Outlet Within

Outlet Within opens at the Dougherty Arts Center on October 10, running through November 28. It's a group show in the Julia C. Butridge Gallery featuring the work of the center's 2026 Resident Artists, and since it's free and open to the public, it's an easy one to drop into whenever you're near Barton Springs.

The show comes out of the Dougherty's Artist Residency, a work-exchange program that gives ceramic artists the space, facilities, time and professional interaction they need to grow their ideas and skills as practicing artists. The five artists on display are Victoria Zhuk, Stefania Garcia, Minnie Rogers, Gargi Sharma and Nathan Anthony, and they're each working from a very different place. Zhuk's intuitively hand-built vessels imagine an inner garden—a place of refuge, growth, and possibility in response to an increasingly uncertain world; Garcia makes playful sculptures of real and imagined insects that ask you to look closer at the smallest creatures; Rogers takes everyday hospital items—pain scales and medical gloves—and transforms them into whimsical sculptural forms; and Anthony uses the haptic nature of sculpture-making to explore the relationship between handmade and mechanized production.

Then there's Gargi Sharma, a veteran resident for whom this is a final exhibit at the DAC. She collects and reconstructs memories into familiar forms, narrating the stories hidden beneath everyday objects and surfaces. It's a good point to keep in mind when you're walking through—the work isn't just about the objects themselves, but about the different ways these artists are thinking through things like memory, anxiety, and the act of making.

If you want to hear from the artists directly, there are two dates to mark. The artist reception is Wednesday, October 14, from 7 to 9 PM, and the artist talk is Wednesday, November 15, from 2 to 4 PM. The reception also brings Outlet Within together with two other exhibitions in the gallery: Errant Obsession by Faith Chonko and Regular & Precious by Bella Cheng. The show runs through November 28 at the Julia C. Butridge Gallery, 1110 Barton Springs Rd, and it's free.