November’s art scene across Austin shows artists exploring big questions about identity, home, and where we belong. These exhibitions show how art connects different worlds that bring together generations, cultures, and humans with nature.
One theme keeps appearing this month: how artists take old traditions and make them new. Several exhibitions look at inherited practices — like Mexican crafts or classic documentary photography — and reinvent them to talk about migration, work, and cultural memory. Other shows examine our relationship with nature, asking whether we should try to control the landscape or learn from it.
This November, Austin’s galleries invite viewers to spend time in these in-between spaces.
Dimmit Contemporary Art
Michael and Grace Dines: The Arboreal — Now through November 29
Father-and-daughter artists Michael and Grace Dines explore nature through contrasting yet complementary approaches. Michael’s large-scale mixed media landscapes evoke the sublime through haunting, fog-obscured layers. Grace works in the opposite direction, turning to powder pigment on paper to create abstract botanical compositions that distill nature to its softest, most ephemeral gestures.
Verdant Gallery
Group Exhibition: Attunement — Now through November 29
Attunement brings together five Austin-based artists working across mediums like paint, collage, and sculpture. The artists examine the deep relationship between their creative practice and the natural environment. By highlighting the subtle exchanges among sky, water, plants, and wildlife through paintings that echo the natural world, the artists shift from observation to connection.
Art Galleries at Black Studies, University of Texas at Austin
Group Exhibition: “World”-traveling: Black Studies Research in Relation — Now through December 6
Drawing from the permanent collection of the Art Galleries at Black Studies, each piece of artwork sits beside research writing, creating an unusual gallery experience where visitors move from looking and reading to analysis. The exhibition uses María Lugones’ concept of “world”-traveling to explore how moving between different perspectives and identities can foster empathy and connection. By accompanying artists’ books, drawings, prints, and paintings with research writings, the exhibition examines themes of landscape, place, ancestry, diaspora, and belonging, with each pairing serving as a bridge between people, disciplines, and ways of knowing.
Rahim Fortune: “Hardtack” and Other Stories — Now through December 6
Building on the work of documentary photographers like Dawoud Bey, Roy DeCarava, and Dorothea Lange, Fortune explores Black and Indigenous communities in the U.S. South through deeply personal photographs that weave together his own experience with the region’s mythologies and photographic history. As both eulogy and elegy for the American South, Fortune’s practice weaves together complex landscapes of loss and love, migration and place-making, and the intersection of Black and Indigenous experiences.
Unchained Art
Ditte Sørensen and Via Boley: between us. — Now through December 13
Danish textile artist Ditte Sørensen, also known as Madstitch, and Austin-based painter Via Boley come together in this exhibition. Their pieces explore how women are perceived and how materials can disrupt that perception through radically different approaches: Sørensen’s tactile, experimental collages incorporate fragments from a cowboy book and a vintage queer novel, creating layered compositions that invite viewers to discover what’s beneath these playful surfaces. Meanwhile, Boley’s fractured, reflective canvases use mirror-like materials to create spaces where figures appear distorted and displaced, transforming the act of looking into a contemplative confrontation.
Erik Neimeijer: Artist in Focus — November 13 through December 13
Dutch musician and painter Erik Neimeijer transforms Unchained.Art’s downtown gallery into a vibrant, four-week celebration of rhythm and color, with works that pulse with the same unstoppable energy as his rock-and-roll career as guitarist and singer for the band Bökkers. His medium-to-large-scale canvases — populated by gamblers, bulls, lovers, musicians, and tropical dreamers rendered in a loose style “somewhere between Walt Disney and Diego Rivera” — channel the chaos and joy of life.
Blanton Museum
Betsabeé Romero: Al reverso de la pista — Now through January 4
Al reverso de la pista (The Other Side of the Track) transforms the gallery into a contemporary Mesoamerican ritual ball court that feels like both an ancient temple and modern garage. The installation juxtaposes ancient ceremonial sport with modern car culture, while addressing the complex relationship between Mexican artisanal traditions and industrial labor. The sacred space is anchored by monumental “oculi” created from engraved hubcaps and car parts that evoke cathedral rosettes, blending Indigenous heritage, Catholic imagery, and Chicano car culture to create a meditation on migration, cultural memory, and the traces left by those who move between worlds.