laura augusta

Sort of a table of contents:

Rincón is a census-designated place in Doña Ana County, New Mexico, USA. As of the 2020 Census, the population was 288 and the place encompassed 0.99 square miles. Since 2021, I’ve been writing an occasional series of love notes to the town.

Some thoughts about armchairs in the desert, dwelling & gardening, mirror displacements and petroglyphs, but also lurking.

Commissioned for More City Than Water: A Houston Flood Atlas (UTPress, 2021), my essay “Lean to that Flood Song” is an essay about floods and protest. “That flood noise lingers in devastation, reconstruction, in social surfaces soaked through; it comes in a shudder and a smell. The music of the flood might be a way of describing our entanglements with the world around us, our inability to make sense of them, our precarious footing even as we keep moving to that beat, as to a beating.”

In 2017, I received an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in support of my writing about art in Guatemala City. You can find some of that writing—published online as Piedrín—here.

My current online offering is a substack newsletter, called Studio for Tomorrow. I think of it as an occasional letter to artists.

Selections from more than 15 years of arts writing—for publications including Momus, Arts + Culture Texas, …mightbegood, ArtReview, ArtForum, and Pastelegram, can be found by following this link.

If you want to see the exhibitions I made as a freelance curator between 2013 and 2020, you should look at this page.

Among those exhibitions, To Weave Blue: Poema al tejido was the first exhibition in the U.S. to center contemporary Maya conceptual practice. Stone’s Throw was a group exhibition of artists from Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Honduras, thinking about the intersections between healing and protest.

I co-curated a biennial once.

My exhibition “To look at the sea is to become what one is” was an homage to Etel Adnan, pairing photographs by Manal Abu-Shaheen with small sculptures by Oscar René Cornejo. It was very beautiful.

After Hurricane Harvey, I received an IDEA Fund Grant in support of my project Mud + Blue, a series of occasions and conversations that took Houston and disaster as its subject. Phil Peters made a durational sound installation in the ruins of my friend Edi’s home; Michael Jevon Demps listened to music with me, across the city. Nathaniel Donnett and I posted his photographs across the Fourth and Fifth Wards in an ephemeral, ad hoc exhibition that we told no one about. It remains unfinished, like many other storms.

For a few years, I hosted a domestic project space in my Guatemala City home. Her name was Yvonne. Among other artists, Lily Cox-Richard participated in the first five visits of what was intended to be a 10-year-residency. Her exhibition Si no es un mushroom was a study of parasitism and invitation. Gustavo Artigas’s project Veneno considered poison as a productive force in our creative work. In some ways, my exhibition Acts of Aggression: An exhibition about community is also about the toxicity that animates a fractious falling-apart-together in shared spaces with artists.

When I was hired as Curator at the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts, Nancy Zastudil at Hyperallergic wrote this thoughtful profile of my work. At Southwest Contemporary, Thao Votang wrote a generous interview with me, about curating and acts of invitation.

Thank you for finding me here.