Spring 2026 Catch-Up Dispatch

Show Closing Soon!

Sarah here. I’m in my last months as a late-in-the-game graduate student. Gotta say I am relieved to be wrapping things up. I learned, I laughed, and mostly I cried over the stress of nonstop overlapping deadlines. 

We’ve just installed the big MFA thesis show at University of Houston’s Blaffer Art Museum. If you have a chance to check it out, I highly recommend it, because I plan to immediately destroy my big ‘peepshow piece’ as soon as the show is down. It’s just too huge to store! I’m hoping I can cannibalize some of the wood for other projects. I also have a couple paintings on the Blaffer second floor, but I’ll save writing about those for another day.

The show is up till April 18, 2026. Blaffer Museum is free and open Tuesday–Saturday, 12:00pm–5:00pm. Check for the six free parking spaces in lot 16B, but if that fails you can pay for parking in the Elgin Street Garage.

A little bit about the thesis work…

 

Tempestas, 2026
Found crate, plywood, cut prints, acrylic glass

This work is an odd one for me, because it’s a bit navel-gazing and self referential. I was grappling with my own anger and fixation on media coverage of natural disasters. For me, it seems that national media coverage is uninterested in providing accurate and nuanced accounts of these horrific events. There’s a lot more emphasis on the spectacle of destruction and horror and those are the images we see again and again. Part of this can probably be chalked up to the perverse human instinct to ‘not look away from the car crash.’ At the same time that I’m frustrated by this style of coverage, I myself, as an artist-storyteller, have regularly created images of disaster, destruction, and entropy. I am especially thinking here of my ongoing comic book series, ‘Holdouts,’ which is all about speculating on the future destruction and dissolution of the US Gulf Coast as a result of climate instability. So this project began with a question in mind: Is it possible to create ethical images of natural disasters whether in art or elsewhere? 

Tempestas borrows the historical format of ‘peep media,’ including the peep boxes that were toured town-to-town by itinerant showmen and the ephemeral ‘paper peep shows’ that were produced as toys and souvenirs. If this sounds familiar, it’s because we wrote a bit about it in the last newsletter. We made a visit to the National Art Library at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London to look at a handful of the hundreds of examples they have in their archives. (You can look back at that dispatch here). In my iteration of these peepboxes, I used a combination of first-person scenes taken from my own memories of flooding/displacement during Hurricane Harvey paired with more eye-in-the-sky style imagery that you might see in broadcast journalism. This combining of source material is meant to draw a parallel between the two practices and encourage the viewer to think analytically about how we consume information about natural disasters generally. 

For a better synopsis, here is the wall text I wrote for the Blaffer Museum: 

 

“Operating from a place of grief, dark humor, and endurance, Sarah Welch asks the question: Is there a responsible way to make images of natural disasters? 

Disasters like hurricanes, floods, fires, and earthquakes are becoming more common as a consequence of climate change and unmitigated environmental crime. Reproductions of violent disaster imagery run the risk of desensitizing distant audiences at best, and retraumatizing victims on the ground at worst. While broadcast media has long been accused of sensationalizing coverage of these horrific events and their aftermath, Welch grapples with the idea that artist-storytellers may also be complicit in their exploitation.

In Tempestas, Welchadopts the eighteenth century tradition of traveling peep shows or ‘‘peep boxes’ and recasts them as a vehicle for present day vignettes of Gulf Coast climate precarity.

While the act of ‘peeping’ promises access, the peephole itself obstructs the visual periphery and forces the viewer’s perspective down a narrow tunnel of hypnotic receding layers. Scenes are intentionally cluttered with intrusive framing mechanisms like the illustrated proscenium arches, television news chyrons, and comic book style narration bubbles. Looking through the restrictive peephole it is difficult to see anything which isn’t dead center. ‘Peepers’ are only permitted a small amount of pre-determined information. 

Here, the artist turns a critical gaze toward her own first-person stories of flooding and displacement during Hurricane Harvey. Welch draws a parallel between two forms of coverage: news media and artistic commentary. Specifically the use of disaster as voyeuristic spectacle for wide-reaching broadcast distribution and the more intimate scale of voyeurism in autobiographical ‘disaster artwork’ made for public---sometimes traveling--exhibition. 

Natural disasters are frequently a site for individual and collective trauma.

This work acts as an exorcism of those individual and collective demons.”

 

NOW, a process image montage:

 

NEXT UP: Collage Zine Side Quest

For me, I must have a little side quest project that’s fun and low pressure to counterbalance the big, long-haul projects like Tempestas. You gotta have a little creative treat. 

So, inspired by a recent Zine Fest Houston workshop at CAMH, I decided to make a series of quick and dirty collages from all the book and magazine scraps I’ve been squirreling away. We’re still in the thick of it, but James and I decided to turn it all into a collaborative zine. James will do a little writing based on the loose themes present in each collage and then reproduce it all on the risograph. 

Here’s a peak at one of the original collage works:

 

Many of my scraps came from a magazine article about outer space exploration/ aliens and I used those headlines to riff on images of prehistoric life, highly structured European-style gardens, and general landscape/nature imagery. These collages are all a murky soup, but there’s something in here about the impulse for ‘nature on human terms’ and the scourge of overly eager billionaires ready to colonize the ‘next frontier.’

 

Tabling Event!

Did you know that 2026 has a high number of Friday the 13ths? In fact, it's the maximum number possible! So in that spirit... friends, we're going to return to Saint Arnold Brewing Co for the 13th annual IT CAME FROM THE BAYOU print fair! Please join us on Sunday, April 26th from 11am - 4pm and peruse a bevy of original prints from across the nation.

We're also contributing a new screenprint for the poster show component of the event, and you can join us for the opening celebration at:

REC ROOM
100 Jackson St, Houston, TX 77002

RECEPTION: April 25, 2026 – 6:00 PM - close ONE NIGHT ONLY

As always, thanks again for being a subscriber, and we hope you're doing well!