Artpace’s Fall 2026 International Artist-in-Residence exhibition brings together three projects that approach memory and power through different forms: Irene Antonia Diane Reece’s work on a local worker-organizing history, Roksana Pirouzmand’s performance about family separation and Chavis Mármol’s transformation of a mechanical bull. The opening reception is scheduled for Thursday from 6 to 9 p.m. at Artpace San Antonio, 445 N. Main Ave., according to Artpace San Antonio.
Three approaches to memory and power
Pirouzmand, a Los Angeles artist whose work includes large-scale oxidation paintings, will appear with her mother in a performance involving rocking chairs positioned at opposite ends of a wave pool. The waves are intended to suggest what can endure and what can be lost between generations, the San Antonio Current reported. Pirouzmand also participated in the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living biennial with Between Two Windows, a work about distance within a family after migration from Iran, according to the Hammer Museum coverage.
Reece, a Houston artist, is working with the history of Fuerza Unida, the San Antonio group created in 1990 by former Levi Strauss workers after the company closed its South Zarzamora plant and moved production to Costa Rica. The plant had employed more than 1,100 people, according to Texas Public Radio. The organization later pursued legal action and organized protests and hunger strikes. In 2021, it donated an archival collection of photographs, documents and other records to the University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries Special Collections.
A 1999 apparel-work baseline
The available Census data provide a post-closure snapshot rather than a before-and-after measure of the plant’s impact: according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 1999 County Business Patterns, Texas apparel manufacturing had 32,942 employees across 678 establishments that year.
Mármol’s performance uses a mechanical bull
Mármol’s installation is built from a disassembled mechanical bull. He replaced its plastic exterior with a wooden replica of Little Boy, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and plans to ride the result at the opening reception. The Current reported that the artist spent the summer carving, sawing and sanding the replica. Little Boy killed more than 100,000 Hiroshima residents in 1945, according to the same report.
The Current also reported that Mármol identified Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb as an influence. The piece follows his use of recognizable objects in confrontational performances, but the artist’s explanation of its timing and its expected reception in Texas has not been independently reported here and is omitted.
Mármol became widely known after dropping a nine-ton quarry-stone replica of an Olmec colossal head onto a blue Tesla Model 3 in Mexico City on March 5, 2024. The performance was part of his Neo-Tameme series; the project took two years, including about six months of carving, and the damaged vehicle remains on view in a vacant lot in the city’s Roma neighborhood, according to Hyperallergic. That report also identified Jimmie Durham’s 2007 sculpture Still Life with Spirit and Xitle as an influence.
A San Antonio-based curatorial connection
Guest curator Rigoberto Luna, who brought Pirouzmand and Reece into the cohort alongside Mármol, co-founded San Antonio’s Presa House Gallery in 2016. He previously curated Soy de Tejas: A Statewide Survey of Latinx Art, which premiered at San Antonio’s Centro de Artes in 2023 before opening at The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture in California in October 2025, according to Artpace San Antonio.
