April 1 - 23, 2022
From DiverseWorks:
“DiverseWorks is proud to present Overlapping Territories, a curatorial initiative and Knowledge-Building Research Lab led by Curator Ashley DeHoyos. The exhibition opens on Friday, April 1, at 6 pm in Matchbox 1 at MATCH, 3400 Main Street, Houston, TX, 77002 with brief artist talks and a performance. The exhibition will be on view through April 23rd and concludes with the Overlapping Territories Symposium. Public hours are Thursdays – Saturdays, 12 – 6 pm, except as noted in the event schedule. Admission is free. Registration is required for the Overlapping Territories Symposium.
Overlapping Territories is an interdisciplinary, experimental space for six artists to engage, discover, and reimagine what it means to be in relationship to the land. DeHoyos begins the project with a Houston-centered approach as a way of understanding what conversations around land already exist within the city. Artists Liyen Chong, Catherine Davila-Martinez, Angel Lartigue, Matt Manalo, Jenah Maravilla, and Monica Villarreal will create multidisciplinary projects that reflect the breadth of the investigations and interrogations into land-centered politics and the issues attached to particular geographies and histories.
The exhibition, which opens on April 1 with brief artist talks and a performance project by Monica Villareal, is inspired by questions about how we occupy land, including histories of settler colonialism, migration, personal and collective liberation, in tandem with understandings of Indigeneity and what it means to be in conversation with land through a decolonized, ancestral, or embodied practice. The ideas presented in the exhibition will be further explored in the Overlapping Territories Symposium, which features a keynote address by artist Nikesha Breeze and guest speakers from across the U.S. Please check the website for the full schedule and updates.
Overlapping Territories is an ongoing project of Curator Ashley DeHoyos who is working with artists to identify and trace a network of knowledge and experiences through public conversations, art, and interviews with other curators, cultural producers, and scholars from across the Southwest United States. The Knowledge-Building Research Lab is the first public iteration of the project. The project welcomes the public into the process through the form of an exhibition, a series of performances, workshops and a knowledge-building symposium as a way to build community and interest in the overall themes and direction of the longer project.
RELATED EVENTS (all at MATCH, Matchbox 1 unless otherwise noted)
Friday, April 1, 2022, 6 – 8 PM
Exhibition Opening Reception & Performance featuring brief artist talks beginning at 6:30 pm and a performance at 7:30 pm, Reflection of Coatlicue (Reflection of our mother the creator and destroyer) by Monica Villarreal with Joyce Day, Enereyda Salazar, and Chloe Belle DeHoyos.
Tuesday, April 12, 2022, 7 PM
Spirit in Motion: a performance activation
Redbud Gallery, 303 E 11th St., Houston, TX 77008
RSVP
Join Body as a Crossroads dance artists Marina Magalhães, Bianca Medina and Tatiana Zamir as they activate an exhibition of sculpture by Anthony Suber (Willie & Shirley’s Son at Redbud Gallery) through improvisational movement practices.
Saturday, April 16, 2022, 6:30 PM
Water, Moon: Film Screening and Ceremonial Gathering with Angel Lartigue
Water, Moon is a short experimental film by visual artist Angel Lartigue of a ceremonial performance within the shrine and burial place of the legendary 19th century curandero (healer) Don Pedro Jaramillo in Falfurrias, Texas. The film includes a soundtrack by H C – (M) and video captured by Tere Garcia.
Thursday, April 21 & Friday, April 22, 2022, 7 PM
Womb, a project of Body as a Crossroads
MATCH, Matchbox 2, 3400 Main Street, Houston, TX 77002
Tickets (pay-what-you-wish)
A new dance work by Los-Angeles based choreographer Marina Magalhães, Womb explores themes of darkness, womb space, and the intrinsic relationship between body-spirit-land and represents the first activation of Magalhaes’s nationally award-winning project, A Body as a Crossroads, that visualizes the possibilities of dance-making as change-making. The project is created in collaboration with dancers Bianca Medina (New York) and Tatiana Zamir (Los Angeles) and visual artists Anthony Suber (Houston) and Francis Almendárez (Houston).
Friday, April 22 – Saturday, April 23rd, 2022
Overlapping Territories Symposium
Keynote Speaker: Nikesha Breeze
Register (free)
The OT Symposium is a program of the Overlapping Territories Knowledge-Building Research Lab. Organized by DiverseWorks Curator, Ashley DeHoyos, the symposium centers on topics such as indigeneity, settler-colonialism, and migration with a Keynote Session led by visual and performance artist Nikesha Breeze, Santa Fe, New Mexico.
For more information about Overlapping Territories events, please visit diverseworks.org.
OVERLAPPING TERRITORIES PARTICIPANTS
Nikesha Breeze (Keynote Speaker, OT Symposium) is an interdisciplinary artist working from a Global African Diasporic, Afro-Centric and Afro-Futurist perspective, their work reimagines the possibility of healing inter-generational traumatic inheritance through the intersection of art and ritual. Nikesha’s work centers Black bodies, simultaneously existing within realms of past, present, and future emphasizing Black, Brown, Indigenous, Queer and Earth bodies, material and immaterial, which are seen as undeniably sacred and inviolable. Nikesha uses performance art, film, painting, textiles, sculpture, and site-specific engagement to build a counter-narrative of an Otherwise, where black bodies and ideas are seen as existing in hypervalue, a realm of indivisibility between black artistic aesthetic, black time, and ritual healing. Nikesha’s methodologies call upon ancestral memory and archival resurrection to bring to the fore faces, bodies, stories, and spirits that have been systematically erased from the master narrative. Breeze is originally from Portland, Oregon and lives and works in the high desert of New Mexico. She is an American-born African Diaspora descendant of the Mende People of Sierra Leone, and Assyrian American Immigrants from Iran.
