Sharp

September 13, 2025-October 18, 2025

In “Sharp,” two artists meet at a nexus of thinking about labor. Though realized differently, the works of Brooke Burnside and Carlos Rosales-Silva share a focus on the materiality of work and of the built environment. In the oil paintings by Burnside, an architectural designer, this manifests more figuratively: We see architectural scenes, frozen in time. Hands proliferate across her canvases, engaged in different activities. In Good Manners (2025) and Backbone (2025), the hands are imaged with braids, even if not in the act of braiding itself. Instead, the braid presents itself as a finished product—or, rather, the hand presents the braid, perhaps in an act of pride, a “Look what I have made” portrayed wordlessly, the satisfaction of a job well done evident in the tableau.

Braids reflect Burnside’s identity. For Black women, braids are more than hair; they carry within not only the history of their creation, but the history of a larger culture. But they are not always well-received. For example, Black hairstyles are often deemed unkempt or “unprofessional” by white culture—in fact, a 2023 study found that 20% of Black women between the ages of 25 and 34 had been sent home from their jobs because of their supervisors’ attitudes towards their hair. Titling these works Good Manners and Backbone subvert these prejudices, asserting the positives of braids—they are good; they offer strength; they are central to an identity.

And yet, inherent in the image of a hand holding a braid is the knowledge that that hand could close around the hair and pull. There is a tension in these paintings, a violence—is it averted or merely delayed? In this, the artist investigates power relations. But she also investigates points of balance, harmony.

Likewise, Rosales-Silva thinks about the tension and harmony inherent in Chicano identity. The surfaces of his works are not smooth; rather, they jut out in peaks and recess in valleys, creating a texture evocative of stucco, itself suggestive of the Spanish colonial revival architecture of the 1920s and 1930s, or popcorn ceilings, a feature associated more with the latter half of the 20th century and its dependence on asbestos. For Rosales-Silva, an assistant professor in the UT Austin Art department, the tension and harmony of hybridity become apparent from a postcolonial standpoint: Chicano identity is influenced by the dilemma of not being able to return home to Mexico, lest one not be allowed back to their home in the US. This identity is itself also an echo of Mexican identity, which in turn has been formed at the juncture of Indigenous and European cultures. Rosales-Silva thus asks: “How have these hybridities manifested in imagery and architecture of the American Southwest?”

The use of bright colors, a staple in Rosales-Silva’s work, seems central to answering this question. They suggest a relationship to rasquache, a Chicano aesthetic with an aesthetic relationship to kitsch; its meaning, however, is more complex. Art critic Jennifer Heath writes of rasquache: “It belongs to the people, and is nothing more, nor less, than Chicano aesthetics, the sensibilities of the barrio, that mingle Mexican and Anglo-American experiences into everyday life. In Spanish, rasquache means ‘leftover’ or ‘of no value.’ In Chicano vernacular, it describes an attitude, the taste or lifestyle of the underdog.” In Chicano art history, rasquache becomes rasquachismo, a style named by Tomás Ybarra-Frausto that uplifts that “underdog,” asserts value in its aesthetic too-muchness, a choice resulting from the action of making the most from the least.

The most from the least; a hand almost around a braid—two sharp tensions, held in delicate balance.

Writing by Grace Sparapani