Admissions Events

Inspired by Jefrey Gibson’s Because Once You Enter My House It Becomes Our House and Mary Sully’s Personality Patterns, Contemporary Issues in Print students have created a site-specific wheat-pasted installation at the Visual Arts Center. Each artist has printed an edition of 50 risograph prints that use patterns to create self-portraits, exploring themes of longing, femininity, heritage, speculative futures, and loss, among others.

If you need quick help and don’t have time for an appointment, we’ve got you covered! Every Tuesday this spring, the COFA Career Services team will offer drop-in hours from 2-4PM in DFA 1.103. 

Transcendence: A Century of Black Queer Ecstasy, through a variety of media, highlights visual representations of Black queer ecstasy from the last 100 years that surpass its absence from the historical record. Centering Blackness and queerness allows this exhibition to consider the potential of queer perspectives around the paradoxes of pleasure and pain, excess and lack, and autonomy and dependence. 

Blackland Prairies borrows its title from the name given to the fertile ecoregion that stretches from Texas’ northeastern edge to the center of the state, encompassing historically Black regions of Austin. The ecological qualities of this area—its access to fresh water from the Colorado River and rich clay soil—served as a site for generations of Black Texans to construct homes, establish churches and schools, and maintain agriculture. Over time, and through the efforts of segregationist city planners, urban developers, and profit-motivated investors, this landscape has transformed into a site unrecognizable to those Black communities that called this area home for centuries. Blackland Prairies examines this historical transformation through the lens of Black presence. It juxtaposes archival materials sourced from local collections with works by Texas-born and based artists who demonstrate, through disparate methods, how Black histories, memories, and everyday life are present and intertwined within the city’s geography, history, and culture.

Like the figure of the cowboy, Austin’s identity is unfixed and defies convention. The Modern Cowboy invites viewers to reconsider established regional narratives and envision a future Austin that is inclusive, equitable, and reflective of its diverse histories and communities.

Between 1835 and 1836, European colonists and the centralized Mexican government fought to control the Texas region. The Mexican government forced Maya men from the Yucatán Peninsula to fight alongside Mexican soldiers. During the 1836 Battle of Mission Refugio, a village located 150 miles south of present-day Austin, several of these Maya soldiers were killed and laid to rest. In Land Invention, artist Pablo Tut traces the journey of these Maya soldiers from the Yucatán to Texas and presents a monument to their legacy.

Typography, games, and type in games!