NOTE: THIS PUBLIC ART EXHIBITION WAS CENSORED BY ALL BILLBOARD COMPANIES IN HOUSTON, TX. Read more about our experience in The Art Newspaper, Hyperallergic, and ArtNet News.

We thank Houston Museum of African American Culture for the space they’ve provided for this critical public art exhibition.

SaveArtSpace and Art at a Time Like This (ATLT) have partnered to present the Houston, Tx edition of 8X5, a nationwide public art campaign named for the size of an average prison cell. This timely public intervention presents the work of artists responding to mass incarceration and inequalities in the justice system. Originally launched in Miami in June 2022, 8x5 Houston will go live on November 4, 2023.

The 8x5 Houston selected artists are Chandrika Metivier, Faylita Hicks, Jared Owens, Jenny Polak with The Fortune Society Artists, Kill Joy, Mel Chin, Monti Hill, McKenna Gessner, Rebo, and Trenton Doyle Hancock.

Curated by Barbara Pollack and Anne Verhallen, Art at a Time Like This; Christopher Blay, chief curator, Houston Museum of African American Culture; Bridget Bray, independent Houston-based curator; Ashley DeHoyos Sauder, curator, Diverseworks.

During the week of November 6, 2023, SaveArtSpace will launch public art installations for each selected work on billboard ad spaces in Houston, Tx. The public art will be on view for at least one month.

Selected Artists

Chandrika Metivier is a non-binary multidisciplinary artist whose preferred mediums range from theatre and music, to larger-than-life sculptures, to iconic bridges over highways. Influenced and informed by their multiracial heritage, including Haitian, Native and Hispanic background, they have staged a diverse range of art installations in their base city, Houston, Texas. Most recently, Chandrika was featured in the Houston Chronicle for their ongoing public graffiti installation on the well-known “Be Someone” bridge that commutes downtown and runs over Interstate 45– its latest rendition reads, “#WOMANLIFEFREEDOM”.

Chandrika is most recognized for their trademark soft sculpture art, made with a reflective material called mylar. Their signature use of mylar spurred a recent trend of mylar integration in high-profile projects and photography around the nation. These large-scale installations both physically and metaphorically reflect the sculptures’ surroundings and viewers. Offering more introspective, interactive components than a mirror, these installations invite the viewer to merge with the artistic backdrop and experience the magnitude of the install. Their art has ranged widely in both location and form. Chandrika has displayed their soft sculpture work in different forums across Houston, L.A., New Orleans, Detroit and New York. Additionally, the flexibility offered when working with such a durable material has allowed them to mobilize responsively to advocate for real-time relevant causes confronting local communities and politics, such as voting rights, homelessness, and human rights.

In fact, Chandrika’s art, oftentimes, is motivated by their activism. During the 2020 U.S. election, Chandrika revamped and localized the “VOTE OR DIE” campaign with their trademark artistic style in multiple forums. This created a grassroots initiative that mobilized young BIPOC voters in Houston’s Third Ward. In 2022, Chandrika went viral on TikTok for revitalizing the cardboard shelter of an unhoused individual living in L.A.’s Skid Row.

After receiving their undergraduate degree from the University of Houston, Chandrika was accepted into a prestigious acting program based in Los Angeles, Identity School of Acting. Chandrika immediately advanced to the professional level tier and was chosen as one of 30 students to receive the Netflix Scholarship.

Chandrika continues to be involved in the mylar arts through brand collaborations, galleries, and private events. Past collaborations of Chandrika’s include Premium Goods, DiverseWorks, Triller, Kool Cigarettes, and KTRU Rice Radio, and PUMA.

The statement used in my billboard submission was an excerpt from a prison zine titled Transforming Carceral Logics: 10 Reasons to Dismantle the Prison Industrial Complex Through Queer/Trans Analysis and Action – S. Lamble which I discovered while reading a catalog of digitized zines provided by True Leap Press.

