Round 20, Attitudes of Humility by Maggie Jensen
November 17, 2023 – March 29, 2024
Maggie Jensen holds a BFA in art history from Massachusetts College of Art & Design, and an MFA in visual art from the University of Chicago. She is a recipient of a 2019-2020 Humanities Teaching Fellowship in the Visual Arts at the University of Chicago, and a 2020-2022 Core Program Fellowship at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. This fall, she will be a visiting artist at Anderson Ranch Arts Center, CO, and in the spring of 2023 will attend the NARS International Artist Residency Program in Brooklyn, NY.
In Attitudes of Humility, Jensen presents a new ensemble of works, conceived for the caged exhibition space at MoHA, facilitated by Cage Match Project. The installation strategically combines three sculptural concepts: the “model”, the “index”, and the “found object”, all within the framework of the art-historical Land Art genre. Employing a post-minimalist perspective, Jensen considers how formal repetition can reinforce inherited, restrictive systems of meaning making and influence. Here, each sculpture presents a version of piping used in commercial infrastructures. The works staged on raised platforms, gesture to both the construction of landscape and landscape under construction.
Maggie Jensen In each of her installations, Jensen becomes involved in different systems or aesthetics of authority, whether the art institution, a natural history archive, or extractive resource infrastructures. She makes requests of a cultural archive or government agency to access data about particular objects. The process informs artworks that reveal the paths and limits of the internal logics of these institutions.
Installation materials consist of unaltered HDPE industrial culvert pipe; platforms of cement board and wood: cast concrete of water main casings broken by extreme heat-related pressure; a curved wall mapped with a reproduced constellation used by artist Nancy Holt in the 1976 landwork Sun Tunnels.
Re-Match | Cage Match Project Retrospective
July 6th – July 24th
Opening Reception : July 6th 1-8pm
Cage Match Project (CMP) gallery presents Re-Match: A Cage Match Project Retrospective exhibition featuring artwork and workshops by previous CMP artists, with an overview of nine years of site-specific art installations. The exhibition will run from July 6th to July 24th, with the opening reception on July 6th from 1-8 pm. With the significant support of the City of Austin Cultural Arts Division’s Elevate grant program, CMP has offered CMP alums to receive financial support through an artist stipend plus a material stipend.
Featured artists include Jesse Cline, Emily Lee, Annie Miller, Rachel Means, and Emma Rossoff. In addition, workshops are led by multidisciplinary artist and independent curator Michael Anthony García and performance artist Sean Ripple to provide essential and inspirational information about their curatorial and artistic practices. This project, a testament to our commitment to community preservation and the fight against cultural erasure, is made possible with the support of the Museum of Human Achievement and supported by the City of Austin Cultural Arts Division to prioritize communities at immediate risk of cultural erasure and displacement within Austin.
On opening night, CMP invites the public to celebrate new and existing artwork by featured artists and to revisit past CMP projects through a series of framed photo documentation of previous CMP installations. Over the duration of the exhibition, two interactive workshops will take place, open to the public. Sean Ripple, known for his improvisation and interventionist projects, will conduct an interactive music workshop inviting participants to create a collaborative soundscape. Michael Anthony García will lead a workshop about project management, based on García’s curatorial practice, where attendees will learn about the behind-the-scenes work that goes into organizing an art exhibition. García, a founding member of Los Outsiders curatorial collective, has curated large-scale exhibitions of international artists, in and out of the US.
Emma Rossoff is a sculptor who builds environments filled with allegorical symbolism. Her work centers around ideas of traps and escapes, represented by interiors and vehicles. Emily Lee’s practice consists of observations about how meaning and value are unconsciously reified in objects, social dynamics, and the built environment. Rachel Means is an artist whose practice gives space to nuance and subtle gestures through tactility, abstraction, and material experimentation. In 2022, the book Buy Black: How Black Women Transformed US Pop Culture was published with Rachel’s commissioned painting on the cover. Annie Miller’s work explores a space of sensuality and desire: the longing to touch, penetrate, hold, and make contact and the inherent failure or displacement of this longing. Jesse Cline is a visual designer, digital artist, and educator interested in contemporary systems of representation and production and the appropriation and diversion of those systems.
