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Adraint Bereal: As It Appears

Name: Adraint Bereal: As It Appears
Start: 2026-10-29
Location: Visual Arts Center, Art Building (ART)

Thursday, October 29 at Visual Arts Center, Art Building (ART), Austin

Visual Arts Center, Art Building (ART)

About this event

In 2019, while attending the University of Texas, artist Adraint Bereal began creating a visual and discursive archive of Black student life on campus. Seeking to counter the systemic invisibility of his peers, Bereal embedded himself within the campus community, documenting personal histories in photographs and interviews. He called this project The Black Yearbook. Adraint Bereal: As It Appears expands on The Black Yearbook, juxtaposing archival images, texts, and video from UT and Austin repositories with over thirty photographs, essays, and interviews with Black students attending American universities.

Who's playing

Adraint Bereal is a Waco-born artist based in New York who graduated from UT's design program. He began The Black Yearbook on this campus, then carried it to public universities, HBCUs, Ivy League schools and trade schools. It became a 2024 book from Penguin Random House. This is his first institutional solo show, and the VAC's director, Max Fields, curated it.

What to expect

More than thirty photographs sit alongside essays, recorded conversations and a newly commissioned video. Archival images, documents and video from UT and Austin repositories run through the show. They reach back to the years before desegregation, the civil rights era and recent student movements. Bereal favors personal stories over a single linear history, so the show reads as many voices. The VAC is a 13,000-square-foot gallery inside the Art Building, set in the restored concrete barrel vaults of the old University Art Museum.

Why go

This is the largest presentation of The Black Yearbook so far, and it is on view at the campus where the project started. Seeing UT's own archival record next to Bereal's portraits gives the work a local weight it can't have in the book. The exhibition runs for months, so it fits easily into a campus visit.