Click Bait, a multimedia exhibition featuring ten artists from across Texas whose practices engage digital tools, emerging technologies, and contemporary modes of image-making. On view from January 29 through March 7, 2026, the exhibition brings together work spanning photography, video, animation, and digitally driven fabrication processes through computer-aided design.

The artists included in Click Bait use technology not only as a tool, but as a subject—examining how digital systems shape perception, identity, labor, and value in an era dominated by screens, platforms, and algorithmic influence. These practices blur boundaries between the virtual and physical, the handmade and machine-assisted, and examines the contemporary creative process.

Click Bait features work by: Kalee Appleton, Melanie Clemmons, Bryan Cope, Lina Dib, Ryan Goolsby, Timothy Harding, Zak Loyd, Paho Mann, Leigh Merrill, and Kris Pierce. Collectively, these artists represent a wide range of approaches to digital practice, from lens-based media and networked video to sculptural works fabricated through CNC routers and other computer-aided design processes.

irl/place

irl/place is inspired by the online social experiment r/place, first launched on Reddit in 2017. On the original platform, users could place a single pixel on a massive digital canvas every few minutes. Millions of people around the world collaborated (and competed) to create flags, memes, portraits, logos, and chaotic clashes of color. It became a living snapshot of online culture, a massive artwork authored by thousands.

This project brings that idea into the physical world. Instead of pixels, we use 1 cm × 1 cm glass mosaic tiles. Instead of screens, we use a gallery vitrine. The digital is reimagined as the tangible, and virtual becomes the physical.

Pixel art, long tied to early video games, memes, and pop-culture nostalgia, has become a recognized genera of art in line with pointillism, minimalism or abstraction. By translating pixels into tiles, irl/place highlights both the collective power of crowdsourced creation and the cultural shift between online immediacy and physical actuality, in real life.

Rules of Play

1. Take a tile from the supply provided.
2. Choose your place: You may add your tile anywhere on the grid.
3. Change is allowed: You may also remove or replace tiles placed by others. Nothing here is fixed.
4. Work alone or together: Participants can collaborate in groups or act individually.
5. No limits: Unlike the online version, there is no time restriction and no maximum number of tiles you can place.
6. Respect the space: While you may overwrite or rearrange, please do so thoughtfully — remember, every decision becomes part of the shared history of the piece.
7. The artwork never ends: The image is always changing, a document of the people who participate.

The San Jacinto College South Campus Gallery is proud to present Be Kind, Rewind, a vibrant and playful exhibition created in collaboration with Matt and Sara Broussard of the Houston Toy Museum. This exhibition invites visitors to step back into the world of childhood nostalgia, celebrating the toys, games, and pop culture of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s.

From Barbie, G.I. Joe, and Tonka trucks to Dungeons & Dragons and Atari, Be Kind, Rewind showcases the icons that shaped generations. Alongside these artifacts, the exhibition features interactive video game stations, a VHS movie library, and immersive spaces where visitors can relive their memories and “choose their own adventure.”

Special Events:

• Monday Morning Cereal Bar – Every Monday at 9:30 a.m. (while supplies last)
  
• Thursday Afternoon Movie Screenings – Classic VHS movies with popcorn, every Thursday afternoon

“This exhibition is all about play, memory, and community,” says Gallery Director Bradly Brown. “We wanted to create a space where people can not only view these nostalgic objects but also interact with them in ways that encourage social connection and shared experiences.”

Cheese Grits, a compelling two-artist exhibition featured the works of Tay Butler and Brittainy Lauback. Through collage and photography, Butler and Lauback explore themes of identity, memory, and personal history, inviting viewers to engage with layered narratives and intimate portraits.

Tay Butler’s multidisciplinary practice focuses on collage as a medium for archiving and recontextualizing black history and culture. Building upon his interest in how the media represents black culture, Butler fuses traditional collage techniques with historical references to create works that both document and reimagine the past. His art invites viewers to examine how pop culture has shaped our historical narrative and power structures, influencing our understanding of the world. 

Brittainy Lauback’s photography captures the harmony of humor and grief, evoking the complex emotional space where laughter and tears coexist. Her work, influenced by candid encounters and staged interactions, reveals the truth exposed within the fleeting moment. Whether documenting themes like “women who own snakes” or “men who want to meet in hotel rooms,” Lauback’s images thread together the absurdity, and the existential fears life serves us.

