The Contemporary Austin presents “The Canvas Can Do Miracles” featuring Patrick Dean Hubbell
Austin, TX (July 8, 2025) – The Contemporary Austin is pleased to announce The Canvas Can Do Miracles, an intergenerational group exhibition that brings together five visionary contemporary artists—Ragna Bley, Nathan Carter, Patrick Dean Hubbell, Suzanne Jackson, and Hayal Pozanti—whose practices expand the possibilities of painterly abstraction. On view September 12, 2025, through January 11, 2026, across the museum’s downtown Jones Center and the outdoor sculpture park of Laguna Gloria, the exhibition explores how abstraction can serve as a vehicle for hidden narratives, environmental engagement, and metaphysical inquiry.
Far from being purely formal language, abstraction in this exhibition becomes a space of transformation, resistance, and coded communication. Drawing from diverse lineages, Indigenous symbologies, underground ecosystems, and the natural world, these artists collectively challenge and reframe the historical narratives of abstraction. Their work reflects The Contemporary Austin’s broader Fall 2025 exhibition season, which features artists that play with coded messaging and artworks in which alternative meanings are hiding in plain sight.
“The Canvas Can Do Miracles assembles an intergenerational group of artists whose commitment to painterly abstraction moves beyond purely formal expression,” says Alex Klein, Head Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at The Contemporary Austin. “The artists in the exhibition approach their canvases with diverse painterly strategies and reference points, but they are united in their deployment of abstraction as a networked space for communication, transformation and, at times, metaphysical inquiry. Through different touchstones ranging from the natural world, Indigenous symbologies, and underground ecosystems, the exhibition foregrounds an artistic ethos rooted in alchemy, process, and resistance. Ultimately the show invites viewers to relish in the formal beauty of these artworks, while also ruminating on how abstraction can be a navigation tool to embed messages and alternative meaning, that is hiding in plain sight.”
For Diné artist Patrick Dean Hubbell, abstraction becomes a vessel for memory, identity, and land-based knowledge. Hubbell contributes five textural, layered works, two created specifically for this exhibition, his draped, folded, defaced, and deconstructed unstretched canvases and mass-produced textiles grounding his unique painterly language. Walking the line between the historical and the contemporary, Hubbell’s works offer a new lens to understand abstraction through both its significance within Diné culture and the discourse of contemporary painting. Hubbell translates Indigenous stories, traditions, language, and art rooted in his Diné identity into abstract marks and geometric patterning that can be read as pure form or markers of cultural significance. His paintings encode cosmologies and cultural inheritance, affirming abstraction as a dynamic tool for Indigenous storytelling within a discourse of contemporary painting.
“The Contemporary Austin strives to support artistically ambitious exhibitions that are also inviting and engaging to the communities we serve,” says sharon maidenberg, Ernest and Sarah Butler Executive Director and CEO at The Contemporary Austin. “The Canvas Can Do Miracles exemplifies this by showcasing artists whose work speaks across generations, backgrounds, and lived experiences, all through the expansive language of abstraction. Whether on view at the Jones Center downtown or outdoors at the Betty And Edward Marcus Sculpture Park at Laguna Gloria, this exhibition encourages visitors to connect with contemporary art in new and unexpected ways, reinforcing our belief that creativity and meaningful arts experiences are for everyone.”
The Canvas Can Do Miracles demonstrates how abstraction remains a vital and insurgent language. Through layered materials, experimental processes, and symbol-rich compositions, these artists harness the canvas as a space of alchemy, possibility, and urgent contemporary relevance. The exhibition’s title, a nod to the Christopher Cross song “Sailing,” hints at this spirit of playful optimism, inviting viewers to believe, even momentarily, that miracles might be made visible through form, color, and process.
Read the full press release online on The Contemporary Austin.
