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Laura Augusta, PhD makes texts and exhibitions informed by (mis)translation, making relation, personal and political sanación, and close listening to the natural world; her work is structured by the forms and disruptions of conversation with artists and writers. Her writing about contemporary art in Guatemala City has been awarded The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and her essays, reviews, and interviews have been published in international magazines, exhibition catalogs, edited volumes, and monographs. Augusta was a Core Critical Studies Fellow at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX (2016-2018) and, in 2021, a Mellon Arts + Practitioner Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration. She serves as an advisor and developmental editor for American Art Journal’s Toward Equity in Publishing program, and is currently at work on a book of essays about contemporary visual art in Guatemala City since the democratic uprisings of 2015. Augusta’s occasional letters to visual artists can be found at Studio for Tomorrow. From 2022-2024, she served as the first full-time Curator at The Stanlee & Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at The University of Texas at El Paso, where she launched a multi-year exhibition program dedicated to contemporary Central American artistic production. In the fall of 2024, she became the Jane Dale Owen Director and Chief Curator at The Blaffer Art Museum at The University of Houston.

Andy Campbell (Associate Professor of Critical Studies, University of Southern California) is an art historian, critic, and curator whose work foregrounds LGBTQ communities and their archives as wellsprings for histories of art and design. He is the author of Bound Together: Leather, Sex, Archives, and Contemporary Art (Manchester University Press, 2020) and Queer X Design: 50 Years of Signs, Symbols, Banners, Logos, and Graphic Art of LGBTQ (Black Dog and Leventhal, 2019). Together with Amelia Jones he co-edited the catalog Queer Communion: Ron Athey (Intellect 2020), named one of the “Best Art Books of 2020” by The New York Times. In November of 2020 he co-curated with Patty Chang, Live Artists Live III: Despair/Repair, a biennial performance art program dedicated to examining catastrophe and healing in the roiling context of the 2020 U.S. election and the (ongoing) COVID-19 pandemic. His criticism and academic writing can be found in Artforum, The Invisible Archive, X-TRA, GLQ, Dress, Aperture, and other venues. Recently he was named a DesignInquiry Fellow (2021/2022), and during the Summer of 2022 he will serve as the curator of the famed Artpace International Artist-In-Residence program in San Antonio, Texas. Forthcoming projects include: Jennifer West: Media Archaeology, a catalog of the artist’s recent work co-edited with Chelsea Weathers (Radius Books, 2022); a survey exhibition of the politically-potent practice of Los Angeles-based artist Susan Silton; a history of design exhibitions (co-written with Jessica Brier); and an academic study of the work of Beverly Buchanan, Harmony Hammond, and Laura Aguilar, focusing on the manifold ways that poverty circumscribes artistic practice in the United States.

Stephen Fox is an architectural historian and a lecturer at the Rice University School of Architecture. He is also a lecturer at the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture at the University of Houston and a fellow of the Anchorage Foundation of Texas. Fox’s work is focused on architecture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially that of Houston and Texas. In his scholarship, he examines the ways that architecture engages such social constructs as class identity, cultural distinction, and regional differentiation.

Francesca Fuchs was born in London and raised in Münster, Germany, and moved to Houston in 1996 as a fellow for the Core Program at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Throughout her nearly 30-year career in Houston and internationally, Fuchs has been thinking about the significance of everyday objects insisting that they illuminate foundational truths about ourselves, our communities, and our histories. Her paintings hone an extended, reflective process of reworking that is engaged in the deeply personal and envisions the power objects hold. Solo exhibitions of Fuchs’ work have been featured at The Menil Collection; The Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; The Suburban, Illinois; The Art Museum of Southeast Texas; and Filet, London. Fuchs’ work has been included in exhibitions organized by The ICA, London; The Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She has attended residencies at MacDowell and La Maison Dora Maar and was awarded Art League Houston’s 2018 Texas Artist of the Year Award. Fuchs currently works in Houston, where she lives with her dog, her cat and seven plants.

This program takes place in the main building, located at 1533 Sul Ross Street. Additional information regarding accessibility and parking can be found here.

As always, Menil programs are free and open to all.