Cheese Grits celebrates the dynamic interplay between Butler’s layered collages, and Lauback’s candid lens offering a thought-provoking examination of personal and cultural identity. Together, their works encourage audiences to find meaning in the interplay of texture, color, image, and story.

Solastalgia explores the emotional impact of environmental change on local communities, particularly those in the South Houston area. This exhibition brought together a collective of talented local artists: Heather L Johnson, Cathie Kayser, Cindee Klement, Renata Lucia, and Ellen H Ray.

Coined by philosopher Glenn Albrecht, Solastalgia refers to the distress caused by environmental changes experienced in one’s home environment. This unique exhibition addresses critical environmental issues such as the Brio Superfund site near San Jacinto’s South Campus, Houston’s flooding patterns, and the ecological effects of the petrochemical industry, inviting viewers to reflect on humanity’s relationship with the environment.

Solastalgia showcases a range of mediums, including traditional printmaking, paintings, sculptures, drawings, and experimental installations. Through these diverse works, the artists engage viewers with narratives of environmental trauma and resilience, creating an immersive experience that transcends visual art and delves into social and ecological themes.

In addition to the visual art, Solastalgia is part of a broader interdisciplinary collaboration with local writers, educators, and community leaders. The exhibition is also in collaboration with The Pits, a theater performance from local artist Sarah Welch, that captures the cultural and environmental history of the South Houston community. Together, these events provide a comprehensive exploration of the intersection between art, science, and advocacy in Houston’s South Belt area.

Beneath the routine of modern life is a wildness imprinted upon our cellular memory. It is a collective memory of our home in time and space that we long to return to. Derived from nostalgia, Solastalgia is a form of homesickness one gets while never actually leaving home.

Arm Candy is a captivating exploration of the unique artistic visions of Houston-based artists Iva Kinnaird and Emily Peacock

Iva Kinnaird, known for her mix of unconventional paintings and mixed-media sculptures, finds a balance between humor and awkwardness. The work included in Arm Candy explores this unease with a series of sculptures involving dead cockroaches, oversized roach totems, and delicate constructions made from ibuprofen gel caplets. Kinnaird’s paintings confront the viewer with both familiar archetypes and unsettling banality.

Kinnaird, who resides and creates in the “swamp-water of Houston”, has received acclaim for her previous exhibitions, including a Hot Dog show at Picnic Surf Shop in Galveston and a solo show at Maximillian William Gallery in London. Her work has been featured in Artforum Magazine, and she has participated in prestigious art fairs such as Spring/Break Art Fair in New York.

Emily Peacock, a Houston-based artist and Assistant Professor of Art at Sam Houston State University, collaborates with her family to create art that explores and celebrates their bond. Her work delves into familial history, relationships, domesticity, the Texas landscape, and personal loss. Peacock, also a stand-up comedian, employs humor and self-deprecation as coping mechanisms, emphasizing the tension between emotional vulnerability and extroversion.

Peacock’s recent work focuses on the profound impact of the pandemic on human connection, integrating technology and nature in surreal nighttime scenes. Her photographs, films, sculptures, and installations offer an uncanny perspective on our digitally dominated world.

Emily Peacock has received accolades, including the Houston Arts Alliance Individual Artist Grant, the New Faculty Research Grant, and solo exhibitions at Lawndale Art Center, and the Art Museum of Southeast Texas in Beaumont. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Art Museum of Southeast Texas and the Houston Museum of Fine Arts.

In 2015, artist Helen Glazer traveled to Antarctica as a grantee of the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, in order to photograph ice and geological formations for eventual production as photographic prints and sculpture. She worked out of remote Antarctic scientific field camps and had access to protected areas that can only be entered with government permits or in the company of a skilled mountaineer.

Inspired and informed by her experiences, Walking in Antarctica is an immersive, interdisciplinary exhibition bringing together photography, sculpture, and audio narrative to take the viewer on a journey through an extraordinary environment of remote places that the tourist ships do not reach and few people get to witness in person. The exhibition is organized as a series of “walks” through remarkable Antarctic landscapes: over frozen lakes, around towering glaciers and baroque sea ice formations, into a magnificent frozen ice cave, across fields of surreal-looking boulders, and through a lively colony of nesting Adélie penguins. Visitors to the exhibition who have smartphones will be able to access an audio tour narrated by Glazer, drawn from a blog in which she recorded her experiences.

