Mud & Blue, or how we imagined it

Mud & Blue takes the physicality of post-Hurricane Harvey Houston as a starting point to consider the murky, muddy ambiguity of emotional life and affective politics within artistic process. In a series of occurrences, Mud & Blue combines spoken word narrative essay and poetry with video, sculpture, photography, performance, workshop and conversation with artists and writers engaging questions of landscape, politics, and emotion. This is an expansive curatorial project that is rhizomatic and anti-institutional in nature that starts in Houston and will be continued in Guatemala City. The works of the exhibition occur in public spaces and community venues around Houston, and as they do, they blur divisions between artist and curator, performer and viewer, art audience and Houston communities. Participants include artists and writers from Houston, Guatemala City, Los Angeles, Mexico City, and San Salvador, who, together, look to earth and the color blue as suggestive materials for considering what life in a disaster-prone city might entail. Mud & Blue suggests a political weariness, mitigated by shared efforts at healing or cleanup, at recovery through notions of community. Simultaneously, it allows for the problematics of such notions of community and recovery--the muddiness of the proposition of a city-wide cleanup effort--in its interrogation of bad feelings, exhaustion, sadness, and apathy--that is, the feelings that are the impetus for the blues. It is slow, languid, and often invisible. It has nothing to do with the metrics of success, unless it is to suggest that these stifle our creative communities. It starts in November and it continues.

This project is made possible with the support from The Idea Fund. The Idea Fund is a re-granting program administered by DiverseWorks, Aurora Picture Show, and Project Row Houses and funded by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.