The opening reception for Re-Match: A Cage Match Project Retrospective will happen in the Museum of Human Achievement gallery at 3600 Lyons Road in Austin, TX. The opening reception is on July 6th from 1-8 pm. The exhibition will be open on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 6-8 pm. Visitors can schedule a walkthrough on other days with the curator or one of the gallery docents to gain deeper insights into the artworks and the exhibition.
Exhibition
Exhibition Artists
Emma Rossoff
Emma Rossoff is a sculptor who builds environments filled with allegorical symbolism. Her work centers around ideas of traps and escapes, represented by interiors and vehicles. She creates objects with no function and employs text and didactic tropes that lead nowhere. Emma Rossoff received her MFA in Sculpture and Extended Media in 2022 from the University of Texas at Austin, and her BA in Studio Art and Art History from Columbia University. She completed her foundation year at the Rhode Island School of Design and studied Fashion Design at Central Saint Martins in London. She has been included in solo and group exhibitions in New York, Washington D.C., Pittsburgh, Austin, and Houston, TX. She lives and works as a furniture fabricator in Austin, TX.
Jesse Cline
Jesse Cline is a designer, artist, and educator interested in contemporary systems of representation, production, and interaction—as well as the subsequent appropriation and diversion of those systems. How do people use language, signs, and objects to define themselves? How do these systems overlay and augment meaning or experience? Jesse received a BS in Electronic Media, Art and Communication from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and an MFA in Design from the University of Texas at Austin. Jesse is also a co-founder of Partial Shade, a nomadic curatorial arts project, and currently teaches communication design at Texas State University.
Rachel Means
Rachel Means is a visual artist whose practice gives space to nuance and subtle gestures through tactility, abstraction, and material experimentation. She draws inspiration from Christian faith as well as the intersections between the relational and internal. The natural and organic quality of Means’ work is imbued with beauty, sadness, and gentleness. Tenderness and vulnerability have become a consistent rhythm throughout her practice. She currently lives and works in Austin, TX. Means received her MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2018 and has exhibited work in numerous places including Washington, DC; Davidson, NC; Tampa, FL; Austin, TX; Philadelphia, PA; and New York City, NY. In 2019, she was invited to be a Visiting Artist at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor in Belton, TX and, in the beginning of 2020, she participated in the Carrizozo Artists-in-Residence program in Carrizozo, NM. Later that year, Means released a virtual art exhibition experience – Stillness, What Lies Beneath. In 2022, the book Buy Black: How Black Women Transformed US Pop Culture was published with Means’s commissioned painting on the cover. Recently, She participated in the Brehm Residency. For more information about Means and her work, please visit the links below.
Buy Black: How Black Women Transformed US Pop Culture –
Emily Lee
Emily Lee (they/she) (b. 1996) is an artist, writer, and community organizer from the Texas Gulf Coast. Through their practice, Lee observes how meaning and value are unconsciously reified in objects, social dynamics, and the built environment. Lee participated in Land Arts of the American West and received two degrees from the University of Texas at Austin. They are the recipient of the Rhodes Endowed Presidential Scholarship in Art, Future Front TX’s micro-grant, and the Roy Crane Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts Grant. Lee is the founder and director of All the Sudden.
Annie Miller
Annie Miller is an Austin-based painter. Miller’s work explores the space of sensuality and desire. Rather than the work describing the climactic fulfillment of longing, it points to the inability to fully realize these desires and a reckoning with cultural expectations of femininity, fecundity, and aging. Miller holds an MFA in Studio Art with a concentration in Women and Gender Studies from The University of Texas at Austin and a BFA in Painting and Drawing from California State University Fullerton. Exhibition of her work includes: FL3X Space Gallery, MASS Gallery, Cage Match Project at The Museum of Human Achievement, The Courtyard Gallery, and CoLab Projects (Austin); WANUSAY (Montreal); McSweeney’s Believer Logger; and Icebox Project Space (Philadelphia). Miller is a full-time lecturer in the School of Art and Design at Texas State University.
Artist Workshops
Project Management for Artists (Donation)
11am – 1pm
Saturday, July 6, 2024
In this workshop, artists will be provided with tools to aid in managing larger projects that involve collaboration and clear communication with other stakeholders. Led by interdisciplinary artist and independent curator Michael Anthony García, this session will walk participants through various online tools that facilitate planning and organizing to stay on track and bring projects to fruition.
