Exhibits
Unboxing the Archives: Our Records, Our Stories
Unboxing the Archives: Our Records, Our Stories
About the Exhibit
Archives are vibrant spaces where history, memory, and identity converge. From community collections to city records and digital preservation, explore how archives shape our understanding of the past and the stories we carry forward. Learn how archivists, donors, and communities preserve diverse stories that connect us, spark creativity, and empower action. Discover how archives preserve our past while informing our futures.
For questions or the latest information about exhibits and collections, contact Austin.HistoryCenter@austintexas.gov.
About the Artist
This exhibit was created by Austin History Center staff using our existing collections.
Image credit
Menchaca Road Library Community Exhibit
Menchaca Road Library Community Exhibit
Austin Community Members
About the Exhibit
Austin's Menchaca Road Library Branch is hosting a Community Art Exhibit with the theme of Pets! These are imaginary, current, past, and future pets. Menchaca's community were invited to submit a piece of art on a 4"x4" canvas and we have a great exhibit. Come check out the beautiful pets!
Image credit
The Legends Project
The Legends Project
The Mosaic Workshop
Living Room (6th Floor South)
About the Exhibit
ART WORKSHOP WITH MOSAICS: SUNDAY, MAY 31, 2026, 1PM-4PM | 6TH FLOOR LIVING ROOM
The Mosaic Workshop is a beginner-friendly art studio in Austin, Texas that teaches the art of mosaic making through hands-on classes, collaborative team building activities, and monumental public art installations. Our mission is to bring the meaningful but often exclusionary art of mosaics to underserved communities in Austin and beyond. We welcome people who traditionally may not have opportunities to express themselves through this synergic, tactile medium. Through workshops, public art projects, artist mentorship, and community-driven installations, we teach mosaics as both a creative practice and a viable path toward artistic careers.
Our artistic values are grounded in collaboration, cultural representation, and grassroots engagement. The medium’s permanence allows community stories to be cemented literally in the city’s landscape. We are inspired by Austin’s AIPP program yet operate with the freedom and flexibility of a small business mobilizing around the community’s passion, energy, and ideas. To date, we have created over a dozen public mosaic murals across Austin, many produced with active participation from community members who will live with the piece in their neighborhood for generations to come.
We have facilitated over 60 Legends Project mosaic portraits by local artists to honor culturally significant figures of color and individuals with intersectional identities. Each Legends portrait preserves underrepresented stories and provides paid opportunities for artists to learn the medium and translate their practices into public art.
This exhibition is an exploration into the power of community artmaking, from small individual pieces available in our daily drop-in hours and weekly Intro Workshops, to local artist–commissioned Legends Project portraits and massive murals made easy when friends and neighbors come together to create art.
About the Artist
We have facilitated over 60 Legends Project mosaic portraits by local artists to honor culturally significant figures of color and individuals with intersectional identities. Each Legends portrait preserves underrepresented stories and provides paid opportunities for artists to learn the medium and translate their practices into public art.
"...hitched to everything..."
"...hitched to everything..."
Sherry Tseng Hill
Gallery (2nd Floor Southwest)
About the Exhibit
ART TOUR and WORKSHOP with Sherry Tseng Hill: SUNDAY, MAY 10, 2026, 1:00 PM-2:30 PM | 2nd FLOOR GALLERY
"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe." ~ John Muir
In this exhibition "...hitched to everything...", Sherry Tseng Hill explores the intricate connections within our natural environment by highlighting the tiny things that often go unnoticed, discarded, or even feared, yet play a crucial role in sustaining our world, such as fungi, slime molds, insects, and decaying leaves.
These small decomposers, pollinators, and food sources help maintain soil health, nutrient cycles, and the overall balance of our ecosystems. As we become more aware of the environmental degradation caused by human activities, we also recognize the urgent need to protect our planet. While these small creatures may seem insignificant, they have a significant impact on our world.
Using translucent mulberry paper as the structural foundation for her work, Tseng Hill considers the delicate balances of nature. Through hand stitching, she layers diverse materials as metaphors for the complexities and interconnectedness of our environment, and contemplate and reflect on the beauty and richness that exist beneath our feet, in the air, in water, soil, and the unseen spaces around us.
About the Artist
Sherry Tseng Hill makes mixed-media artworks that blur the line between the abstract and the representational. Her works incorporate both 2D and 3D elements to explore the texture of connections, as well as the interactions and rhythms of communities, including humans and the More-Than-Human World, while examining borders and edges as sites of friction and violence.
Born and raised in Taiwan, she moved to the US at 14. Part of two cultures yet fully belonging to neither, she lives in the gray area between two states of being: the immediacy of the present and a lingering sense of the distant. Her own experiences with the tensions between two cultures, threatening, violent yet also exciting, vital, and often unavoidable, drive her to think about migration and colonization in the context of climate change and what it means to make a home. Turning over rocks and peeling back tree barks, she looks for traces and crevices, thinks about how they can serve as metaphors for other things- erasure, loss, the passage of time, and what is seen/not seen- to tell stories about our impact on each other and reflect on the art of living together.
Through generations of family tradition in craft-making, she explores her past and re-presents new narratives. Using mulberry paper (a nod to her culture of origin) as structural foundations with materials from everyday surroundings- twigs, palm bark fiber, bamboo grass from a broom, and threads, she layers, felts, weaves, and stitches to explore environmental degradation from the entanglements and legacies of relations.
Tseng Hill received a Bachelor of Architecture (1982) and a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture and Art History (1980) from Rice University, Houston, Texas. After practicing architecture and raising two sons, she completed the BLOCK Program at The Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2021-2023), where she currently teaches. Her work is in the public collections of Rice University, Houston Endowment, and the City of Houston, where she was commissioned to create a Public Artwork. Tseng Hill has exhibited at The Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Rice University, Moody Gallery, Fort Worth Community Arts Center, the San Antonio Art League and Museum, Discovery Green, and The Jung Center. She is represented by Moody Gallery in Houston, Texas.