1
Baptizum
Corey De’Juan Sherrard Jr.

Baptizum is a dual-video projection piece depicting truncated images of Black baptisms in musical repetition. This work references Buffalo Bayou’s history of public baptisms through the early 20th century, as well as being a multimedia response to the spiritual calling of the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s 1973 live album Bap-Tizum, acting as a seventh song to follow their six. Accompanying the video components is an original music and ambient sound piece, recorded in response to these images and the bayou itself.

Corey De'Juan Sherrard Jr. is a multidisciplinary artist who employs a unique system for creating songs, images, and objects responding to the deficit of radical black objectives in popular culture. Sherrard is an alum of School for Poetic Computation and University of Houston, and has exhibited visual and sound works at Project Row Houses, Sanman Studios, Sabine Street Studios, Cleve Carney Museum of Art, George Washington Carver Museum and Cultural Center, and elsewhere. He is also a member of experimental music group Essex Moor, and a regular DJ with KTRU and Ice House Radio.

2
Port and Starboard
Hillerbrand+Magsamen

Borrowing nautical terms for the opposite sides of a ship, Port and Starboard depicts origami vessels, everyday objects, and shifting fields of light near Allen’s Landing, a historic point of arrival and navigation in Houston. The illuminated bridge becomes both instrument and threshold, orienting movement while holding two distinct surfaces in tension. The work echoes the human impulse to chart direction, and the dynamic relationship between structure and drift in life’s ongoing navigation.

Hillerbrand+Magsamen is the collaborative artist duo whose work across video, photography, installation, and interdisciplinary performance examines personal relationships, social structures, and the tensions between control and surrender. Their work has been presented at festivals including the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Fusebox Festival, CounterCurrent, and Diffusion Photography Festival; and exhibited at institutions such as FotoFest, Grand Rapids Art Museum, Everson Museum, and Center for Photography Woodstock. They are currently working on a commissioned public artwork for the Austin Bergstrom International Airport.

3
dreams Not liquid Are passage
Kenneth Tam

In collaboration with Alexander Jamu, Cal Mascardo, Claire Morton, and Elbread Roh

dreams Not liquid Are passage utilizes local archival imagery to contrast an unrealized urban development project with the location’s current reality: the building across the Bayou has no windows. The land once imagined as a fantasy island of chic hotels, high-priced shops, and glass-paneled malls is, today, the location of the Harris County Jail, the Sheriff’s Office, and the Baker Street and Kegans facilities— state-managed sites where the surplus population is excluded from bourgeois prosperity.

Kenneth Tam is an interdisciplinary artist who works across moving-image, sculpture, installation, movement and performance, often making work about the performance of masculinity, spaces of physical intimacy, and the transformative potential of ritual.  Tam received his BFA from the Cooper Union, has exhibited widely across the US, and is included in the upcoming Greater New York 2026 at MoMA/PS1. Tam is Assistant Professor at Rice University, and for this commission has collaborated with students Alexander Jamu, Cal Mascardo, Claire Morton, and Elbread Roh.