Link to the Project Management for Artist PDF and Project Timeline Excel sheet
About the Host
Michael Anthony García is a founding member of Los Outsiders curatorial collective and have curated large-scale exhibitions of international artists, in and out of the US. Notably, he has had solo curatorial projects for Mexic-Arte Museum, Texas State University Galleries, the gallery at the Austin Central Public Library and Fusebox Festival. He participated in the 2011 Texas Biennial and has won awards both for his curatorial and three-dimensional work. He co-hosts an intersectional conversation podcast named El Puente and is publisher for POCa Madre Magazine. García has premiered work for The Utah Museum of Contemporary Art Biennale in Houston, The Contemporary Austin, Soundspace at The Blanton Museum of Art, El Museo de la Ciudad de México, and ThreeWalls in Chicago.
misc. diskette
1pm-2pm
Saturday, July 13, 2024
In this workshop, Sean Ripple will create a new misc. diskette song with participating guests of the workshop. misc. diskette is a running improvisational music project started in 2012.
About the Host
Sean Ripple is an artist, writer, and curator based in Austin, TX. His projects are often improvisational and interventionist in nature and rely heavily on social media and the Internet to frame the outcomes of a feverish dedication to an idea. Recent projects have explored a perceived lack of commitment to interactivity and participation across a number of digital platforms as well as the destabilization of meaning that seems to trail technological innovation and advancement.
This project was supported in part by The Museum of Human Achievement and The City of Austin Economic Development Department.
Round 21, cullective by Ariel Wood
April 13, 2024 – July 7, 2024
Ariel Wood is a sculpture artist interested in the way plumbing and drainage can elicit notions of interconnectedness, liminality, and queerness. Their investigation of access and control through the practice of sculpture and lens of water materializes the interplay of agency and relationality. Wood picks and parses out those aspects of the larger system that appear strange, silly, or sentimental.
April 13, 2024 – July 7, 2024
Round 21: cullective by Texas based artist Ariel Wood exposes a selective gathering. The installation invokes a possible system of water collection, yet elements are either still needed or slowly being taken away. There’s a suggestion of past or future use, yet current stasis. The form of a water tower is built with steel beams woven together with blue twine. Ceramic thrown and altered pipes and vessels are held in alignment via welded steel structures bolted to concrete pavers. Each element holds the potential for collection and conveyance, yet falls short of this linear progression. The structure of the cage itself, appearing to be parked permanently—its days of fluid mobility have come to a close—is wrapped in a burlap scrim disrupted by varying sizes of cut circular vents or viewing portals. Partially protected from both sight and the elements. Round 21: cullective utilizes the relationships inherent to the exploded-view diagram—a lack of delineated function and an emphasis on labor—to call attention to access, control, and connection or a lack thereof.
Round 22, Plastic Bag Lion Dance by Jasmine Chock
August 3, 2024 – November 2, 2024
Jasmine Chock is a Chinese American artist based in Austin, TX. Chock works in a wide range of 3D materials, photography and video, including, but not limited to, sewing, ceramics, noodles, and plastic bags. In making art, she playfully explores the relationships between humans and the public, private and personal objects and spaces they interact with. Chock takes inspiration from observing everyday routines and traditions and subverts their usual purposes, creating humorous, uncanny relationships.
Chock graduated from The University of Texas at Austin with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Art. She has shown work at the City of Austin Asian American Resource Center, The Museum of Human Achievement and the Visual Arts Center. She is an artist educator and administrator. She has facilitated art-making workshops for youth, seniors, and adults of all abilities in Austin, TX, with printmaking, clay, paper mache, and fiber arts.
August 3 – November 2, 2024
Round 22: Plastic Bag Lion Dance combines the Chinese tradition of Lion Dance with the ritual of saving plastic shopping bags to create a new Chinese American Lion species. Collected plastic shopping bags surround the cage, combined with fringed plastic grocery twine, transforming the caged trailer into the lion’s body. This lion has many heads adorned with plastic bags and crocheted plastic yarn to ward off evil from all directions.
The Lion Dance originated during the Han Dynasty in Guangdong, China, where Chock’s ancestors are from. While the Lions are traditionally red, a lucky color, Lions today come in many different colors and appear at various celebrations, including weddings, birthdays, grand openings, and even sports halftimes. Plastic Bag Lion Dance reimagines the traditions of Chock’s ancestors, translating them with the consumable physical materials and rituals of the United States in the 21st century.