Mark Menjívar: Murmurations

Mark Menjívar: Murmurations

Feb 6–May 3, 2026

Mark Menjívar: Murmurations is an expansive, mid-career survey exhibition highlighting more than  10 multifaceted projects from Menjívar’s body of work from the past 20 years. Broadly, Menjívar works through social practice and participatory education models to focus on community building. In his projects Menjívar creates frameworks for students, community groups, and leaders to come together and have critical dialogues about the issues impacting their lives. These participatory projects often utilize oral history recording, archive building, publications, and installations to present the conversations and findings, and generate further participation by the general public.

Menjívar’s practice largely takes place outside the studio and in community with the public– in schools, community centers, museums, along the San Antonio River, and more. His approach of often working with students, ranging from primary school to university, offers multiple distinct opportunities to frame conversations around complex issues in new ways. It provides the chance to educate younger generations on historic events and policies while researching topics alongside one another. Students also tap into their neighborhoods and families as resources, through which intergenerational storytelling is shared and firsthand experiences connected to the projects’ themes. Young people bring a fresh ability to be critical and discerning of existing structures while remaining hopeful and passionate about the future, a tool which often dulls with age.

The conditions and approach Menjívar took his artistic start from were born out of training in both social work and photography. This led him to study social practice at Portland State University with Julie Ault and other educators at the forefront of establishing social practice modalities within an art context. Social practice, in brief, collaboratively weaves together artistic practice and community organizing by creating contexts where artists and participants share their perspectives on subjects central to their lives, identities, and the current cultural moment. While social practice as a methodology within the artworld evolves and ebbs in popularity, it has remained Menjívar’s driving force. At the center of engaging collaborators is the ethics of helping others share their stories. For Menjívar this is key to his way of navigating the world and his community as artist, teacher, father, husband, friend, and neighbor. In this mid career survey Murmurations, we reconfigure and reactivate past projects from the last 20 years of Menjívar’s practice along with debuting new work.