Visual Arts Center

Tomorrow! The Visual Arts Center hosts PechaKucha Austin 40, a night of storytelling that brings together creatives from diverse fields, including art, architecture, graphic design, music, and film. Each of the ten guest presenters will deliver a six-minute presentation, comprising 20 slides, shown at a rate of 20 seconds per slide.

PechaKucha 40 presenters include: Sinclair Black and Stephi Motal, Lauren Dickens, Elizabeth Gibson, Kristell Jean, Karen Maness, Mariana Nun Ruiz McEnroe and Ian McEnroe, Zell Miller III, Joel Salcido, Bob Schneider, and DJ Stout.

RSVP is required. Seating is first-come, first-served. Doors at 7 PM; Program starts at 8:20!

PechaKucha 40 is presented in collaboration with Design Austin and DJ Stout (), Austin-based graphic designer, Pentagram Partner, Principal of Pentagram’s Austin office, and Co-Director of PechaKucha Austin.

🔗More info and RSVP in bio! Flyer design by Pentagram Austin.

Thank you to everyone who stopped by our opening last night for a first look at “Zalika Azim: Blood Memories (or a going to ground)” and “Love in Excess.” Big thanks to Alienated Majesty Books () and We Luv Video () for joining us!

If you want to learn more about the exhibitions, join us this afternoon, Oct 24 at 3pm, for a tour featuring artist Zalika Azim, VAC Director Max Fields, and “Love in Excess” curator Maysa Martins.

“Love in Excess” will be on view until December 19, 2025 and “Blood Memories” will be on view until March 7, 2026. The VAC is open Tuesday — Saturday from 12-5 PM and is always free!

📸 by Alex Boeschenstein ()

Today, artist Zalika Azim led a workshop with UT Theatre and Dance students enrolled in Lucas Williams’s class, “Black Power in Arts and Culture.” In the workshop, Azim read from Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s “M Archive: After the End of the World” as an entry point into discussions about archives, dance notation, and writing scores as part of movement-based practice. 
 
Azim asked the students to work together to create choreography and then translate that choreography into a score for repeated performance.
 
“Zalika Azim: Blood Memories (or a going to ground)” opens tomorrow, October 23, with a reception from 5–8 PM.

🥀The exhibition “Love in Excess” looks into a form of love that has been explored for millennia by philosophers, poets, and artists. It has been described as the lover’s act of reaching for an inherently absent other—a gesture inhabited by both pain and pleasure. 
 
While this acute yearning traditionally evokes notions of erotic desire between people, thinkers have also linked it to the longing for the divine, as well as for alternative social realities. This broader understanding reveals longing as an affect that is simultaneously bodily, spiritual, and political. 
 
Flowers, the centuries old symbol of love, are a constant presence in the exhibition. Artists in the show explore their material and conceptual aspects, using them not only as romantic gestures, but also as weapons against the body, symbols of mourning, offerings to lovers as well as to the gods. 
 
Join us for the opening of “Love in Excess” on October 23 from 5 – 8 PM. 🔗 More info in our bio! Image credits in comments.