2023 End of Year Letter

Season's Greetings,

It’s hard to believe 2023 is coming to an end. It’s hard to believe that nearly three years have passed since we connected a generator to five culverts, flipped a switch, pulled a cord, and brought a concrete tunnel to life. Indeed, every year is full of challenges, strengths, and learning opportunities, but it’s safe to say that we are closing out 2023 with a sense of purpose and renewal we haven’t experienced since the day we first flipped that generator switch.

The landscape of philanthropy in our city has shifted significantly over the last few years. We are all at the whims of an inflationary economy and the struggle to return to whatever new version of “normal” has become. At Co-Lab, we resigned ourselves to shift gears as well, de-emphasize our Capital Campaign, and focus on building a better foundation of financial stability. We have always been great at bringing you incredible programming, at finding solutions that work within unexpected spaces, and content that is both beautiful and challenging. We have also always been good at bringing artists into our community, opening doors and building bridges, or whatever portal is necessary for shared growth and mutual learning. We also do all this while offering space to our artists right here at home, proving our support locally as well as outside of Austin.

But 2023 brought us out of our comfort zones, and with the help of Mary Katherine Matalon we built (and are continuing to build) a robust membership program. We have expanded our base of supporters who have opened up our access to a wider community in exciting ways, and made us realize that our reach is much further than we knew. Thanks to Co-Lab Director Chris Burch, we hosted our first fundraiser event over the summer —a model that was replicated in early December — to bring in nearly $40,000 combined while offering an opportunity for new donors to have a real and observable impact. All the while, we continued investing our time and energy into the strong program of exhibitions that we continually offer the public, our city, and most importantly, our community of artists.

2023 began with a challenging project by Mexico City based artist Virginia Colwell, an exhibition five years in the making and supported by a Jumex Foundation production grant. Co-Lab was invited to collaborate with Beverly’s New York on a shared booth at the Material Art Fair in Mexico City — a long-time dream for our organization. We worked with Steve Parker and performance-based collaborators on an iteration of “Sonic Meditation for Solo Performer”, an interactive piece originally shown at Art League Houston. We worked with artist Mick Burton on “RAILRODEO”, and created a fundraiser inspired by his exhibition. In the summer we ran an open call inviting artists we had never worked with before and “Show Me a Dawn” was born. Recent UT MFA graduates Gabrielle Constantine and Rowan Howe transformed our space into a sensory installation that ignited memories and wisdoms, and we closed the year with “Boy’s Ranch” by Mexico City based artist Ana Segovia, a dream project for the artist who tackles the pervasiveness of artificial masculinity through media.

But this year was not just about the exhibitions. We created areas of programmatic opportunity through exhibition previews for our members, studio visits between local and visiting artists, conversations at the Center for Latino Visual Studies at UT, an ever-evolving book club, artist meet and greets, and an exciting new partnership with the Department of Visual Studies at St. Edward’s University, and we received a generous grant from H-E-B that helped support these programs.

All in all, we’ve made some great shit happen and we could not be more excited about it.

This is all to say that we have started to lay a new foundation for growth, one that we are committed to building on, and one that will take us to the future of our organization, eventually providing the conceptual groundwork for our eventual, shiny new facilities. But that foundation always takes work, and building also requires stability. Your monetary support has always helped us to steer our ship in a direction that is exciting and innovative. In closing out 2023, we look toward 2024 with renewed excitement and creativity, one that your generous donation will directly and substantially support, and trust us, you want to be a part of it.

Wishing you all the best in the new year!


Sincerely,
Leslie Moody Castro, Director and Itinerant Curator
and Directors Sean Gaulager, Austin Nelsen, Christopher Burch, and Vladimir Mejia