IMAGE: Alexandra Robinson, Exceptionally Meritorious Contribution of Great Responsibility, 2020–2021. Installation view, Crit Group Reunion, Chapter Two: Facing Each Other, The Contemporary Austin – Jones Center, Austin, Texas, 2021. Artwork © Alexandra Robinson. Courtesy the artist. Photograph by Brian Fitzsimmons.

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Interactive Performance with Crit Group Reunion artist Alexandra Robinson

In conjunction with the exhibition Crit Group Reunion, you’re invited to participate in an activation of Alexandra Robinson’s Exceptionally Meritorious Contribution of Great Responsibility. Through facilitation by the artist, participants will play a pair of music boxes embedded within the installation, each holding half the notes from America the Beautiful. Together we will explore the meaning of the song, the inability to play the tune in unison, and what it means to work together.

Reserve admission between 1–3P to participate!

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Born 1974 in Fort Benning, Georgia, and currently based in Austin, Texas, Alexandra Robinson makes work steeped in ideas of identity, labels, and signifiers that question place and how she exists in that place. Her interest in what it means to be a Mexican-American, Latinx woman without language is directly reflective of how generations of her family internalized what it means to be American. Robinson utilizes military communication languages of Morse code and flag semaphore as a vernacular in this exploration and appropriates symbols of American exceptionalism, which are informed by her upbringing and familiarity with military family life, American idealism, and an attraction to language and meaning.