A Proposal: The Texas Biennial We Deserve

The entrance to the exhibition “2024 Texas Biennial: The Last Sky” at the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston

I want the Texas Biennial to be a success. I want it to be a big to-do that people travel from all over to see, that curators from across the world add to their “must-visit” list. I want the Biennial to accomplish everything its lofty name would suggest — to be a true representative venue to showcase “Texas art” (whatever that might be) in a significant, meaningful way, which would raise the profile of our state’s individual and collective art scenes, giving more visibility to our fantastic, talented local artists. 

In its 20-year history, though, the Texas Biennial has instead been an underfunded exhibition with confusingly related offshoot events, whose erratic timing hasn’t even fulfilled the “biennial” promise of its title. To understand how the program got here and what its problems are, you have to understand where it came from (or, if you want to brush past the history and instead read about the problems, skip a few paragraphs and start at the divider). 

The exhibition was founded, per its website, by a group of Austin artists in 2005. Three of these artists, Shea Little, Jana Swec, and Joseph Phillips, would go on to found Big Medium, the longtime Austin-based nonprofit which has just recently announced its closing. From 2005 to 2009, the first three biennials took place at venues across Austin. In 2011, the initiative merged with Big Medium. That year’s Biennial smartly grew beyond Austin to include programming in Houston and San Antonio. The happenings were, again per the Biennial’s website, “independently curated exhibitions and other programming.” 

The 2013 edition expanded to host programming in San Antonio (The Contemporary at Blue Star), Dallas (CentralTrak), Houston (Lawndale), and Marfa (Ballroom Marfa), along with a show of works by past Biennial artists at Big Medium. Then, skip four years to the Biennial’s return in 2017: it is back and being organized by guest curator Leslie Moody Castro. She chronicles her on-the-ground work doing studio visits across the state in an online blog that many people still mention to me as a highlight of Texas Biennial history. The show happens only in Austin this year, in the back of a furniture warehouse in Southeast Austin. 

The show skips 2019. Its 2020 edition, postponed because of COVID, instead opens in 2021 as a co-curated exhibition by Ryan N. Dennis and Evan Garza. This year, San Antonio is the homebase, and each venue has an indiscriminate closing date: the San Antonio Museum of Art (December 5, 2021), Artpace (December 26, 2021), the McNay Art Museum (January 9, 2022), and Ruby City (January 30, 2022). FotoFest, the Houston nonprofit, also hosts a Biennial show, which closes November 13, 2021. 

Three years later, in 2024, the Biennial returns with three co-curators: Erika Mei Chua Holum, the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Associate Curator at the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston (the Blaffer’s portion of the exhibition, called 2024 Texas Biennial: The Last Sky, closed March 9, 2025); Ashley DeHoyos Sauder, Curator of DiverseWorks in Houston (the venue hosted River on Fire, a show “presented in conversation” with the Biennial, which closed November 16, 2024); and Coka Treviño, the then-Curator and Artistic Director of Big Medium. The Biennial’s website lists participating venues and auxiliary exhibitions hosted by “programming partners,” some of which include work by or are solo shows of artists featured in DeHoyos Sauder’s and Holum’s shows. Other listed events feel tenuously related. Closing dates for these exhibitions vary wildly. 

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Here’s what I’ve gathered from the exhibition’s history, from my own experience, and from talking with Texas artists over the past ten years: the Texas Biennial is a 20-year-old program that has lacked consistency, focus, depth, or logical growth. Why go from hosting shows at venues across Texas in 2011 and 2013 to then having the exhibition solely in the back of a furniture warehouse in Austin, especially after skipping one whole biennial? Why host a statewide slew of related exhibitions and events if some of them are going to barely be up for a month and a half, making it hard to attend as a cohesive program? Can we even expect this Biennial to be every two years? Does anyone outside of Texas care about this show, or even know it exists? Why have some of the most interesting artists in Texas (or with Texas ties), like Michael Ray Charles, Julie Speed, Otabenga Jones & Associates, Mel Chin, Jeff Elrod, Donna Huanca, etc., never been included in the Biennial, per the exhibition’s web archive? Who is this show for and what is its ultimate goal? Am I alone here? Am I crazy? 

I’m writing this because I don’t think I am. Ultimately, what we all want is for the show to be interesting, satisfying, challenging, gritty, and generous — a real representation of Texas as a state, a place, and a people. And the Biennial’s founders and Big Medium must be commended for having the vision to believe that Texas should even have a biennial in the first place and for running it, albeit intermittently, for all of these years. (The fraughtness with which biennials operate, generally, and whether they should exist at all, isn’t something I even want to consider here. That is its own op-ed, and has already been written by multiple people. I’m going to plod along instead with optimism and good faith that a biennial for Texas is a brilliant idea that could impact our state and its artists for the better. This is an idealized version of what a biennial can be, but I digress.) 