True Leap Press is a radical publishing collective that is currently located in New York and California. We promote Black intellectual struggle and advocate for the building of mass-based, autonomous projects for antiracist, anticapitalist, and antipatriarchal political education. 

Connect with Chandrika on Instagram at @ch4ndrika.

FAYLITA HICKS (she/they) is the author of HoodWitch (Acre Books, 2019), a finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry, the 2019 Julie Suk Award, and the 2019 Balcones Poetry Prize. A queer Afro-Latinx activist, writer, interdisciplinary artist, and cultural strategist, they were born in South Central California, raised in Central Texas, and are now based in Chicago where they are currently working on the forthcoming poetry collection A Map of My Want (Haymarket Books, 2024), and a debut memoir about their carceral experience A Body of Wild Light (Haymarket Books, 2025). In 2023, they starred in Cara Mia Theatre’s national touring production of the Whiting-Award winning one-person show Your Healing Is Killing Me written by Virginia Grise and directed by Kendra Ware. The former Editor-in-Chief of Black Femme Collective and Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, their digital art, poetry, essays, and interviews have been published or are forthcoming in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day Series, Adroit, American Poetry Review, AfroPunk, Ecotone, Foglifter, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Kenyon Review, Longreads, Poetry Magazine, Scalawag, Slate, Texas Observer, The Slowdown Podcast, Yale Review, amongst others.

Throughout their career, they have used their intersectional experiences to advocate for the rights of BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ people by interpreting policy’s impact on the individual via various arts mediums. Their personal account of their time in pretrial incarceration in Hays County was featured in the ITVS Independent Lens 2019 documentary 45 Days in a Texas Jail, and the Brave New Films 2021 documentary narrated by Mahershala Ali Racially Charged: America’s Misdemeanor Problem. In 2022, their untitled text-based collage was included in Art At A Time Like This’ touring “8 x 5” billboard exhibit, and in 2023 they received a Special Mention for their digitally altered portraits of previously incarcerated and formerly detained people in the “Re: Touch Smartphone Photography Contest” hosted by Kultur Projekte Berlin. Their poem entitled “A Liberation All My Own,” was featured in the Spring 2023 “No Justice Without Love” Exhibit curated by Daisy Desroiers at the Ford Foundation Gallery.

A voting member of the Recording Academy/GRAMMYs and the 2022-2023 Songwriters and Composers Committee for the Texas Chapter, Hicks is the recipient of fellowships, grants, and residencies from the Art for Justice Fund, Black Mountain Institute, the Tony-Award winning Broadway Advocacy Coalition, Civil Rights Corps, Lambda Literary, Texas After Violence Project, Tin House, and the Right of Return USA. Their sixth spoken word album, A Name Name for My Love, was released independently in 2021 in support of the #EndTheException campaign lead by Worth Rises and in 2023, they were featured on Benjamin Boone’s jazz-infused spoken word album Caught in the Rhythm alongside Kimiko Hahn, Edward Hirsch, T.R. Hummer, Tyehimba Jess, and Patrick Sylvain. Hicks is an inaugural member of the Center for Art and Advocacy where they support previously incarcerated emerging and established writers and artists from around the nation. Their work has been anthologized in Poemhood: Our Black Revival (Harper Collins, 2024), Mid/South Sonnets Anthology (Belle Pointe Press, 2023), The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood (UGA Press, 2022), When There Are Nine (Moon Tide Press, 2022), and others.

This piece is inspired by my work with Civil Rights Corps in 2021 and 2022. As someone who stayed in a Texas jail for a substantial amount of time because I couldn't afford $600 for bail, I was especially horrified by the reports organizers and advocates working with CRC were receiving from the inside. Dozens of deaths were reported among the people who were being held in the Harris County Jail pretrial for weeks, months, and years in horrific conditions. Like me, these people were being punished for being unable to pay the outrageous fees set by the courts and the county--and they hadn't even had their day in court! The use of cash bail is violent to people from underserved communities, and almost always guarantees that people like me will be forced into cages, whether we are innocent or not. For this digital text-based collage, I "disrupted" one of my self-portraits and highlighted an excerpt from my poem "Harris County Renames Cash Bail to the Death Penalty." Originally written to support one of CRC's education campaigns, the thesis of the poem was catalyzed by the 19 deaths, at the time the poem was written, in the Harris County Jail among the people being held pretrial in 2022.

