A Welcoming Place presents a poetic narrative stitched out of six conversations with Black and Brown Indigenous Austinites, half of whom were born and raised in Austin. Since Jackson arrived in 2017 to attend the University of Texas at Austin for their MFA in Print and Transmedia, they have been cultivating these intimate relationships. Each conversation focuses on advice given to Black and Brown newcomers as well as highlighting each individual’s relationship to the city of Austin, with an emphasis on East Austin. Each interview will be made available in full towards the end of the exhibition. The visuals in this exhibition highlight sites in West, South, and East Austin according to where Freedman communities once stood. The artist presents themselves as a proxy figure, holding a black weather balloon as a metaphorical gesture of taking temperature. Aiding these scenes are re-animated archive footage of US and British weather balloon systems. Additionally, online archival footage depicting Black and Brown life and various public archival imagery.

Jackson’s exhibition celebrates the local power of Black and Brown Indigenous oral histories as they have impacted their experiences, using analogy to insist that communication, intimate codependency, and aesthetics shared between Black and Brown Indigenous people throughout a region is Black cultural technology. From the Greek word tekhnologia [to mean ‘systematic treatment’ derived from tekhne meaning ‘art, craft’], forecasting is a valid form of Black cultural technology for Black and Brown Indigenous people to identify and locate the illusive underpinnings and characteristics of an unwelcoming place.