Juliana Huxtable,

IN A DREAM YOU SAW A WAY TO SURVIVE AND YOU WERE FULL OF JOY

17 September 2022 — 12 February 2023

The Contemporary, Austin

IN A DREAM YOU SAW A WAY TO SURVIVE AND YOU WERE FULL OF JOY, comes from a work by the prominent feminist artist Jenny Holzer. This evocative phrase tells a story of possibility and implies critical questions that have guided our thinking around the artworks gathered for this project: Who, under what conditions, must struggle to survive? What does survival look like for individuals and communities? And, how might the tools of our imaginations help us to find joy and collectively reshape the conditions of our society?

This exhibition grapples with a range of critical issues facing our society today. As Holzer’s phrase suggests, the featured artists both acknowledge societal inequities and envision pathways toward a new and better future. Confronting identity and history in ways informed by feminism and other political thought, their works evaluate systems that suppress and exclude those whose lives are not privileged within the dominant patriarchal power structure.

Dreams can offer sources of inspiration motivating us to change the circumstances of our lives. Similarly, storytelling and other approaches to narrative forms offer ways of examining and affecting reality. Employing these strategies of imagination, the artworks in this exhibition offer refuge from systems of oppression and present vital perspectives that may help us to unsettle those systems. Reflecting on the social and historical conditions underpinning our ways of being in the world, the featured artists inspire us to tell new stories about who we are and what is possible for each of us. In this, they invite us to imagine more equitable, joyful futures.

IN A DREAM YOU SAW A WAY TO SURVIVE AND YOU WERE FULL OF JOY is curated by Robin K. Williams, Curator, with Julie Le, Assistant Curator, The Contemporary Austin.

The exhibition is made possible through generous support from Rachel and Jeff Arnold, Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation, Carly and Clayton Christopher, Suzanne Deal Booth, Deborah Dupré, Deborah Green and Clayton Aynesworth, Kathleen Irvin Loughlin, Suzanne McFayden, Chris Mattsson, Fredericka and David Middleton, Guillermo Nicolas and Jim Foster, Topo Chico, Zarmeena Vendal, and Melba and Ted Whatley.

This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Juliana Huxtable

Artist, writer, musician and performer Juliana Huxtable (b. 1987, Bryan-College Station, Texas) excels in probing dormant and marginalized histories, narratives and technologies to challenge discourses around contemporary perceptions of identity, futurity and politics.

Through painting, photography, text and video, she has defined a singular aesthetics of language that often plays into a digital, Tumblr-ised visual identity, a kind of collaged rap and visual rapture. Huxtable’s practice offers a key critical voice on identity, as well as, specifically, her own identity as a black trans woman. Her work comments on different forms of reality through the lens of her personal structural experience. Inseparable from the political, the personal is our opportunity for disobedience, and Huxtable plays with this concept through her ever-evolving portrait of selfhood.

Huxtable is concerned with the way in which marginalised groups are ‘forced to be their own saints’. Hinged on empathy, desire and agile distortion as a political and social paradigm, Huxtable’s motive re-examines our understanding of ‘the image’ and ‘the human’. Her works pool together references from science fiction, queer nightlife, Internet subcultures, folklore, fetishes and Furry fandom, into portrayals of intersectionality and speculative social archetypes as a method of resistance and liberation.

In 2022, Project Native Informant presented AKIMBO SPITTLE. In the exhibition, Huxtable places her own body at the centre of mythologising scenes; the printed and overpainted canvases set against hallucinogenic landscapes render her figures half human, half animal.

Huxtable’s recently opened solo exhibition HEADS & TAILS IN THE STRUGGLE FOR ICONICITY presented the artist with the opportunity to broaden the cast of characters populating the canvases. From the exploration of her own image in the previous show, Huxtable here takes the work a step further; an exercise in world building if you will, resulting in a universe of her own creation.

In 2017, Huxtable published Mucus in My Pineal Gland, a celebrated volume of poems, performance scripts and essays. In the same year, MUMOK and Huxtable published Life: A Novel, a collaborative science-fiction narrative with artist Hannah Black.

Her works and performances have been presented internationally in solo and group exhibitions, including Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève; Hayward Gallery, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Brooklyn Museum, New York; ICA, Boston; MoMA PS1, New York and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, amongst others.

Her work can be found in the collections of Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem and Magasin III Museum for Contemporary Art, Stockholm.

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