FotoFest Biennial Celebrates 40th Anniversary with Global Showcase

Impressive as they are, the numbers only hint at the enormity of FotoFest Biennial 2026. The festival features hundreds of artists from around the world, includes 85 participating spaces across Houston and the surrounding area, dozens of related events, and draws on the previous 20 biennials. Steven Evans, FotoFest’s executive director and a gay man with an extensive history of queer activism, spoke with OutSmart about the festival.

In putting together the city-wide event, Evans saw a unique opportunity to embrace all of the topics that have been covered since FotoFest’s beginning. “We saw that we had the potential to celebrate a double anniversary, because it’s the anniversary of 20 biennials and it’s the 40th anniversary of the organization’s first biennial. I felt like this was a good time to look back at the different themes and the different kinds of topics that FotoFest has embraced.”

Along with an incredible amount of work, Evans tells us there’s been both joy and pride in the process. “There’s the joy of encountering new artists and new art that, as an organization, you can embrace and bring to public attention,” he says. “There’s also some pride. When you look back, you see the strength of the subjects that we’ve covered. I think in recent years there’s been recognition among larger cultural institutions that they need to acknowledge society’s thorny issues. Honestly, it’s largely a relatively recent thing for most larger institutions, and yet it’s something FotoFest has been doing all along.”

Evans and his staff look for photographers who have found a new way to talk about something. Those discoveries are exciting, even when an artist brings attention to something that doesn’t show the best of humanity. In a sense, the artists are also activists in bringing issues to the public.

“I’m thinking very specifically right now of work from India from 2018 that’s about the fact that some rural hospitals in India employ only Dalits (formerly the “Untouchables”) to work with cadavers,” says Evans. “The caste system was officially abolished, but the traditionally higher caste doctors don’t want to touch dead bodies.”

When viewers see that the caste system in India is still alive, though unofficially, it’s a small step for them to consider the legacy of the United States’ Jim Crow system. Those connections are possible in many of FotoFest’s groundbreaking exhibits.

C. Rose Smith contributed images from her series Scenes of Self: Redressing Patriarchy, which addresses that very issue. Smith places herself, a black queer artist, within antebellum spaces. In each image, Smith is wearing only a man’s white cotton dress shirt, a nod to American slavery’s cotton trade.

The dress shirt is “a seemingly conservative and benign garment traditionally associated with business, professionalism, and white male respectability,” Smith explains. “By extracting this garment from its conventional context and placing it on my own Black queer body, I reconfigure its meaning. I expose its roots in systems of exploitation. The antebellum homes in which I photograph myself are not merely backdrops, but active sites of memory—monuments to a violent past that I reclaim.”

The FotoFest staff and volunteers started working on this Biennial some three years ago. Participants often create work about the current political situation worldwide. But the thing is, the world has changed dramatically in the last three years. Work started then has a chance to change and grow before being presented in this Biennial. While some artists, like Smith, address historic issues, others discuss current events.

“We had the situation in Ukraine get worse. Now we’ve had the conflict between Israel and Palestine,” Evans says. 

Other situations that have changed include Latin American-U.S. relations.

“There’s a piece in a previous biennial by Anna Teresa Fernandez. She’s a cultural activist. There’s a video where she painted the border wall between California and Mexico. And she paints it baby-blue so that it matches the sky, and then it visually disappears. Of course, it’s still there. But her painting is, you know, showing a metaphor for what it could be—what it should be.”

Another artist, Shona Illingworth, who was in the most recent previous biennial in 2024, focuses on the militarization of the sky and atmosphere. “She’s an advocate for atmospheric rights—that humans should be free from the threat of surveillance or violence from above. That’s exciting, and it’s important work.”

WHAT: Global Visions – FotoFest at 40
WHEN: Through May 10, 2026
WHERE: Various locations in and around Houston
INFO: fotofest.org