Art in the AM: (the water is rising) at Blaffer Gallery

LOCATION: Blaffer Art Museum,120 Fine Arts Building, University of Houston Houston, TX 77204

Free museum parking available in lot 18A, accessible from Spur 5 exit. Paid parking available closer to the museum.

Join us for Art in the AM at the Blaffer Art Museum for writers' inspiration! We will meet in the atrium of the Fine Arts Building at 10:30 for reflection before heading into the museum at 11 am. Downstairs are two exhibits a way to mend, curated by Doug Welsh and featuring abstracted realism by Gulf coast artists, and ¡Cuidado! a video installation centering caregivers who are migrants from Honduras.

Upstairs we will visit Saif Azzuz: Keet Hegehlpa’ (the water is rising),which interrogates the privatization of land, water, and natural resources within settler-colonial systems. Across a range of mediums, Azzuz references the myths, origin stories, and fabricated tales animating the land we now call Houston.

For the artist’s first museum exhibition, Azzuz draws upon historicized fictions in archives and material histories. In Keet Hegehlpa’, the artist employs archival references, such as Allen Brothers advertisements which depicted an idyllic hilly European hamlet known as Buffalo Bayou. These manufactured misrepresentations encouraged settlers to purchase and occupy the unceded land of the Sana, Atakapa-Ishak, Akokisa, and Karankawa peoples. Azzuz responds to the control of stolen land and carceral realities to discuss how privatization is enforced; in so doing, the artist centers the unyielding and interconnected force of life in all beings—human and more-than-human alike.

Also check out other Arts events in Houston, Exhibitions in Houston, Literary Art events in Houston.