: @kimi_hanauer

 

Lovie Olivia Lovie OliviaAmerican artist Lovie Olivia–born, living, and working in Houston, Texas, creates works that are informed by race, gender and sexuality and the historical and cultural nuances surrounding these intersections. She employs painting, printmaking, sculpture, and installation to arrive at her body musings. Throughout her career she has applied what Valerie Cassell Oliver coins as “Intuitive Intellectualism” or an autodidactic approach to a rigorous multi-disciplined practice that engages with the historical art canon. Olivia’s work hangs in numerous private and public collections including Project Row Houses, ACRE Residency Chicago and the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian Institute. She is a recipient of three Individual Artist Awards funded by the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance, including a current commission with the City of Houston and Bush Intercontinental Airport. She has exhibited nationally and abroad at Corridor Gallery, Brooklyn NY; 1969 Gallery, Manhattan, NY; Jam Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Woman Made Gallery, Chicago, IL; Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN; Arthello Beck Gallery, Dallas, TX; Art Pace, San Antonio, TX; and various locations in Houston, TX, including Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Blaffer Museum, Houston Museum of African American Culture, The Station Museum, Project Row Houses, TSU University Museum, and many more. lovieolivia.com

Instagram: @lovieolivia

 

Jason Ting Jason TingJason Ting (b. 1986, Johor Bahru, Malaysia) is a new media artist based in New Haven, CT with a background in Interdisciplinary Computing Arts. Jason’s work explores the interaction of light, color, and motion through digital animation and interactive installation.

Instagram: @jzlabs

 

Charlie Watts, photo credit Kelly Blackmon Charlie Watts, photo credit Kelly BlackmonAtlanta-based artist Charlie Watts seeks to create images not of this world, to use photography as a stepping-stone to the unknown realm just past the peripheral edge of consciousness. She creates images to bring imagination into fruition and provide a visual escape from the mundane to the fantastical. Watts received an MFA in photography with the San Francisco Art Institute and a B.A. in art history and visual arts at Emory University and is currently finishing her doctorate in occupational therapy at Georgia State University. She is a member of the Dash Contemporary and a resident with Marble House Projects, The Creatives Project, Hambidge Center for Creativity and the Arts, Starry Night Retreat, and the Hambidge Hive Project at Colony Square. Her photographs are heavily performance-based and have been exhibited at de Young Museum, the High Museum, the Harn Museum, Vogue Italia, SomARTS, Root Division, Whitespace Gallery, the Diego Rivera Gallery, and Saatchi Gallery London. Currently, her 5-year photographic exploration with Tricia Hersey of the Nap Ministry is on display at Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport. Watts’ work is in the permanent collections of Netflix, the Harn Museum, and the firm of Womble-Carlyle. Watts is represented by Whitespace Gallery. charlottewattsphotography.com

Instagram: @charliewattsstudio

 

Paula Wilson, Courtesy of the artist & Denny Dimin Gallery Paula Wilson, Courtesy of the artist & Denny Dimin GalleryPaula Wilson (she/they) is a mixed-media artist who studies and sources imagery from different cultures, geographies and times to develop a unified, visual language of her own. Wilson frequently combines printmaking, painting, sculpture and video into her projects. Wilson works by collaging multiple forms of visual language together: ancient motifs, tropes from Western art history, and identifiers of her home in the New Mexico High Desert. Wilson has repurposed visuals associated with Greek myths, Impressionist paintings, and styles derived from the decorative and domestic arts. Paula Wilson received an MFA from Columbia and a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis, MO. Wilson is represented by Denny Dimin Gallery and Emerson Dorsch, and has held recent solo exhibitions at Locust Projects, Miami, FL (2020-2021), 516 ARTS Contemporary Museum, Albuquerque, NM (2019), Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY (2018), and Denny Dimin Gallery, New York, NY (2022, 2018). Wilson’s artwork is in many prestigious collections including The Studio Museum in Harlem, the New York Public Library, Yale University, Saatchi Gallery, The Fabric Workshop, and Colby College Museum of Art. paulajwilson.com

Instagram:  @paulalights