VOLUME: a living library
Hosted within the Center for the Study of the Southwest (CSSW) and the Center for Texas Music History (CTMH) at Texas State University, VOUME originated as a way to contribute to the preservation of regional women's histories in Texas.
From September to December 2018, the exhibit’s curators Xochi Solis (of Chulita Vinyl Club) and Jane Hervey (of #bossbabesATX) gathered vinyl, zines, books, and artist prints from the intersecting communities of women artists and Texas music. Filled with native Texas plants, bright furniture and stacked books and vinyl records, Solis and Hervey turned the Texas State University Brazos Hall gallery into a space prompted by queer Chicana poet, writer, and feminist theorist Gloria E. Anzaldúa's essay "Geographies of Selves.”
Our bodies are geographies of selves made up of diverse, bordering, and overlapping “countries.” We’re each composed of information, billions of bits of cultural knowledge superimposing many different categories of experience . . . As our bodies interact with internal and external, real and virtual, past and present environments, people, and objects around us, we weave (tejemos), and are woven into, our identities.
― Gloria E. Anzaldúa,Excerpt from essay Geographies of Selves, 2015.
On the walls of the “VOLUME” exhibit, Solis and Hervey also installed works by eight Texan visual artists, including: Bodega Visual (Austin, Texas), Jasmine Brooks (Austin, Texas), Elizabeth Chiles (Austin, Texas), Anne-Lise Emig (Austin, Texas), Good Snake (Austin, Texas), Katy Horan (Austin, Texas), Ashley Elaine Thomas (Corpus Christi, Texas), Whitney Noel Devin (Austin, Texas).
“I used to love us,” a group show with ily magazine
In December 2017, Hervey produced a physical installation, featuring the poetry found in her forthcoming 2019 EP, “Sour Grapefruit.”
“At the Bishop art gallery in Brooklyn, nine women put their broken hearts on display. ‘I Used to Love Us’ is a pop-up exhibit curated by ILY Magazine that on December 1 and 2, 2017 showcased the work of artists based on household items that remind them of their ex-lovers.
‘Have you ever looked around your apartment and an ordinary household object catches your eye?’ curator and ILY founder Erika Ramirez asks. "All of a sudden you're no longer alone. You're in the midst of a memory with a past lover.’”
Read about the installation in VICE.