art events

Newly merged AMOA-Arthouse debuts three winter exhibitions

Toute la mémoire du monde - The world's knowledge.Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani
Evidence of Houdini’s Return.
Jill Magid Failed States

On Friday evening, members of the newly-merged AMOA-Arthouse will be able to preview the three winter exhibitions at The Jones Center on Congress Avenue.

The space will house three individual exhibitions — Failed States, Evidence of Houdini's Return, and Toute la mémoire du monde – The world's knowledge — featuring the work of 10 individual artists. Guests at Friday’s Member’s Preview will be able to see the art, enjoy light bites, beer and wine and mingle with the artists. The exhibits officially open for public viewing on Saturday, Jan. 14.

Failed States

Jill Magid

Failed States is a body of work created by New York-based artist Jill Magid, though it has a distinctly local provenance. In 2010, Magid was witness to the mysterious incident near the steps of the Texas Capitol when Fausto Cardenas dramatically shot a few inexplicable bullets into the air. Moved by having been there for the bizarre scene, Magid was inspired to channel that experience into her artwork. In an unlikely linking, Magid found thematic parallels between the shooting incident and Goethe’s tragic epic poem, Faust.

“I’ve read about six translations of Goethe’s. For a while I tried to suppress my desire to read Faust in relation to Fausto — it seemed like such a silly link. But I finally gave in, which was good, because I kept finding all these inspiring connections between the drama and the real story,” notes Magid.

According to Arthouse-AMOA, Magid’s work includes text-based pieces, photographs and sculpture containing evidence from the shooting. Although these aspects of Failed States will be on display at The Jones Center, there are additional off-site components as well, such as an armored Mercedes station wagon and a text that will run in The Texas Observer.

Evidence of Houdini’s Return

Sterling Allen, Facundo Argañaraz, Strauss Bourque LaFrance, Katja Mater, Christopher Samuels, Justin Swinburne, J. Parker Valentine

As AMOA-Arthouse Associate Curator of Exhibitions and Public Programs Rachel Adams explains, “The artists in Evidence of Houdini's Return are informed by the historical path of abstraction and continue to re-consider cultural presets today by re-conceptualizing familiar ideas and objects, while focusing on the materiality, process, context and the abstract form.”

With contributions from seven artists, Evidence of Houdini’s Return is a group exhibition of artists selected by Adams for their “aesthetic and similar processes.”

Local artist and Okay Mountain co-founder, Sterling Allen describes his approach to the process of visual abstraction:

“[I’m] really looking for abstraction within representation. For example, seeing a photograph of something recognizable and somehow finding abstraction in either form or composition, rather than sticking to pure abstraction such as shapes and colors.”

Allen’s pieces in the exhibit span the sculptural and two dimensional realms, with the flat works utilizing “mostly collage techniques… made up of both found and self generated imagery.”

Toute la mémoire du monde—The world’s knowledge

Nina Fischer, Maroan el Sani

The showing of this film marks Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani’s first solo exhibition in the United States. Normally based in Berlin, the artists are currently living in Japan working on their next film project together.

They created the work, Toute la mémoire du monde—The world’s knowledge, as a direct response to Alain Resnais’s 1956 film of the same name, taking advantage of a vacant Bibliothèque Nationale de France to capture the identical scenery of the original film, minus the books.

“In Resnais film, the user of the library can get a part of the universal knowledge by using the library. It is a key for the knowledge. In our movie, the knowledge is not accessible. The library is empty. The key is missing,” says Fischer.

Failed States and Evidence of Houdini’s Return will run from Jan. 14, 2012 - March 4, 2012 and Toute la mémoire du monde—The world’s knowledge runs from Jan. 14, 2012 - April 22, 2012.

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On Saturday, Jan. 14 at 2 p.m., Jill Magid will hold an open conversation about her work, inspiration and practices. Open to the public and held at The Jones Center.

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Theatrical History

New play weaves stories of real Austin women together from 1950s on

Photo courtesy of

A photo from the She Was Here dress rehearsal ahead of its world premier.

On January 17, She Was Here, a play about real Latina women in Austin, premieres at Austin Playhouse's new interim theatre space off of West 22nd Street. Although the story is fictional, it was compiled through interviews, making it a truthful rendition of Austin across 70 years.

Written by Austin's renowned Raul Garza and directed by Jerry Ruiz, this poignant but lighthearted play is about how Austin, and culture more generally, have changed over the decades. It's about how women's roles are shifting—moving forward, and sometimes backward; it's about mothers and daughters, and it's about the relationship between people and the space around them.

As Garza puts it, "What imprints do places leave on our soul, and what imprints does our soul leave on [a] place?"

The play was originally written and developed during the pandemic. Garza had received a grant from the city during a time when theatre could be written, but not attended.

"It was a time when there was nothing going on," says Garza, "so we just kind of got reacquainted with what was around us."

For this play's devising team, which included Garza, director Jerry Ruiz, Katie Bender, and mother and daughter Giselle de la Rosa and Chamila Muñoz, what was around them was Austin.

"I wondered what it would be like to wake up 50 years in the past, 60 years in the past, and revisit the exact same physical space but with a new sensibility," says Garza.

Ester A photo of Ester, one of the women whose stories inspired the play. Photo courtesy of Raul Garza

With this idea, Garza and the team began talking to multiple generations of Latina women from Austin, starting with Garza's own mother who went to UT. From there, they expanded their conversations to include multiple groups and multiple family members—activists, mothers, daughters—all via Zoom or the phone. They asked them, How did you get here? What hardships did you encounter? What was it like for you then?

The story that began weaving itself together showed that despite changing times and a changing place, the little things in life always remained the same.

The play, starring Tonie Knight, Alyssa Hurtado, Vivian Noble, and Yesenia García Herrington, is inspired by these stories; but it doesn't focus on any one of them autobiographically. Instead, it follows the lives of two imagined families in one imagined house over the span of decades.

"We see this one consistent place, a physical house, that we imagined was somewhere in the Rainey Street neighborhood," says Garza. "And we see what happens to the lives of the people who inhabit that space, from the 50s through 2020. So it's like you're a fly on the wall, if you could be a fly on the wall in your grandmother's house. The setting is definitely a character."

Joann and her family Joann, pictured here with her family, was one of the women interviewed for this play.Photo courtesy of Raul Garza

At first, this might sound like a play about how things are getting better over time, but of course, it's not that simple. Austin is being developed, and depending on who you ask, we're better or worse off than we were a few decades ago. The same goes for women's rights; it certainly hasn't been a linear progression.

"In the wake of our latest election, it really made us stop and think," Garza says. "Wow, they're talking about the ERA March in 1975; we're talking about the ERA March in 2025. What is going on here?!"

Though the play covers some important and at times heavy topics, Garza says it's also a lot of fun; he hopes the audience comes away with a new appreciation for Austin, for those around them, and for the stories we all hold.

She Was Here is showing at Austin Playhouse Theatre at 405 West 22nd Street, from January 17 though February 9. Tickets range between $24 and $38 and can be purchased online.

theater plays women history