Season 3 of MUSED Houston opens with Taylor Jackson, CEO of Houston Arts Alliance, for a conversation about the systems that support — or constrain — a city’s creative life.

Jackson steps into leadership at a moment when artists and cultural organizations are navigating urgent questions of sustainability, space, and public investment. In this episode, host Melissa Richardson Banks explores Jackson’s vision for Houston Arts Alliance and the three pillars guiding her tenure: advocacy, collaboration, and resilience. They also unpack the grantmaking process, the role of peer panels and community feedback, and how civic art operates through a distinct public ordinance and funding stream.

This interview was recorded a few months ago, so one event reference has since passed — but the conversation remains a timely look at how Houston can strengthen and protect the conditions that allow artists to do what they do best: create, innovate, and inspire.

In this special episode of the MUSED: LA 2 HOU podcast, host and producer Melissa Richardson Banks interviews photographer Luis C. Garza with Charlene Villaseñor Black, Ph.D. who is Chair and Professor of Art History in UCLA's César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies, the editor of "Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies" and the founding editor-in-chief of "Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture" (LALVC, UC Press). She publishes topics related to Chicanx studies, contemporary Latinx art, and the early modern Iberian world.

What is decolonial love? Villaseñor Black shares that "decolonial love is a love for community and for ourselves that breaks free from coloniality, that is, the ways in which European social order, racial hierarchies, and imposed ways of knowing live on and structure our world today."

Villaseñor Black states that "decolonial love manifested in Garza’s photographs and, indeed, in the work of other Chicana/o/x artists and cultural workers from the beginning of the movement to the present day. By documenting the Mexican American experience of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, Garza’s images fought against biased media representation and oppressive policing tactics. By presenting the truth of the Chicano experience and by his dignified representations of our community, Garza’s photographs articulated decolonial love as they helped us visualize more just futures. This commitment to future action is central to activism and activist art."

Some of Garza's most famous photographs documented activism during the Chicano movement. However, for the exhibition, curator Armando Durón strategically paired Garza’s photographs to encourage viewers to make new connections with his more well-known images. While his couplings were often formal in nature, they fostered comparisons across differing subject matter. Scenes of protests, taking place in various locales -- from Los Angeles to New York to Uzbekistan and Budapest -- made clear the global nature of political unrest in the early 1970s

While the interview was recorded on January 21, 2023, it is a timeless conversation about Garza and the images that he took while documenting the Chicano civil rights movement, the World Peace Conference in Hungary, and the women’s movement in New York during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

"The Other Side of Memory: Photographs by Luis C. Garza" is now touring nationally:

• Loveland Museum, Colorado Jun 22–Sep 1, 2024
• Walter N. Marks Center for the Arts at College of the Desert, Apr–May 3, 2023
• Riverside Art Museum, Oct 22, 2022–Mar 19, 2023

BUY THE EXHIBIT CATALOG HERE!

Check out more in-depth articles, stories, and photographs by Melissa Richardson Banks at www.melissarichardsonbanks.com. Learn more about CauseConnect at www.causeconnect.net.

Follow Melissa Richardson Banks on Instagram as @DowntownMuse; @MUSEDhouston, and @causeconnect.

Subscribe and listen to the MUSED: LA 2 HOU podcast on your favorite streaming platforms, including Spotify, iHeart, Apple Podcasts, and more!

In this special episode of the MUSED: LA 2 HOU podcast, photographer Luis C. Garza talks with collector and curator Armando Durón, museum director Megan Callewaert McAdow, and arts marketing specialist Melissa Richardson Banks.

This conversation was first presented as an online public program to coincide with the exhibition “Time Refocused: Photographs by Luis C. Garza" on view at the Marshall M. Fredericks Sculpture Museum in University City, Michigan (September 11, 2021 to January 15, 2022). Check out the virtual tour of this exhibition at https://www.marshallfredericks.net/luisgarza.html.

While recorded on October 9, 2021, this timeless conversation shares much of the backstory of Garza’s work of how he became a photographer and the inspiration for many of the images that he took while documenting his view of the Chicano civil rights movement, the World Peace Conference in Hungary, and even the women’s movement in New York during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Garza's latest exhibition "The Other Side of Memory: Photographs by Luis C. Garza" is on view at Riverside Art Museum in California through Sunday, March 19, 2023. Details at https://riversideartmuseum.org/exhibits/the-other-side-of-memory-luis-garza/

Check out more in-depth articles, stories, and photographs by Melissa Richardson Banks at www.melissarichardsonbanks.com. Learn more about CauseConnect at www.causeconnect.net.

Follow Melissa Richardson Banks on Instagram as @DowntownMuse; @MUSEDhouston, and @causeconnect.

Subscribe and listen to the MUSED: LA 2 HOU podcast on your favorite streaming platforms, including Spotify, iHeart, Apple Podcasts, and more!