Cindy Elizabeth’s Mama’s Americana

February 21, 2026-March 28, 2026
Hyde Park location

Mama’s Americana is Cindy Elizabeth's dedication to the aesthetics of the South: rough denim jeans, the strum of her father’s guitar strings, and to the mothers’ hands that wrap heads in silk on Sunday mornings. This exhibition is a love letter to the South she witnessed growing up and a celebration of the Texan culture that raised her. Through textiles, slip-cast ceramic sculptures, and film photography, Cindy reflects on personal memory alongside broader histories of Southern life, recognizing material as a carrier of history and inheritance.

Cindy's wall hangings bring together a range of fabrics such as cotton, woven jacquard, satin, velvet, denim, and faux fur alongside photographs printed on satin fabric. These images depict cars unique to Texas culture, reflecting the visual language of East Austin neighborhoods where she grew up. Southern culture is shaped by Black aesthetics, histories, cultural practices, and artistry-both ever-changing and yet specific to place. Without Black culture, there would be no Southern culture. The combinations of textures, patterns, and shapes draw from improvisational quilting traditions rooted in the Black South. These wall hangings also pay tribute to Cindy's late father’s “Black History” collage works, which he sold door to door in country towns surrounding Austin in the 1980s to 90s, with Cindy and her siblings in tow in his old station wagon.

Heritage, a sculptural installation utilizing ready-made bonnets and a ceramic cast of a wig head, reflects the passing down of headwrapping traditions carried by enslaved Africans to the Southern United States. Caring for their hair is one of the earliest rituals Cindy remembers sharing with their late mother. Every Sunday night, her mother would carefully style her hair and wrap it tightly before sending Cindy to bed. These moments of care shaped Cindy's understanding of protection, intimacy, and identity, and she returns to them to honor how cultural knowledge survives through everyday practices.

The ceramic boots and film photographs connect Black Southern identity to Texan cowboy culture, expanding who is remembered within narratives of the American South. Most importantly, these pieces pay tribute to Cindy's late Uncle Freddy, who cared for horses, pigs, chickens, and other animals in Creedmoor, Texas, and her father, known to most as Big Tex, who ran a gospel record store in East Austin and never left the house without his cowboy hat and boots.

Cindy's work has been exhibited at the Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts, in Los Angeles, CA at SEASONS LA Gallery, in Atlanta, GA at Echo Contemporary Art Gallery, Hambidge Hive, Georgia State University, and The Works, and in Austin, TX at The Elisabet Ney Museum, The Art Galleries at Austin Community College, Martha’s Gallery, The George Washington Carver Museum, ICOSA Gallery, and the Visual at Center galleries at the University of Texas at Austin.

Mama’s Americana's opening reception will be held from 6:00 to 9:00 PM on February 27, 2026, and will be on view through March 28, 2026, Friday-Saturday 12-6 PM, or by appointment.