Connect with Faylita on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok at @faylitahicks.

Jared Owens (1968) is an multidisciplinary artist whose practice focuses on bringing awareness to the plight of nearly 2.5 million people enmeshed in the American carceral state. He is self taught during more than 18 years of incarceration, working in painting, sculpture, and installation, using materials and references culled from penal matter.

Connect with Jared on Instagram at @jaredowensart.

Jenny Polak in collaboration with artists from The Fortune Society who have been impacted by the (in)justice system: Becky Jane Dunham, Chaniah Flicking, Desiree Soto, Devin Hughes, L. Miriam Hansberry, Maria Hazelton, Nadine Richardson, Queen Robinson, Raymond Benekin, Ryan Bennett, Sarah Moreno, and Jake Pankey.

The Fortune Society provides services to support successful reentry for people returning from prison, and works for a more just future.

Polak uses familiar materials to make public and community engaged art, drawings, structures and commemorative objects. Her studies in architecture and planning, family history of migration, and collaborations with directly impacted community members drive projects about prison abolition and community empowerment in the face of hostile authorities.

With ink, building materials, upcycled fabrics and slipcast ceramics, her site- and community-responsive installations and objects connect struggles for justice to domestic dreams: of homes, sharing platforms and overcoming barriers. Since 2020, and now with a Creatives Rebuild NY grant, she has been working with members of the Fortune Society - people who have survived incarceration - to develop collaborative artworks. Her art intends to provoke a desire to resist expanding prisons and border violence and the fear-mongering fueling them. Her work activates sites where it is seen - whether in homes, galleries or out in public - and lifts up the vision of contributors.

Polak's art has been exhibited widely and she has created site-responsive, community engaged projects for Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, the Center for Arts and Public Life, Chicago, Griffiss International Sculpture Garden, Rome NY, Exit Art and The Lower East Side Tenement Museum in NYC. Her work has been discussed in the New York Times, Hyperallergic, The Art Newspaper, and Brooklyn Rail and has won support from Creatives Rebuild NY, BRIC, Villa Albertine, NYFA, the Graham Foundation, BRIC, Franklin Furnace, and residencies including Camargo Foundation, Northwestern University, Newark Museum, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

Connect with Jenny and The Fortune Society on Instagram @jennypolakstudio and @fortunesociety.

Kill Joy's work is grounded in honoring the earth and seeking environmental and social justice through both imaginative worlds and social movements. Her work is an interpretation of world mythology and a study of ancient symbols. She integrates story telling with calls to spiritual and political awareness and action.

Connect with Kill Joy on Instagram at @kill.joy.land.

Wheat-paste location: 1802 Richmond Ave, Houston, TX

Mel Chin conveys complex ideas and themes through a mutative strategy, working alone or employing different disciplines and people, compelled by researched concept. From such critical means, actions, films, to objects are realized as necessary. His Revival Field (1991), pioneered “green remediation”, using plants to remove toxic metals from the soil. From 1995-1998 he formed the collective the GALA Committee that produced In the Name of the Place a public art project conducted on American prime-time television. His actions for the Fundred Project (2008-2019) to end childhood lead-poisoning, activated mass public engagement as a means for policy-maker education. He has produced original films such as 9-11/9-11 (2007), to decenter preoccupations that engender nationalism and L’Arctique est Paris (2015), to deliver the poignant warnings of a Greenlandic subsistence hunter to an international audience. In 2018 he filled New York’s Times Square with, Wake, on the ground, and Unmoored, in the air, creating an experiential portal into a past maritime industry and a future of rising waters. All Over the Place, a 40-year survey, was named by Hyperallergic as the best NYC exhibition of 2018. He is the recipient of many awards, grants, and honorary degrees including a MacArthur Fellowship in 2019.