Catherine Davila-Martinez (Exhibiting Artist) is a mixed media sculptor with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture and current Masters of Fine Arts candidate at the University of Houston. As an artist she has led a public art commission, erecting an outdoor sculpture of an Ankh utilizing crystals and stones from and for the community of 3rd Ward; Zin’s Memorial commemorates the legacy of Anthony Mills, aka Wali Aqueel, aka ZIN. Davila-Martinez has exhibited work in Houston at Lawndale Art Center’s 2021 Big Show and the Station Museum of Contemporary Art’s group exhibition and symposium, In the Sun. She is a recipient of the University of Houston Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts’ 2021-22 Graduate Scholarship and is a lecturer for Convergence Research, a platform for interdisciplinary research, experimentation, improvisation, and performance. Davila-Martinez is a founding member of the Black Women’s Road Trip Collective.
Angel Lartigue (Exhibiting Artist) is an artistic researcher born and raised in Houston, Texas. Lartigue’s work explores the relationship between the body and land through the use of “putrefaction” matter as raw material. This concentration has led them to experiment with using archaeological processes of decomposition in artworks, incorporating fungi, insects, and even odors captured during fieldwork. Lartigue participated in research training in human remains recovery at Texas State University’s Forensic Anthropology Center (the body farm) in 2018. Lartigue designed the 2017 label book, La ciencia avanza pero yo no, which is part of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston’s Hirsch Library rare books collection. Recommended by Italian curator, Eugenio Viola, Lartigue was accepted as an honorary research fellow to the artistic laboratory, SymbioticA, part of the University of Western Australia Perth for 2020. Lartigue is a member of Collective Artists in Solidarity with Palestine (CASP), a Houston collective created as a response to the lack of Palestinian solidarity within cultural art centers.
Matt Manalo (Exhibiting Artist) creates work that involves elements of painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, and printmaking. He uses raw materials and found objects, sometimes collected and oftentimes donated. By doing this, he is making his practice environmentally conscious as well as understanding the idea of scarcity and abundance. He uses the grid as a foundation for most of his work to tackle geography, cartography, borders, and the idea of displacement while having a constant conversation about how “home” should be defined. Being a first-generation immigrant, Manalo discusses his experiences navigating around the physical and social structures of society through his work. As he explores this, home becomes a two-part environment where the artist is split between the Philippines and Texas. The latter sits on the southern border of the US. It is also important to mention that colonization of the Philippines by Spain, Japan and the United States resulted in erasure, colorism and colonial mentality, frequent topics in Manalo’s work. Manalo is the founder of Filipinix Artists of Houston, a collective of visual, performing, literary, culinary, and multidisciplinary artists. He also runs the alternative art space Alief Art House.
Jenah Maravilla (Exhibiting Artist) is a writer, poet, and visual artist who spent her adolescence and young adulthood in and around Houston, Texas. Her father opened TJ Filipino Cuisine in 2006, opening her eyes to the community of Filipinx Americans who reside in the area. Joining Texas A&M’s Philippine Student Association (PhilSA) from 2010 to 2012, Maravilla realized her identity as both a Filipinx and American helped shape her worldview. As a graduate (2017) of Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing, Maravilla carried her earlier college experience with her. Amidst the chaos of nursing school, she joined the local Filipino American National Historical Society (FANHS – HTX) and became part of the founding team for Pilipino American Unity for Progress (UniPro) Texas chapter in 2016 as Secretary General. Realizing a need for Filipinxs in leadership positions, Maravilla has participated in the hosting and facilitation of various workshops, conferences, and events in Houston and nationwide, which revolve around the duality of the Filipinx American identity.
Monica Villarreal (Exhibiting Artist) is an interdisciplinary artist and native of Houston, Texas. Her art explores ethnic identity, gender roles, migrant and environmental issues. She is a recipient of multiple awards in photography and filmmaking. She has participated in installations and performance art productions organized by Voices Breaking Boundaries, Project Row Houses, Houston Arts Alliance, DiverseWorks, Santa Fe Arts Institute, and Alabama Song. Monica wears various hats, as the founder of Creative Women Unite, a local feminist arts collaborative, and as a traditional Aztec dancer with Danza Azteca Taxcayolotl, a local group that practices Indigenous traditions through spirituality and community engagement performances. She is an adjunct professor at the University of Houston Clear Lake and has over a decade of experience organizing with local grassroots and nonprofit organizations.
SUPPORT
Overlapping Territories is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Texas Commission on the Arts, the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance, the Brown Foundation, Inc., the Cullen Trust for the Performing Arts, the George and Mary Josephine Hamman Foundation, Houston Endowment, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Wortham Foundation, and DiverseWorks members and patrons.
The Overlapping Territories Symposium is supported in part by an Arts Respond Project Grant from the Texas Commission on the Arts.
Overlapping Territories research and development is supported by a Curatorial Research Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.”
Reception: April 1, 2022 | 6–8 pm
3400 Main Street, Suite 292
Houston, 77002 TX
713 223-8346
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