Exhibitions
For the 2025 iteration of Salon Acme, in partnership with The Augustus Owen Foundation, Los Angeles-based artist Li Zeng presented a series of works loosely based on Franz Kafka’s short story “Josephine the Singer”, or “The Mouse Folk”. In this tale, the narrator recounts the story of Josephine, a mouse who is revered for her singing, yet struggles with her identity as both a performer and a member of a community that is increasingly indifferent to her art.
Li Zeng
Salón ACME No. 12 Proyectos Públicos
Velvet Faith explores the dynamics of community, emphasizing trust and faith as foundational elements. The show serves as a trust fall for both artists, who come together to create new work in a collaborative process, embracing the unknown of what emerges. This show emerges from a month-long residency at the museum, where the artists came together without the typical pressures of a formal exhibition-making framework, allowing them to answer fully to themselves.
EJ Hill and Martin Gonzales
Velvet Faith
Much of the US is currently experiencing a reproductive care emergency, from total bans on abortion to threats against birth control and IVF; to the horrific maternal mortality crisis, medical racism, and lack of access to life-saving medical care. Is It Real? revealed the horrific realities of the current political climate in the United States and envisioned a more just country in which every human has the basic right to control their own body and determine their own future.
Is It Real?
Artists Address Reproductive Freedom
For her first solo exhibition in the United States, Bianca Bondi delved into The Highway Beautification Act of 1965 passed by Texan president Lyndon B Johnson. The act was intended to prohibit the erecting of billboards in order to preserve the native plants and wildlife already under risk by the building of highway infrastructure. With this work, Bondi spotlights landscape as an unsilent witness to mankind’s destruction and forgotten laws
Bianca Bondi
A Preservation Method
Described by the artist as an imaginative drive down the main street of a small Southern town, the sculptural paintings present idealistic visions of rural-bred teens and young adults taking ownership of storefronts, backyards and riverside parking lots. Chiasson lays out the trappings of quintessential Southern nostalgia, while challenging us to consider a rewritten narrative, one that not only includes but celebrates queer identity within this distinct cultural context.
Chloe Chiasson
Keep Left at the Fork
For THIS MUST BE THE PLACE, artist Eduardo Sarabia evokes the history of the traditional Mexican hacienda to explore notions of home, cultural heritage, and interior and exterior spaces while culling from popular art and culture, craft methodologies, and Mexican tradition.
Eduardo Sarabia
This Must Be The Place
Texas Vignette presents an annual art fair exclusively featuring works by women artists from Texas in order to promote exceptional yet under-represented regional talent. Vignette Art Fair is fully submissions-based and works with a different Texas woman juror/curator each year.
Texas Vignette
2023 Art Fair
Memory is a Verb: Exploring Time and Transience brings together ten women photographic artists exploring the liminal space between time and transience. Represented in this body of work are the universal concepts of loss, mortality, and legacy, and the exploration of what inspires us to seek solace, and reexamine our histories; subsequently unearthing discoveries about ourselves, our relationships, and our place in the universe.
Memory Is a Verb
Exploring Time and Transience
The 23-minute video captures a performance by the University of Cape Town choir, which collectively sounds a lament in her honor. Though Chorus specifically commemorates victims in South Africa, the work resonates transnationally due to the devastating ubiquity of violence in our contemporary society at large, notably within the United States. With her Dallas exhibition, Goliath gave space for viewers to grieve and heal.
Gabrielle Goliath
Chorus
Inspired by her awe of abundance of life and growth in her new home state of Texas, Natalie Wadlington presents a new series of paintings depicting spaces ripe for exploration. Starring the expansive and ever-changing sky, the paintings appoint the celestial sphere as the covert protagonist and are set in all times of day, from dusk to dawn.
Natalie Wadlington
Places That Grow
Mumbai-based artist Shilpa Gupta’s multi-channel immersive sound installation is the outcome of a years-long research project into persecuted poets across time and geographies. It plays an audio loop of snippets of poems whose authors have been subjected to imprisonment, detainment, and execution. The poems are dated from the eighth century to contemporary times and are read in languages including English, Spanish, Arabic, Russian, Azeri, and Hindi, allowing visitors to experience over a thousand years of global poetry in an hour.
Shilpa Gupta
For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit
Ariel René Jackson
Commissioned by Dallas Contemporary, “Doubt & Imagination” is a lyrical film essay, combining poetry, memoir, and research overlaid with in-camera effects. Inspired by the contrasting findings of two archeologists on early Black American pottery, Austin-based artist Ariel René Jackson considers what qualifies as data when speculating about a cultural past that has been erased by colonialism and industrial progress.
Doubt & Imagination
The title of the exhibition is a common metaphor within Latin American communities, used to show how reality can only partially be disguised. An immigrant from Mexico herself, this survey of Margarita Cabrera’s work highlights her ongoing exploration of sociopolitical issues such as migration, labor practices, and economic empowerment.