All are invited to a free, public discussion with Valerie Cassel Oliver, curatorial contributor, and Dr. Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, Dean and Professor in the College of Fine Arts, hosted in celebration of a new public art project by artist Howardena Pindell. Titled Autobiography: Circles, Pindell’s commission for the College of Education features a multistory composition embedded within the newly renovated glass façade of the George I. Sánchez building.
Valerie Cassel Oliver, a curatorial contributor for this Landmarks project, is the Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. Oliver has organized several acclaimed exhibitions, including Howardena Pindell: What Remains to Be Seen (2018), Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art Since 1970 (2005) and The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse (2021–22).
Dr. Ramón H. Rivera-Servera is the dean of the College of Fine Arts, chair in Latin American Art History and Criticism, and the Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Fine Arts at The University of Texas at Austin. Rivera-Servera is an interdisciplinary scholar in the arts with a focus on creative ethnography, new work development in performance and other ephemeral art forms, and Black and Latinx arts and cultures in North America and the Caribbean.
The lecture will take place in Elizabeth Shatto Massey Honor Hall, SZB 2.500 located at the College of Education, George I. Sánchez Building, 1912 Speedway, Austin, TX
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This project was generously funded by Ginni and Richard Mithoff and the College of Education and supported, in part, by the Still Water Foundation, VIA Art Fund, Texas Commission on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Image: Howardena Pindell, Autobiography: Circles, 2026. Courtesy of McKinney York Architects; Commission, Landmarks, The University of Texas at Austin, 2026
