This Land is an exhibition reflecting on landscape. Bringing together five multidisciplinary artists from regions across the Americas—Vivian Caccuri, Raven Chacon, Minerva Cuevas, Danielle Dean, and Jamilah Sabur—the show explores the concept of land as a container for subjects including the histories and mythologies of place, migration and displacement, and the exploitation of human labor and natural resources. In doing so, the exhibition seeks to address the complex and historically fraught concept of “land,” or “landscape,” as a system, centering the artists’ inquiries into political, economic, and social conditions shaping our world in this era of global capitalism.

The artists gathered for this exhibition all possess research-based methodologies that enable them to confront complex questions and to craft narratives interweaving different places and times. As a result, the artworks on view each provide a framework for acknowledging the ongoing, intertwined legacies of colonialism and capitalism, and suggest imperative moves toward environmental and social justice.

With Greater Austin ranking in the top ten fastest growing and most expensive metropolitan areas in the US, the rapid geographical transformations surrounding us provide inspiration to consider larger histories and practices affecting our realities, both here and elsewhere. While the subject matter encompasses multiple regions and time periods, the exhibition seeks to explore a larger story about how this land we inhabit connects with our individual, everyday lives.

The exhibition spans both floors of the museum’s galleries, as well as the rooftop, and includes a major performance, Raven Chacon’s Tremble Staves, at Laguna Gloria in October. Vivian Caccuri’s sound installation Bass Mass, presented in conversation with the city’s skyline on the Jones Center rooftop, features a new soundtrack commissioned by The Contemporary Austin, created and produced by Caccuri in collaboration with Austin–based recording artist Mama Duke.

This Land is curated by Robin K. Williams, Curator, with assistance from Erin Gordon, Curatorial Project Assistant, The Contemporary Austin.

About the Artists

Vivian Caccuri (b. 1986, São Paulo, Brazil; lives in Rio de Janeiro) investigates musical cultures and sound productions in a broad sense, creating experiments with sound that go further than the auditory field and encompass the visual, corporeal, and technological.  Caccuri has participated in numerous international exhibitions including: Brazilian Histories, Museu de Arte de São Paulo (2022); 13th Bienal do Mercosul, Porto Alegre, Brazil (2022); La Biennale di Venezia – May you Live in Interesting Times, Venice, Italy (2020); The Musical Brain, The High Line, New York (2021); and the 32nd São Paulo Biennial (2016). Caccuri has presented solo exhibitions in galleries and museums such as Millan, São Paulo, Brazil; Kunsthal 44Møen, Møen, Denmark; and the New Museum, New York. Caccuri's work is in the collections of the Museu de Arte do Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.  

Raven Chacon (b. 1977, Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation, Arizona; lives in Red Hook, New York and Albuquerque, New Mexico) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, performer, and installation artist. As a solo artist, collaborator, and a member of Postcommodity from 2009 to 2018, Chacon has exhibited, performed, or had compositions performed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; San Francisco Electronic Music Festival; REDCAT, Los Angeles; Vancouver Art Gallery; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Borealis Festival, Seattle; SITE Santa Fe; Chaco Canyon, New Mexico; Ende Tymes Festival, New York; The Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C.; Whitney Biennial, New York; documenta 14, Athens and Kassel; and Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. Since 2004, Chacon has mentored more than three hundred Native high school composers in writing new string quartets for the Native American Composer Apprentice Project (NACAP). He is the recipient of the United States Artists fellowship in Music, a Creative Capital award in visual arts, the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation artist fellowship, the American Academy’s Berlin Prize for Music Composition, the Bemis Center’s Ree Kaneko Award, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award (2022) the Pew Fellow-in-Residence (2022), and the Pulitzer Prize for Music (2022).  

Minerva Cuevas (b. 1975, Mexico City; lives in Mexico City) finds raw material for her work in analyzing notions of value, exchange, and property inherent to the capitalist system and its social consequence, and in the latent possibility for rebellion that exists within everyday life. Her work encompasses a wide range of media—installation, video, muralism, sculpture, and public intervention—through which she investigates the politics that permeate social and economic ties.  Cuevas studied at Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas (ENAP) of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (1993-1996). She founded Mejor Vida Corp. and joined Irational.org in 1998. She created the International Understanding Foundation [IUF] in 2016. Recent solo exhibitions include In Gods We Trust, kurimanzutto, New York, NY (2023); Game Over, Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2022); Dark Matter, Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego (2022); Migratory, Rubin Center, El Paso, TX (2022). She participated in the Seoul Mediacity Biennale, South Korea (2020) and Prospect 4 New Orleans (2017) and has exhibited at numerous institutions internationally.

Danielle Dean (b. 1982, Alabama; lives in Los Angeles) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the geopolitical and material processes that colonize the mind and body. Drawing from the aesthetics and history of advertising, and from her multinational background—born to a Nigerian father and an English mother in Alabama, and brought up in a suburb of London—her work explores the ideological function of technology, architecture, marketing, and media as tools of subjection, oppression, and resistance. In 2022, Dean participated in the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Art Now: Danielle Dean at Tate Britain (2022); Trigger Torque at Ludwig Forum Aachen, Germany (2020); True Red Ruin at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit (2018); and Focus: Danielle Dean at the Studio Museum, New York (2016). In January 2023, she co-presented a version of her video work, Long Low Line, with Times Square Arts as part of their Midnight Moment Series. Her work has also been exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2018) and is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco and Paris; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; CC Foundation Shanghai; and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She is the recipient of a Creative Capital award for visual arts (2015).

Jamilah Sabur (b. 1987, St. Andrew Parish, Jamaica; lives in Brussels, Belgium) explores recurring themes including metaphysics, geology, and memory, employing a distinct poetics to reframe territory and language.  Her work explores the temporary nature of existence and our fleeting presence in it, evoking a new planetary literacy where alternate geographies become possible as submerged histories are revealed. Recent exhibitions include The Harvesters, Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, Florida (2022), La montagne fredonne sous l’océan/The mountain sings underwater, Momenta Biennale, PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art, Montreal (Canada), Sinking Feeling, Or Gallery, Vancouver (Canada), Here and Now: Recent Acquisitions, University of Maryland Art Gallery, Maryland (USA), and Prospect 5, New Orleans: Yesterday we said tomorrow, New Orleans, Louisiana (USA). Sabur earned a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore (2009), and an MFA from University of California, San Diego (2014).

Hear from the Curator & Artists

Press Release

The Contemporary Austin presents a group exhibition exploring relationships to land and place