Connect with Mel on Instagram at @mel.chin.

Monti Hill holds multiple jobs in several spaces of her work. As a full-time Digital Coordinator of Grassroots Leadership, an abolitionist organization focused on uplifting communities throughout Texas to abolish for-profit private prisons, jails, and detention centers.

Her work is concentrated on community storytelling for the digital community. Most of the organization’s members or people in the communities are taking back the narrative through storytelling and sharing powerful narratives of formerly incarcerated people and the crimmigration legal system. She has experience working in local politics as an organizer, but it all started by donating her time to design for local campaigns.

Working throughout the State of Missouri to find candidates with outdated imagery, content, and marketing on billboards inspired her to support them. Providing content to candidates who needed political designs in their messaging. Collaborating with traditional patterns but developing marketing that centers on the community is the inspiration that caught on to some candidates.

As the digital community grows and expands, it’s essential to support intentional visual storytelling, branding, and marketing for communities to begin healing and ensuring Black and brown folx are leading the narratives.

Artist Statement:

When we think of Reform, are we intentionally working to dismantle the criminal legal system so that Black and brown bodies have the potential to thrive, or are we working towards Reform to uphold the practices that will keep us bound and tied to a system that makes us feel comfortable and “safe?”

These images were taken during the summer, fall, and winter of the Ferguson uprising—a reminder that community is rooted in healing, love, and, most importantly, abolition. The death of Mike Brown Jr. shook up the nation because of the movement building of organizers and residents in a small county of St. Louis, Missouri.

Community is intersected between love, liberation, healing, and even chaos. I saw the community through and through while I was among the protesters and residents. I saw the community when we fellowshipped at local churches that provided food for the protesters. I saw community when we gathered to have intentional meetings on the next step of the demands. I saw community all around me, yet what was depicted in news broadcasts or the local newspapers was not a community; it was a direct fight against what the community wanted: Abolition.

When people think of abolition, it tends to scare people because it’s not rooted in what we think is safety. We consider safety as a way that Law and Order control us.

Safety is a space where we have to abide by the criminal legal system.

Reform is another way for people to feel “safe,” and that’s not what the community wants.

After the Ferguson Uprising, several other uprisings around the nation sparked a call to action among activists, organizers, and residents who felt unsafe around reform movements.

These images can spark a discussion of how you view uprisings or radical spaces that invite love, healing, and dismantlement—eventually moving past the discussions and getting involved with local organizations or residents that have strategies to build a space where Reform is turned into abolition.

For more information, you can reach her at monti@designandracialequity.com or have fun on social media IG @monti.hill.

Connect with Monti on Instagram at @designandracialequity.

Born & raised in Houston, McKenna Gessner (she/they) is an artist, activist, and healer. McKenna’s art explores themes of reproduction, the disruption of cycles, survival, landscapes, and the medicalized body. They enjoy experimental techniques using a wide variety of materials, contexts, and reimaginings of the making process. In addition to digital art, McKenna creates film photographs, cyanotype prints, collages, and video projection. Their work has appeared in gallery shows at Hardy and Nance Studios, and Aurora Picture Show x The Menil Collection’s annual Bring Your Own Beamer event.

Creating this design for 8X5, McKenna invoked their deep interest in dismantling mass incarceration through restorative justice. McKenna currently teaches health classes at the Harris County Jail since starting the program in 2021 and engages in efforts to improve medical care for incarcerated patients. They are featured on an episode of the Baylor College of Medicine Resonance podcast focused on incarceration and health and led a roundtable discussion at the National Conference on Correctional Health Care in 2023. McKenna is currently finishing their final year of medical school with plans to become a full-spectrum family physician and community advocate.

