Symbiosis : Sharing Words & Sustenance with Laura Augusta, PhD & Cindee Travis Klement

Please join us for a reading by Laura Augusta, PhD followed by a dialog with Symbiosis artist Cindee Travis Klement. We invite the community to bring food to share at a potluck following the conversation and weather permitting we will gather together and enjoy surrounded by Symbiosis in Lawndale’s Mary E. Bawden Sculpture Garden.

From Left: 2023 Community Day, image by Nash Baker. 2022 Fall Festival , image by Ronald L. Jones.

Cindee Travis Klement’s sculptural practice is inspired by natural systems in Texas’ ecological history that build soil health, absorb water, and sequester carbon.

Her work reimagines Houston’s landscape practices, proposing holistic restoration of ecological balance — awakening urban consciousness to our kinship with living systems and restoring what is lost. Incorporating time and movement, she adapts new, research-driven landscape processes, including systems thinking, economics, and incorporating organic and living materials, to create works that inspire urban land conservation. Klement believes widespread environmental change begins with envisioning (and making visible) the wisdom inherent in the natural world.

Laura Augusta, PhD, is a US-born writer and curator who has sustained close working relationships with contemporary artists in Central America since 2014. A recipient of The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her writing about contemporary art in Guatemala City, she completed the Core Fellowship at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and was an inaugural Mellon Arts + Practitioner Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration. As an independent curator, her exhibitions have been produced internationally at independent arts spaces, galleries, universities, museums, and the Paiz biennial; her essays and articles have been published in artist monographs, edited volumes, journals, and exhibition catalogs. A freelance editor for artists and art historians since 2016, Laura’s editorial support and coaching centers writers and artists whose work has been historically excluded from academia and museums; she is a developmental editor for the Toward Equity in Publishing Program at the Smithsonian’s American Art Journal. And, with Francesca Fuchs, she has taught the BLOCK program at the Glassell School of Art in Houston since 2019. In 2022, she was hired as Curator at the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts, located on the U.S.-Mexico border.