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Lecture and Reception

January 13, 2026, 5:30-6:30 pm (Wilson Hall’s Concert Hall)

About the Exhibition

Taking its title from Adrienne Rich’s 1971 poem In a Classroom, Joey Fauerso’s exhibition presents new work begun during her residency at the ARCUS Project in Moriya, Japan, housed in the historic Oisawa Elementary School building. Inspired by her studio, a classroom until the school’s closure in 1994, Fauerso’s current project contrasts structured, geometric materials and spaces, such as paper sandwich bags, blackboards, and modular cubbies, with the movements and irregularities of bodies in the natural world. The Swiss psychologist and epistemologist Jean Piaget wrote, “To know an object is to act on it.” In a Classroom begins with an open-ended curiosity about the physical and acoustic properties of everyday materials and extends to broader conversations on the physics of “crumple theory,” the complexities and limitations of learning environments, and the nature of embodied perception.

The exhibition will debut a new large-scale projected video installation, along with a series of two- and three-dimensional works installed on the gallery walls. Fauerso is an interdisciplinary artist working across painting, sculpture, installation, video, and performance. Her subject matter is both personal and political, centering on family, gender, humor, figuration, and representation.

Her work has recently been exhibited at the Blanton Museum of Art, Ruby City Museum, the Galveston Arts Center, Western Exhibitions Gallery, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, MASS MoCA, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and The Drawing Center in New York. She has received numerous grants and residencies, including the 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2020 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, a 2021 Sustainable Arts Foundation Grant, the RAIR artist-in-residence grant, as well as fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, and Kunstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. Fauerso is a Professor in the School of Art and Design at Texas State University and lives with her family in San Antonio, Texas.

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