Last month I had the pleasure of visiting the Blanton Museum of Art located on the University of Texas at Austin’s campus. It is one of the largest University Museums in the country and their collection is gorgeous. Here’s a small selection of my favorite pieces from the trip.
Diedrick Brackens: darling divined
October 2020-May 2021
Brackens honors black and queer history through textiles and imaginative new futures utilizing symbolic elements. He uses traditional elements like West African weaving, European tapestries, and quilting from the American South to create figurative narratives that merge history and shared experience. He states: “I cling to cotton (as a use of material) because it’s ubiquitous and then because it is tied up in the history of this country, Texas, and my family. I think often about the unknowable terrors and violence endured, all back-dropped by King Cotton, and I know it is my life’s work to try and make something beautiful out of this materials. It is some small healing tribute to my ancestors when I choose to sit at my loom and weave my stories”.
opening tombs beneath the heart, 2018 
bitter attendance, drown jubilee, 2018
“The weaving bitter attendance, drown jubilee was inspired by a 1981 event a few years before my birth, so for me the memory is the constant retelling of the actual tragedy. The event in question is the drowning of three Black teenagers while in police custody. These deaths transpired at a Juneteeth celebration on Lake Mexia (in Texas). The site was once home to one of the largest observances of Juneteenth in the country, upwards of 20,000 people celebrating over a three-day weekend. As a child, I grew up hearing about this event from all my family members. It wasn’t until a few years ago that the significance and all the details began to come into focus. The loss of Black life, on the anniversary of Black liberation, at the epicenter of its celebration was gut wrenching. It was made all the more personal that it was situated in the place I was born, on land purchased by my once enslaved ancestors.
I created the weaving as a way to tell the story and reimagine its violent ending. To honor the lives lost, the boys are returned to the world transformed as catfish” – Diedrick Brackens, Blanton Museum.
Vincent Valdera: Untitled from The Strangest Fruit, 2013
Vincent Valdez painted the series of ten life sized Latino men after extensively researching what he refers to as the “erased” history of the lynchings of Mexican immigrants in Texas. He explains “Presenting this historical subject in a contemporary context enables me to present the noose as a metaphor and to suggest that the threat of the noose still looms over the heads of young Latino males in American society”
El Anatsui: Seepage, 2007
Seepage is composed of thousands of flattened aluminum wrappers from Nigerian liquor bottle caps that the artist and his team tied together with twisted strands of copper wire. (I always this his work is reminiscent of Olga de Amaral) Since 2002, Anatsui has been making these bottle-cap tapestries as a way of addressing the legacy of colonialism in Africa and the historic triangle trade where European countries imported alcohol into Africa in exchange for slaves, ivory, and gold.
Karl Zerbe: Woman on Trapeze & Unknown Artist: Retrato de Carlos II Nino
Karl Zerbe: Woman on Trapeze, 1946 
Unknown Arist: Retrato de Carlos II Nino, c.1667
Cauleen Smith: Light Up Your Life (For Sandra Bland), 2019
This was one of my absolute favorite pieces in the collection. Cauleen Smith is an LA based artist, originally from Riverside, CA. This piece titled Light Up Your Life (for Sandra Bland), was made in 2019 and commissioned by Artpace San Antonio.
The neon banner alternates by blinking “I will light you up” and “I will light up your life”. Texas State Trooper Brian Encinia shouts the first statement at Sandra Bland in a 2015 video of the rapidly escalating traffic stop that led to Bland’s death in police custody. The latter phrase plays on the song title “You Light Up My Life”, originally by Debby Boone by reinterpreted by Whitney Houston and Aretha Franklin.
Smith wrote: “I wanted to play with this threat, I will light you up, by finding a response that neutralized it… and so this flashing neon is a dance off, a sing-a-thon, a battle, a protest, a mememto mori that collectivizes Sandra Bland’s resistance, reclaims her sovereignty, and reifies the ways in which Black culture is inextricably woven into national identities and cultures.”
Ramiro Gomez: The Broad & Lee Lozano: Ream
Ramiro Gomez: The Broad, 2016 
Lee Lozano: Ream, 1964
Joan Mitchell, Rock Bottom, 1960-61
Joan Mitchell is one of my all time favorite artists and I’m in love with the movement in this piece. She made this painting in Long Island during the summer of 1960. It is one of the only works she painted outside of France. Mitchell often looked to nature for her abstraction, and the cobalt blue paint that dominates this frenetic work is a color she begins to use after her summer on the Long Island shores.
Leonora Carrington: Casting the Runes & Gene Beery, R.I.P, 1960
Leonora Carrington: Casting the Runes, 1951 
Gene Beery: R.I.P, 1960
The image on the right is by Leonora Carrington, one of the few female surrealist artists. In this work, a golden bird protects an egg under the gaze of strange beings. Two hooded female figures seem to engage in an ancient ritual involving runes, small marked stones or bones, perhaps to divine the future of the golden creature in their care. The egg may symbolize the “alchemical egg” of medieval mythology, which was said to contain an elixir that could not only prolong life, but also turn a novice into an enlightened master. Carrington refused to explain any symbols in her paintings, so we are just left with our own imaginations.
Cildo Meireles: Missao/Missoes [Mission/Missions](How to Build a Cathedral), 1987
This work includes: 600,000 coins, 800 communion wafers, 2,000 cattle bones, 80 paving stones. Meireles’ installation was first commissioned for an exhibition about the history of Jesuits in southern Brazil. The artist created a contemplative space that functions as a critique of Jesuit missions established during colonial times to contain the indigenous Tupi-Guarani people and convert them to Catholicism. The work’s symbolic elements reveal the complicit relationship between material power (coins), spiritual power (communion wafers), and tragedy (bones), while the black shroud and overhead lighting evoke ideas of life and death. The use of cattle bones references the importance of ranching within the region’s colonial economy – yet, the bones’ physical resemblance to a human femur alludes to the human losses associated with forced acculturation.
Frida Baranek: Sem Titulo, 1988 & Enrico Donati, Galera Romana, 1945
Frida Baranek: Sem Titulo, 1988 
Enrico Donati, Galera Romana, 1945
