FotoFest Viewing

Founded in 1983, FotoFest International was established to promote international awareness of museum-quality photo-based art from around the world. It is the first and longest running photographic arts festival in the United States. It is considered as one of the leading international photography Biennials in the world. As an producer of serious international photographic arts exhibitions, FotoFest is a platform for art and social issues.FotoFest is known as a showcase for the discovery and presentation of important new work and new talent from around the world. The FotoFest Biennial takes place citywide in Houston with participation from the leading art museums, art galleries, non-profit art spaces, universities and civic spaces. The Biennial has an audience of 275,000 people from 34 countries.

My America is a quiet yet chilling critique of the United States, an archive of and a memorial to those who have died in lethal police encouters. The exhibit focuses on photographs taken at locations where citizens were shot or tasered by law enforcement officers. The photographs focus on the local, often mundane settings where the fatal encounters took place: shopping malls, mobile homes, empty
fields, and roadside highways. As George Slade wrote in Black and White Magazine, “the phographs do not draw conclusions. What they do capture is a theory about landscape and memory in collision with social history and issues of discrimination. They build a powerful case about contemporary life and death in an unjust America.

Diana Matar
Using photography, testimony and archive, Diana Matar’s in-depth bodies of work investigate themes of history, memory and state sponsored violence. Grounded in heavy research and often spending years on a project, Matar attempts to capture the invisible traces of human history and produces installations and books that query what role aesthetics might playin the depiction of power. A graduate of the Royal College of Art, Matar has received the Deutsche Bank Pyramid Award for Fine Art; the International Fund or Documentary Photography; a Ford Foundation Grant for artists making work on history and memory; and twice been awarded an Arts Council of England Individual Artist Grant.

View Diana Matar’s My America at First UU from March 7th through May 10th.

Tuesday and Wednesday, 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM
Thursday 5:00 PM to 8:00 PM
Saturday 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM
Sunday 9:00 AM to 2:00 PM
Other visitation available by appointment.