Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions is a two-part exhibition, concurrently taking place in Houston at the Blaffer Art Museum and at KADIST San Francisco, which traces the cyclical nature of improvised, responsive, and sustained systems of mutual aid, information sharing, and embodied knowledge sets, as well as their intersectional, intimate, and enduring effects in the wake of the COVID-19 global pandemic. The exhibition includes public programs that examine time, ritual, memory keeping, and community-building practices between 2020 and 2024. The exhibition considers artists as prognosticators—forecasters of cultural shifts— and traces evolving artist practices and approaches as informed by activism—in particular, the creation of mutual aid networks spurred by lived experiences such as the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic, as well as the systemic inequities producing Black and Brown grief and the struggle towards liberation. The artists assume the role of narrators for mimetic memory, muffled silences, and informal archiving practices against power structures sanctioning conditions of personal isolation, cultural amnesia, and planetary extinction.