I want the Biennial to be the kind of examination of our state that Texas and its artists deserve. When the Biennial was young, it was okay for it to be inchoate; 20 years on, it is embarrassing. This isn’t to say anything specific about this or past iterations of the exhibition: its 2021 version across San Antonio looked sharp. It was nice to see the show in institutions for once, which also meant that perhaps a wider, museum-going audience would happen across it. This year’s Biennial was perfectly nice as well — I was glad the Blaffer could play a role, and was happy to see such a strong showing in Houston. But there is a need for bigger, more significant, structural foundations that could build up the Biennial as a happening, as a thing that would be impossible to ignore, as a real occasion.

We should all want the Biennial to be the best version of itself, and I’d be remiss not to mention that this isn’t a new argument: in 2011 Rainey Knudson wrote an op-ed for Glasstire with this same thrust. In the years since, the Biennial has occasionally followed some of her recommendations, and other times it has gone back to its old self. My vision for the Biennial overlaps some with what she theorized then, but it also diverges — our solutions are cousins. Without further ado, here’s what the Biennial could and should be for our state. 

The Biennial should have an endowed, full-time curatorial position at one of Texas’ leading museums or kunsthalles (the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Dallas Contemporary, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, etc.). This curator’s job would be the Biennial. Full stop. And their institution would take on the role of either hosting the show or collaborating with a similarly serious museum to house the main Biennial exhibition. This situates the responsibility of the Biennial within an institution that has the capacity to pull it off, and also puts the show in conversation with other important, large-scale exhibitions being organized there. The show could rotate institutions every two years — great! It could stay at the curator’s home institution and have well-thought-out and co-curated programmatic offshoots elsewhere — exciting! Either way, it would finally have a driving force and a gravity (and a consistency) behind it. 

The person in this position would also be responsible for bringing in guest curators to co-organize the show. This means the Biennial (and Texas) would have new eyes every two years, and the guest curators would give the show some star power, which would draw in a larger audience from outside Texas. 

There should be funding behind the show, too. I’m not talking about an ocean of money, but enough that the Biennial curatorial position is prestigious and that the guest curators receive a sizable fee and a gratuitous expense account, which would allow them to spend considerable time traversing Texas’ cities and smaller towns. By the time this show opens, the curators should know Texas like the back of their hands. 

There should be enough money to commission some artists to create new, major artworks that they’ve never had the capacity to make (à la Prospect New Orleans). There should be an open call, but the show should not be derived entirely from that group of artists — it would instead be a springboard from which the curators explore, visit, and invite artists based in Texas and with strong Texas connections to be part of a purposefully curated (maybe thematic, if a theme feels natural) show. 

There should be enough money that all participating artists receive a more-than-fair artist fee, and that shipping, framing, and other extraneous costs are paid. (One well-known Texas artist told me that they didn’t apply for a previous edition of the Biennial because shipping costs weren’t covered, and that they weren’t paying to transport their piece to the show. Rightfully so. An exhibition with the lofty goal of being the Texas Biennial shouldn’t make artists foot the bill.) 

There should be a catalog. Exhibitions are well and fine, but they only live in the ether after they close. Books are forever; books are marketing; books are vehicles for scholarship — all things Texas could do with. A substantial book means that some Biennial artists would have their first-ever catalog mention. It would also further the dialogue about well-known artists included in the show, and would begin, in a focused way, to make sense of this landmass and ethos we call Texas.

There should be a substantial marketing budget for ads in national and international newspapers and art magazines, and also for press junkets for journalists and arts professionals to travel to Texas and see the show(s). Are there auxiliary events in multiple cities? Journalists get a bus tour! Do the guest curators know writers who are interested in their programming and in good art? Of course they do, because we invited top-tier curators to co-organize the event!

If we’re going to host a biennial for art in Texas — the Texas Biennial — it needs to live up to its name. Artists who live in and have come out of our state are far too good for it to be anything less than. As I discussed the state of the Biennial with folks this winter, I was conflicted whether I should write this piece. One of the fears of prescriptive op-ed writing is that if you propose something, it might never actually happen. I also don’t want to write to complain — while the Biennial isn’t even halfway down the field, everyone associated with it has put in far too much blood, sweat, and tears for me to disparage the platonic ideal of its potential. Two things can be true at once: curators, arts workers, and artists have put years of hard work into this project (which should be commended), and the Biennial as a concept and reflection of the excellence of Texas art isn’t near what it should be. 

But now, more than ever, is the time to act. Since Big Medium has closed, is the Biennial up for grabs? Perhaps more importantly, is there a Texas institution willing to step up to the plate and lead the Biennial into its proper future? 

I’ll end with hope: I hope the Texas Biennial, in whatever its future iteration is, will be a wild, unexpected, jaw-dropping, nationally considered, punk rock, serious growth out of its current self. We deserve it. Texas’ artists deserve it. And the world deserves to see it. Here’s hoping it can happen.