Through her artwork, Glazer strives to convey the wonder and complexity of the natural world to others, in order to motivate a desire to protect and preserve wild places. Her study of earth science over the past several years heightened her awareness of multiple factors shaping the land over time. In recognizing that complex patterns in nature express the particular physical forces at work, she became more attuned to the interplay between geology, climate, life forms, and human activity in a given location. Walking in Antarctica opens September 5, 2023 at San Jacinto College’s South Campus Gallery.

This project is organized by Mid-America Arts Alliance and is an adaptation of the artist’s solo exhibition of the same title held at the Rosenberg Gallery at Goucher College (Baltimore, MD) that was funded in part by grants from the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance and the Puffin Foundation. Creation of this work was made possible in part by a Rubys Artist Project Grant, a program of the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance conceived and initiated with funding from the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation, and by a Puffin Foundation Artist Grant.

Walking In Antarctica at San Jacinto College

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Burning Bones Press is a Houston-based printmaking studio founded in 2011 by Carlos Hernandez and Pat Masterson. The studio has established itself as a center for artists working in a variety of print media, including etchings, lithographs, woodcuts, screen-prints, and monoprints. This exhibition at San Jacinto College’s South Campus Gallery features a selection of over 70 artworks by 22 members and affiliated artists.

Burning Bones Press collaborates with artists to produce limited editions of original etchings, lithographs, woodcuts, screen-prints, and monoprints. The studio also does contract, collaborative printing for other pub- lishers, dealers, artists, and institutions. Burning Bones Press is available as a monthly membership for experi- enced printmakers. In addition, Burning Bones Press offers workshops for the general public in screen-printing, lithography, relief, monoprints, and more.

Artists Include:

Pat Barton, Michael Bise, Blaine Davis, Tess Doyle, Lillian Evans, Francesca Fuchs, Jessica Guerra, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Carlos Hernandez, Liv Johnson, Amber Kaiser, Cathie Kayse, Mark Masterson, Patrick Masterson, Eileen McClellan, Nicola Parente, Eric Pearce, Lamar Peterson, Linda Ridgeway, Charlotte Seifert, Julie Speed, James Surls and Charles Tanner

www.burningbonespress.com

The Ways They Are brings together Houston-based artists, Carris Adams, Sebastien Boncy, and Matt Manalo. This mixed-media exhibition explores how the quality and character of our environment directly affects our identities. Adams, Boncy, and Manalo translate their personal histories through different mediums such as painting, photography, and assemblage.

Exploring the idea of how we are defined by our surroundings, each artist provides a unique voice to this conversation. Adams’ layered paintings take on multiple meanings as they seek to guide viewers through the artists personal experience while allowing them to recall their own. Using raw, found, and donated material in his work, Manalo simultaneously recognizes both the scarcity and abundance of the material he is using. Boncy’s photo-based installations respond directly to the environments they are installed in through the placement and rhythm of the images. Boncy is interested in “the world of things”, not just for their histories, or their meanings, but often just in the way that they are. 

Escape the summer heat at San Jacinto College South Campus Gallery, and join us for a round of mini-golf with our interactive exhibition, Golf Coast. The gallery brought Houston’s bayou system indoors and transformed the entire gallery into a seven-hole mini-golf course… with air conditioning! 

Each hole of the course follows the shape of one of our local bayous. All the favorites are featured: White Oak, Brays, Buffalo and more. The obstacles were constructed using mostly recycled and reusable materials and found objects. 

San Jacinto College students have been building the show over the summer, along with noted contributing artists Gao Hang, Iva Kinnaird and Gregory Ruppe. Now the gallery needs Houston’s help to keep fill the show with as much life as the city’s bayous by painting, drawing, or building in the gallery. Whether visitors want to color in one of the carboard cut outs or create something from scratch, the gallery hopes you’ll come and leave your mark on this Bayou City-inspired installation.

The course will continue to change and grow throughout the month, and visitors are encouraged to bring materials that can be up-cycled into this evolving environment. Each visit at the gallery may reveal new obstacles on the course and new wildlife roaming through the swamp.

Golf Coast will come to a close with a tournament at the end of September.

See you on the green!

In collaboration with the 20th Anniversary of the San Jacinto College Dance Program, we are proud to present, The Body Follows, an interactive performance based exhibition focusing on body movement as an artistic medium.

Featuring a retrospective of the last two decades of San Jac’s dance program, The Body Follows also includes installations from artists Ann Wood, Julia Barbosa Landois, and Daniela Antelo, as well as a series of performances by dancer Christina Maley and a free dance workshop with STEM From Dance. 

