Art History alumna Laura August (M.A. Art History, 2006; PhD Art History, 2012 was named the next curator at the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at The University of Texas El Paso. August will take curatorial leadership of the Rubin Center’s exhibitions program, bringing substantial expertise and a collaborative approach to exhibition-making that both complements the Rubin Center’s trajectory and provides an opportunity to expand and deepen the Rubin Center's commitment to exploring contemporary art and its place in our world.
Working between the U.S. and Central America, August makes texts and exhibitions informed by border-breaking aesthetics and politics, (mis)translation, and close listening to landscapes. Her work is structured by living alongside artists and poets, developing conversations through expansive periods of time. August’s writing has been published in international magazines, exhibition catalogs, edited volumes, and artist monographs. Her previous exhibitions have been seen at artist-run spaces, galleries, museums, public sites, and universities in the U.S. and Latin America. Her exhibition To Weave Blue (Memphis, TN) was the first to center contemporary art by Maya artists in a U.S. exhibition.
In 2021, she was the inaugural Mellon Arts + Practitioner Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration. She is currently at work on a book of essays about contemporary visual art in Guatemala City, since the democratic uprisings of 2015. At the Rubin Center, she will work closely with the UTEP Department of Art to propose exhibitions that complement material being taught across the curriculum and provide multiple points of entry for students developing careers in the arts.