Connect with McKenna on Instagram at @corporeal_archive.

Rebo is a graphic artist specializing in printmaking, gig posters, merch & murals. Born in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, Rebo immigrated to Tejas with his family at the age of 9. He explores immigration & identity through the memories of his journey to the U.S. and that of countless others with a similar immigrant experience. Rebo uses pop symbols & slogans that reference Mexican & Chicanx rites of passage to proclaim pride in his cultural identity. 1/2 of La Onda Gráfica, residing now in Houston, Tx.

Connect with Rebo on Instagram at @reboprints.

Born in 1974, Houston-based artist Trenton Doyle Hancock has produced decades-worth of fantasy and commentary, incorporating iconography from art history, comics and superheroes, pulp fiction, and myriad pop culture references, resulting in a complex amalgamation of characters and plots possessing universal concepts of light and dark, good and evil, and all the grey in between.

In 2019, a major exhibition of his work, Mind of the Mound: Critical Mass, opened at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA. In 2014, his retrospective, Skin & Bones: 20 Years of Drawing, at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston traveled to Akron Art Museum, OH; Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; and Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, VA. Hancock is represented by James Cohan Gallery in NY.

His work is in the collections of museums worldwide including the Museum of Modern Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Studio Museum in Harlem; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Dallas Museum of Art; Menil Collection; Detroit Institute of Art; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen; and il Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea, Trento, Italy.

Connect with Trenton Doyle Hancock on Instagram at @trenton_doyle_hancock.

Additional Information

We hope the following statistics will inform you:

● The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world

● While the United States represents about 4.2 percent of the world's population, it houses approximately 20 percent of the world's prisoners. 

● Between 1980 and 2022, the number of people incarcerated increased from roughly 500,000 to 2.3 million.

● Black people are incarcerated at more than 5 times the rate of whites.

● Spending on prisons and jails has increased at triple the rate of spending on Pre‐K‐12 public education in the last thirty years.

And in Texas:

• 133,800 people are behind bars, the largest prison population in the U.S.   

• Each year, at least 505,000 people are booked into local jails in Texas.

• Harris County (Houston) jail holds approximately 8,000 people on any given day, the majority of whom are legally innocent, awaiting trial

• Texas’s  242 county jails are already increasingly overcrowded, with more than 70,000 inmates. According to state data, there is a corresponding rise in jail deaths, suicides, use of force incidents and assaults.

• Texas has 196 individuals on Death Row 

• Texas has the highest number of detained immigrants in the U.S.

Curators

Anne Verhallen is the founder of Art At A Time Like This, an online base non-profit organization supporting artists and curators in the 21st century. ATLT focuses on presenting artwork in response to current events in public space, online, and IRL.

Verhallen is also an agent for visual artists and is currently the director of partnership at 291 Agency. She has worked on projects for many leading artists, including Nancy Baker Cahill, DRIFT, Hank Willis Thomas, Derrick Adams, and Lily Kwong. In this capacity, Verhallen has overseen large-scale activations and installations in collaboration with brands in the luxury industry such as Louis Vuitton, Valentino, Google, and BMW. Prior to 291 Agency, Verhallen was the director of the fine art division at CXA for 4 years.

Connect with Anne on Instagram at @anne_verhallen.

Barbara Pollack, Co-Founder and Co-Director of Art At A Time Like This Inc., is a leading authority on global art movements. Since 1994, she has written extensively on art from non-western centers for such publications as The New York Times, Vanity Fair, the Washington Post, Artnews, Art in America, Airmail and many others. She is the author of two books on Chinese contemporary art: Brand New Art from China: A Generation on the Rise (I.B. Tauris, 2018) and The Wild, Wild East: An American Art Critic’s Adventures in China (Timezone 8, 2010.)