Workshop and Performance Schedule:

Nov. 18th & Nov. 21th
Christina Maley: Performance of Redbud

Nov. 19th
STEM From Dance
STEM From Dance is a national educational outreach organization that works with under-served communities to show students how diversity, technology, and dance merge together to empower, educate, and encourage the next generation of technical innovators. Beach will give a presentation, workshop, and performance that illustrates how STEM and dance can live and thrive in the same space, while providing innovative educational opportunities. See attached flyer for more details. Hope to see you there!

John Bavaro’s series, BrainTree, is based on a serious stroke he experienced in 2012. Early in his recovery he had no speech and his arm was severely compromised. A year later he created this body of work based on MRI scans of his brain and carotid artery.
Using an iPad, Bavaro creates digitally enhanced images from his brain scans, and layers them with Images of trees growth he has built in an app called “TreeSketch”

“I realized that the growth parameters, the tropism, and gravitropism of the tree, behaves like the physiology of the human brain. It parallels it in many ways. The branches that the brain takes, directly parallels the growth pattern of a tree. I was struck by the metaphor of re-wiring, or re-growth of connections that had died and now needed to be rewired.”

BrainTree Panel Discussion

Please Join us at the South Campus Gallery (S15-143) on Wednesday, October 16th at 3:00pm for a discussion about stroke rehabilitation, brain science and our current exhibition, BrainTree, by John Bavaro.

Panelists include
Simon Fischer-Baum, PhD
Simon Fischer-Baum is an Assistant Professor of Psychological Science at Rice University. He studies how we read, write and use language, with a large portion of his research focused on the careful investigation of individuals who have lost language because of stroke.
 
Kelly Anne Barnes, PhD
Kelly Anne Barnes, is a Professor of Psychology at San Jacinto College – South. Dr. Barnes earned her BS in Psychology from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2003 and her PhD in Psychology from Georgetown University in 2008. Prior to joining San Jacinto College, Dr. Barnes conducted cognitive neuroscience research at Baylor College of Medicine, the National Institute of Mental Health, and Washington University School of Medicine. 
 
Christine Joseph, OTR
Christine Joseph obtained her master’s degree in occupational therapy from UTMB in Galveston, Tx. Joseph worked at Quentin Mease Hospital for 5 years with adults with  various neurological impairments from strokes, brain injuries, spinal cord injuries and Parkinson’s Disease. In 2018 she began working at San Jacinto College – South as an Instructor for the OTA program and Academic Fieldwork Coordinator.
 
Emily Fens (panel moderator)
Emily Fens is a Houston-based artist who received her formal training from Glassell School of Art and holds a BS in Neuroscience from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Recent projects include Brainbloom at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2019) and Brain on Grass at Lawndale (2018). 

Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and other iconic characters will be featured in original drawings, animation cels and videos on loan from the Chuck Jones Center for Creativity.

“This exhibition has been in the development for over a year, and we are very excited to help introduce the work of Chuck Jones to an audience that may not be familiar with the breadth of his work,” said Bradly Brown, San Jacinto College Gallery curator. “These characters are timeless, and no matter your age, Jones’ characters and humor resonates across generations.”

The event, named Carrot Cake to commemorate the artist’s 106^th birthday, will feature, the works of Chuck Jones as well as a screening of some of his most popular cartoons and an address by Jones’ grandson, Todd Kausen.

“We’re excited to share the magical work of Chuck Jones with San Jacinto College and its students, staff, and visitors to the gallery,” said Craig Kausen, one of Chuck Jones’ grandsons. “If, as Paul Klee said, ‘a line is a dot out for a walk,’ then these drawings by Jones will give you a heart-healthy workout. It’s a behind-the-scenes look at the making of classic cartoons; they represent the thinking and creative process behind the finished product, the film itself.”

For those unable to attend the opening reception, the Gallery invites the public to their Monday Morning Cartoons event. This weekly event will last the duration of the exhibition, every Monday from 9 to 10:30 a.m. Patrons are invited to find a cozy spot on the living room rug and enjoy some of the most iconic Warner Brothers cartoons while enjoying a complimentary bowl of milk and cereal.

In conjunction with the run of the exhibit, the Gallery will also host a free Character Design Workshop on Friday, Oct. 12, from 10 a.m to 1 p.m. This event is designed to inspire aspiring animators to develop their own unique cartoon characters under the direction of San Jacinto College professor Jeff McGee.