Doors open at 7:00PM

Lawndale Art Center and Aurora Picture Show co-present a special preview of the newest episode of In Good Company, featuring Houston artists Tay Butler and Jeremy Samuel Johnson. The free event will include excerpts from the forthcoming episode followed by a live conversation between the artists.

In Good Company is a series of in-depth online conversations made by and for artists. Adapting the format of long-form television interviews to the web, the series creates time and space for deep explorations into an artist’s life, work, and influences.

Framed and hosted by Johnson, the episode traces Butler’s multidisciplinary practice through his unconventional journey from Army private to artist and the influences that have shaped his work, from basketball to Nas, Toni Morrison, Malcolm X, and Love Jones (1997).

Throughout the episode, Johnson and Butler resist tidy narratives, embracing complexity and contradiction. “A life can’t be summarized, and lives still being worked out are even messier,” Johnson reflects. “But I do believe that seeing each other live and validating the experience of the multitudinous / harmonic / dissonant ways we intersect is always worth the time, and worth the effort.”

Who and what we see are central to Butler’s work. Drawing from Black archives and popular media, he examines the commodification of the Black body and the possibilities and limits of self-expression under capitalism. For Butler, basketball is a recurring framework for exploring power, protest, and aspiration.

Butler says, “Basketball is as much an American sport as any other sport, because it keeps the status quo in place. You have the black body, the other performing at an extremely high level. You have the status quo, owning and manipulating those performances. And in the process you sell that scattered success to the many as hope.”

Collage and sampling shape Butler’s multidisciplinary practice, which spans photography, drawing, video, sound, performance, and installation. Across mediums, he cuts, rips, tears, and reconstitutes the past to imagine new ways of seeing the present.

“I knew I always wanted to have this tearing from many to create one. Because hip-hop is that, hip-hop is sampling. In a lot of ways, being a child of hip-hop influenced my art,” says Butler.

TAY BUTLER is a multidisciplinary artist based in Houston, Texas. His collages, paintings, installations, and performances reshape archives and images into forms that speak to Black history and the tension between media and lived experience. Butler has exhibited his work at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Project Row Houses, and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, among others. In 2023–24, he was an artist-in-residence at Lawndale Art Center. Butler received a BFA from the University of Houston and an MFA from the University of Arkansas.

JEREMY SAMUEL JOHNSON is a writer and cultural worker based in Houston, Texas. Their work explores Black embodiment, memory, and the layered histories of place. Johnson was selected for the Black Embodiments Studio (2024–25) and has held writing residencies at the Mitchell Center–UH Coastal Center (2024) and the Saharan Dust Residency (2025). Their writing has appeared in Burnaway and elsewhere. Johnson received a BA in Literature from the University of Houston and is the Exhibitions Director at Lawndale Art Center.

IN GOOD COMPANY is produced by artists Arie Bouman and Eileen Maxson in memory of their late friend and collaborator Vinod Hopson. The project grew out of an online conversation they created together in 2022, which became IGC’s pilot episode. That conversation sparked the idea for a series of artist-to-artist dialogues shaped by care, close attention, and thoughtful questioning.

VINOD HOPSON (1975–2023) was an artist, storyteller, and cultural worker. His project, Those Who Desire, explored the lost, often difficult history of the city of Houston through performance and cartography. Hopson was a two-time recipient of The Idea Fund and presented his work at organizations including DiverseWorks and Lawndale Art Center. Beyond his individual practice, Hopson was a generous collaborator and champion for artists, especially through his work as a curator, writer, and arts administrator, most notably at FotoFest International from 2001–2020. Hopson received a BFA in Photography and Digital Media from the University of Houston.

ARIE BOUMAN is an artist and writer originally from the Netherlands. His writing on art and artists has been published in Glasstire, Arts and Culture Texas, and Metropolis M. Bouman received a BFA in Painting from the AKI Academie in Enschede, an MA in Critical Theory and the Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York, and was a resident at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten.

EILEEN MAXSON is an interdisciplinary artist whose work spans video, performance, installation, and photography. She has exhibited and screened her work at the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Queens Museum, the Museum of the Moving Image, and Light Industry. Maxson received a BFA from the University of Houston, an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University, and attended De Ateliers in Amsterdam. She is based in Houston and Oberlin, Ohio, where she is Visiting Assistant Professor of Intermedia at Oberlin College.