Pollack was the lead curator of the groundbreaking My Generation: Young Chinese Artists, the first exhibition of the 1980s generation of Chinese artists in the U.S. which was shown at the Tampa Museum of Art and Museum Fine Arts, St. Petersburg in 2014 and traveled to the Oklahoma City Museum of Art and the Orange County Museum of Art in 2015. Other recent shows in the U.S. includes WeChat: A Dialogue in Chinese Art at Asia Society Houston and Lu Yang: Delusional Mandela at MOCA Cleveland. She has also curated in China most notably Tu Hongtao: A Timely Journey, at the Long Museum West Bund in November 2018 and Sun Xun: Prediction Laboratory at Yuz Museum, also in Shanghai in 2016. In 2022, she will present Mirror Image: Changing Chinese Identity at the Asia Society Museum in New York

Due to her extensive expertise, Pollack has lectured frequently, including participating as a featured speaker at the World Economic Forum’s Summer Davos in China in 2012 and 2013. In 2015, she spoke at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum and at Christie’s headquarters in New York. She has also presented talks at Asia Society, Seattle Asian Art Museum, Sotheby’s Institute, Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland, NYU Museum Studies Program, NYU Shanghai, Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, Art Basel Miami Beach, College Art Association, Louis Museum of Contemporary Art, Berkeley Art Museum, Milwaukee Museum of Art, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Toronto Museum of Art, Indianapolis Museum of Art, and the Freer Gallery of the Smithsonian Museum She. is quoted regularly as an expert including a radio interview on PBS-WNYC.

Connect with Barbara on Instagram at @BXPollack.

Bridget Bray is an independent curator and arts advisor based in Houston, Texas. She served as the Nancy C. Allen Curator and Director of Exhibitions at Asia Society Texas from 2014 through 2022, and organized exhibitions featuring the work of artists such as Mel Chin, Phung Huynh, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Hung Liu, and Mineko Grimmer. Her creation of the annual Artists on Site residency program at Asia Society in spring 2020 continues to support Houston-based BIPOC artists through a re-envisioned use of the galleries and related programming.

Her most recent responsibilities prior to her arrival in Houston were leading the curatorial department at the University of Southern California’s Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, CA. During her ten years of service there, she curated major exhibitions of both historical and contemporary arts of Asia and the Pacific Islands. She has lived and worked in Asia, including India, China, and Nepal, and was educated at Georgetown University and University of Washington, Seattle.

Connect with Bridget on Instagram at @bridget_bray.

Ashley DeHoyos Sauder is a curator at DiverseWorks, where she organizes a full range of visual, performing, and public arts programming. Her focus is on intersectional artists and speculative futures as they relate to history and the environment. Recent projects include; Overlapping Territories, Virginia Grise: Rasgos Asiaticos, online projects Visionary Futures, Sarah Dittrich: The Tender Interval, the performance Jefferson Pinder: Fire & Movement; the 2019 Bayou City Be All LGBTQ+ performance festival; and group exhibition Collective Presence.

DeHoyos Sauder received a BFA from Sam Houston State University (2013) and MFA in Curatorial Practice from Maryland Institute College of Art (2016). Outside of her curatorial role, DeHoyos Sauder enjoys teaching Museum and Gallery Management as part of the Museum Certificate program at University of Houston's MA in Art Leadership program and serving as steering committee member for Houston's BIPOC Arts Network and Fund, and 2023 - 2024 National Performance Network Partner Advisory Council.

She is a recipient of the Andy Warhol Curatorial Research Fellowship, Teiger Foundation, and Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation for curatorial lead research and programs. Her upcoming projects include A Portrait of Houston a film and performance collaboration with French artists Jocelyn Cottincin, and French Choreographer Emmanuelle Huynh, Installation and performance of Lisa E. Harris: D.R.E.A.M Away to Afram, and performance of Jasmine Hearn: Memory Fleet: A Return to Matr.

Connect with Ashley on Instagram at @ashleydelara.

