July 15 - October 9, 2022
From the Blaffer Art Museum:
“The Blaffer Art Museum is proud to present the first solo museum exhibition in Texas of artistic and life partners Nick Vaughan and Jake Margolin (working collaboratively as “Nick & Jake”), whose poignant interdisciplinary practice marries art, theatre, performance, archival research, and spoken word. As part of this select survey that spans multiple years of activity, the Blaffer will commission a precedent-setting number of new works by Nick & Jake that include two monumental drawings, intimate cartographic mappings of pioneering community members, and a pair of new performative lectures. The artists will also orchestrate a new performance-based “cloud” painting that will be presented at a campus-based location outside the museum, and a newly assembled compilation of their seminal video works will be displayed at the UH Student Center and Blaffer Art Museum social media channels. Within this multi-faceted and multi-site celebration, this constellation of new works will be integrated with a handful of past works to carefully trace the evolution and achievement of Nick & Jake’s practice.
Nick & Jake have spent the majority of their artistic lives mining the habitually marginalized and unheralded histories of LGBTQ communities across the United States, and how the legacies of elements found and forgotten affect the contemporary queer experience. Their primary body of work, 50 States, is an ongoing, multi-decade series of installations and performances made in response to little-known pre-Stonewall queer histories from each state. This profound vocational endeavor engages critically with perceptions of history and identity as America’s views of sexuality evolve at an astonishing pace, while provoking deeply troubling social and legislative backlashes.”
Reception: July 15, 2022 | 6–9 pm
120 University of Houston Fine Arts Building
Houston, 77204-4018 TX
713-743-9530
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