HOUSTON, TX.- FotoFest announces the participating artists in its upcoming FotoFest Biennial 2022 central exhibition, If I Had a Hammer, on view September 24 to November 6, 2022.

Co-curated by Amy Sadao, Steven Evans, and Max Fields, the exhibition features twenty-three international artists, photographers, and activists whose work reveals the social and political impacts of image production and circulation.

The artists and collectives featured in the FotoFest Biennial 2022 central exhibition include:

Laura Aguilar • Mónica Alcázar-Duarte • Chow and Lin • Forensic Architecture • Elaine W. Ho • Ho Rui An • Jibade-Khalil Huffman • David Kelley • Yazan Khalili • Ryan Patrick Krueger • Dorothea Lange • Dionne Lee • Tōyō Miyatake • Delilah Montoya • Reynier Leyva Novo • Lorraine O’Grady • Mike Osborne • Liz Rodda • Keisha Scarville • Ines Schaber •Fred Schmidt-Arenales in collaboration with David Ramírez Cotón, Daniel Hernández-Salazar, Camilla Juárez, and Jorge de León • Jonathan David Smyth • Bruce Yonemoto

The artists of If I Had a Hammer represent a diverse range of image-making, and include photo-documentarians, activists, research-based artists and collectives, filmmakers, performance artists, and artists working in social practice. They propose alternative ways to understand and participate with society, working in both conventional and unorthodox media to explore the formation of historical narratives, political ideology, and agency. Through various methods, the artists featured in If I Had a Hammer question the role of images in the construction, depiction, reception, and repression of global social movements and political ideologies.

Co-curators Steven Evans, Max Fields, and Amy Sadao state, “We’re excited for this year’s FotoFest Biennial 2022, which includes both historical works and newly realized commissions to execute intergenerational conversations. It is our intention that this year’s Biennial will present an opportunity to our visitors to explore the social textures of contemporary and historical image-making practices while celebrating Houston’s arts community, bringing various institutions, galleries, and project spaces together.”




This year’s Biennial includes several commissions, featuring new works by artists Elaine W. Ho, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Dionne Lee, Liz Rodda and Fred Schmidt-Arenales. In addition, FotoFest, HvAD, and Schilt Publishing are releasing a comprehensive book featuring new and republished texts on contemporary photographic praxis with images by each If I Had a Hammer artist, made available during the Biennial.

ADDITIONAL FOTOFEST BIENNIAL 2022 EXHIBITIONS:

The FotoFest Biennial 2022 exhibitions program is comprised of three discrete exhibitions presented simultaneously during the September–November dates. In addition to If I Had a Hammer, FotoFest is re-presenting the postponed 2020 Biennial exhibition as African Cosmologies: Redux, curated by Mark Sealy, and presenting a new exhibition titled Ten by Ten: Ten Portfolios from the Meeting Place 2020–21.

We are pleased to announce the artist list for the exhibition Ten by Ten: Ten Portfolios from the Meeting Place 2020–21, which features artists whose works are selected by a series of invited nominators as exceptional image-based portfolios presented during the 2020–21 FotoFest International Meeting Place Portfolio Review programs. The 2022 Ten by Ten exhibition is a celebration of FotoFest’s Meeting Place Portfolio Review as an important site of discourse and display, highlighting the works of ten artists, nominated by ten guest reviewers, whose works exemplify the broad range of contemporary photographic practice. The exhibition is complemented by an illustrated digital catalogue featuring images representing each of the artist’s work and essays by those who nominated them for inclusion in the Ten by Ten exhibition. Reviewers and writers for the catalogue include Nela Eggenberger, Teona Gogichaishvili, Mary Heathcott and Jacqueline McGilvray, Sam Mercer, Joaquim Paiva, Sinara Sandri, Serubiri Moses, Johan Sjostrom, Paula Tognarelli, and Wendy Watriss.

The artists featured in the 2022 Ten by Ten exhibition include:

• Nick Block • Zana Briski • Alejandro González • Will Harris • Hillerbrand+Magsamen • Gregory Eddi Jones • Irolan Maroselli • Theresa Newsome • C. Rose Smith • Larry Smukler