MAY 25 - SEPTEMBER 4, 2022

JUROR: TYLER BLACKWELL

The Salina Biennial was established in 2018, in part as a continuation of the regional invitational, an exhibition held at the Art Center from 1979 until 2002, but also to highlight artists who are balancing the traditions and history of our region with a larger, global contemporary practice. It includes artists from Colorado, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming.

"The selected artists’ work reflects a breadth of interests—from aesthetic and formal concerns to issues of representation and identity, geographies and borders, and practices seeking to re-articulate or elucidate fraught sociohistorical issues. In these uncertain times, I feel strongly it is important to look to contemporary artists to help us explore and think through the complexities of the issues confronting us. These makers grapple with personal, communal, and political stories that illuminate lesser-known histories and distinct relationships to place and personhood. In this way, their works simultaneously celebrate and complicate our understanding of the human condition and the state of social and/or institutional infrastructures that govern or have somehow informed the way we live."

-Tyler Blackwell, Juror

About the juror

Tyler Blackwell is the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Associate Curator at the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston. For the Blaffer, he has organized or co-organized exhibitions that include Jagdeep Raina: Bonds (2021); Carriers: The Body as a Site of Danger and Desire (2021); Rodney McMillian: Historically Hostile (2020); Jacqueline Nova: Creación de la Tier- ra (2019); Beatriz Santiago Muñoz: Otros Usos (2019); Yoshua Okón: Oracle (2019); and Rebecca Morris: The Ache of Bright (2019). Blackwell also organized the Houston presentation of the traveling survey exhibition Paul Mpagi Sepuya (2019). His upcoming projects include a major survey exhibition of the work of artist and writer Molly Zuckerman-Hartung and new presentations of artists Hugh Hayden and Monira Al Qadiri.

Blackwell previously held positions at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago and the Art Institute of Chicago’s Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, where he supported permanent collection acquisitions and the organization of wide-ranging exhibitions, commissions, programs, and performances.

His writing has been published in exhibition catalogues for the Blaffer, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Smart Museum of Art, and the Centre for Fine Arts Brussels. Blackwell holds a MA in Art History and The Humanities from the University of Chicago.

Blackwell’s exhibitions and projects have been written about in Hyperallergic, Chicago Tribune, Houston Chronicle, VICE, TimeOut, Chicago magazine, Glasstire, Chicago Reader, Visual Art Source, Bad at Sports, and Temporary Art Review, among others.

The Salina Biennial is funded by Salina Art Center donors, members, and the Salina Art Center Endowment Foundation, along with the Horizons Grants Program of the Salina Arts and Humanities Foundation, a private donor group.