Christopher Blay is the Chief Curator of the Houston Museum of African American Culture. The Liberian-born American artist, writer, and curator was the News Editor at Glasstire Magazine from 2019 - 2021 and served as curator for the Art Corridor Galleries at Tarrant County College in Fort Worth for the ten years prior to Glasstire. Blay has been a guest lecturer at Numerous Texas universities, museums, galleries, and conferences.

Blay’s writing credit includes art criticism, Op Ed essays, and interviews for the Fort Worth Weekly, Glasstire Magazine, and Art in America Magazine. His essays were also featured in the spring 2022 issue of Nasher Sculpture Center Magazine, twice in Art in America Magazine (Fall/2022 on artist Jule Speed, and Fall, 2021 on artist Jammie Holmes), and catalog essays for the October 2022 exhibition of artist Richard Prince at the Kapardis Collection in Dallas, as well as for 2022 Texas Artist of the Year catalog for artist Letitia Huckaby.

Blay has spoken at length about his work at the Menil Collection (May, 2022 panel “Collection Close-Up: Bruce Davidson’s Photographs”), The Dallas Museum of Art, The Kimbell Art Museum (Artist’s Eye Program,) SMU Meadows Museum, as panel moderator for Noor Images’ panel “Agency and Authorship: Approaches to Visual Storytelling,” “Creative Conversations: Mark Sealy with Christopher Blay on Photography: Race, Rights, and Representation,” for Houston’s FotoFest Biennial, 2022, and the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth( a panel discussion on the mural boom in Fort Worth). His public lectures have also included Texas A&M University in 2021, New Cities, Future Ruins, presented by Southern Methodist University in Dallas in November, 2016, and the Texas Society of Architects convention in Houston in 2014.

Blay has served as Juror for the Nasher Sculpture Center, Southern Methodist University Meadows Museum's Moss/Chumley award, Big Medium’s Tito’s Prize, as well as numerous University gallery exhibitions including the recent student exhibitions at Texas State University in San Marcos, portfolio reviews at the International Center for Photography, and the Juried Members exhibition of the South Central Chapter of the Society for Photographic Education in Dallas. As an artist, Blay uses photography, video, sculpture, and performance in exhibitions, and his work considers the Black experience in America.

His exhibitions and public art projects follow the themes of the Black experience and include the ongoing East Rosedale Monument Project in Fort Worth, Texas, and Dindi (for Annibel) in Dallas' Coombs Creek park near Oak Cliff. Blay’s work is the focus of a Summer 2023 commission at the Ion Building, Dallas, solo exhibition Christopher Blay: SpLaVCe Program at the studios at Crowley Theater in Marfa, 2023, and Christopher Blay: SpLaVCe Ship at the Barry Whistler Gallery in Dallas. Blay’s other recent exhibitions include Future Power: Traps and Targets, at the St. George Hotel in Marfa, Texas (Spring, 2022) The Amarillo Biennial (Spring, 2022) and Christopher Blay: Power, Traps, and Targets, a solo exhibition at Big Medium gallery, Austin, 2021. Blay is a 2003 Graduate of Texas Christian University with a BFA in Photography and a minor in Art History.

Connect on Instagram at @artist_c_blay.

Organizations

Founded in 2015, SaveArtSpace is a non-profit organization that works to create an urban gallery experience, launching exhibitions that address intersectional themes and foster a progressive message of social change. By placing culture over commercialism, SaveArtSpace aims to empower artists from all walks of life and inspire a new generation of young creatives and activists.

Art at a Time Like is a 501c3 organization that supports artists and curators in the 21st century, presenting art in direct response to current events. Utilizing public platforms (digital and IRL), this organization presents art in a non-profit context, highlighting art as a conveyor of content, rather than a commodity. Our mission is to show that art can make a difference and that artists and curators can be thought-leaders, envisioning alternative futures for humanity.  

Art at a Time Like This was founded on March 17, 2020 by independent curators Barbara Pollack and Anne Verhallen who saw the need for a new kind of alternative space to address the pandemic and other crises, ever addressing the question, “How can we think about art at a time like this?”

Press