Joey Fauerso: You Destroy Every Special Thing I Make spans nearly a decade of Fauerso’s career and demonstrates her ongoing commitment to addressing themes of family, gender, and humor in her artwork.

Feature writer and curator Veronica Roberts presents the first text contextualizing Fauerso’s work within her overall practice. Poet Jenny Browne reflects on Fauerso’s intentions through poetry and prose to raise questions on waiting, meaning, and living. Additional writing by Betsy Huete, Neil Fauerso, Aurvi Sharma, Hilary Leichter, and Claire Hoffman are punctuated amongst Fauerso’s artwork. Republished along with these essays is Adrienne Rich’s poem Incipience, which serves as the inspiration for the title of Fauerso’s exhibition Inside the Spider’s Body.

Additional bodies of work presented in the monograph, which traverse media through installation, performance, and video, include Drawing Battles, A Soft Opening, Attendance, Views of North America, Teardowns, Wait For It, and the publication’s namesake You Destroy Every Special Thing I Make. The opening series includes Fauerso’s artist book Dog Hospital, while the final imagery includes a selection of paintings that stand as examples of her continued dedication to the medium at the core of her practice.

Support for this publication generously provided by Texas State University, The Smothers Foundation, Sarah E. Harte and John S. Gutzler Fund of the San Antonio Area Foundation, The Craig and Elise Boyan Fund, Sonny Collins and Penelope Speier, and Joan Wyatt.

Joey Fauerso’s art seems both intent upon making us uncomfortable, while also comforting us. It offers an artist and mother’s feminism as a core strength that encourages us to defy assumptions placed upon us, to nurture the impulse to make and collect interesting things, to embrace intuition, collaboration, chaos, and risk, to make whatever is getting in the way of our creative work be part of our work, and to not see our lives as fixed or locked into place, but as spaces we can constantly remake and reimagine.

—Veronica Roberts
Excerpt of "defying, waiting, collecting, improvising, destroying”

About the Artist

Joey Fauerso is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts (2022) and the Joan Mitchell Grant for Painters and Sculptors (2020). She has presented solo and two-persons exhibitions at the Visual Arts Center, The University of Texas at Austin; New Mexico State University Art Museum, Las Cruces; Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha; Contemporary at Blue Star, San Antonio; Western Exhibitions, Chicago; David Shelton Gallery, Houston; and Antenna Gallery, New Orleans. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams; The Drawing Center, New York City; and the Museo de Arte Moderno Medellin, Colombia; among others. Fauerso has received multiple additional grants and residencies including a Sustainable Arts Foundation Grant, Open Sessions program at The Drawing Center, Golden Foundation Grant, Dallas Museum of Art Kimberough Grant, Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program, Yaddo, MacDowell, and Kunstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. Fauerso is Professor in the School of Art and Design at Texas State University, San Marcos. She lives and works in San Antonio, Texas.

www.joeyfauerso.com