Adraint Bereal (fine arts ‘20) spent over seven years using art to explore the Black collegiate experience. From creating a zine in a photography class to publishing The Black Yearbook in 2020 and 2024, Bereal returned to UT for his first solo institutional exhibit “Adraint Bereal: As It Appears.” The exhibit will debut at the Visual Arts Center on Friday and will remain open until March 5, 2027. The Daily Texan sat down with Bereal to discuss his work’s development and the intent behind his new exhibit.
The Daily Texan: Could you walk me through what this exhibit is going to look like and how it’s changed from (The Black Yearbook)?
Adraint Bereal: The Black Yearbook work has never been shown in exhibition form at this scale. This is the first time the work from, not only what I did at UT, but also traveling across the U.S. is being seen all together for the very first time. This work is really the accumulation of years of interviews, photography (and) portraiture.
DT: Does the exhibit (feature) new content?
AB: The work that you’ll see in this exhibition is the gathering of all those (works). It will be interacting with archival material as well, which we borrow from the Benson (Multi-Cultural Museum) and the Austin Historic Center. It’s a conversation not only at UT, but the nation at large. … This work is speaking to impermanence as a way to speak about this decades-long conversation around where Black students deserve to just simply be.
DT: Do you have a favorite photo or piece in this exhibit that you’re excited for people to see?
AB: All the photographs bring something really unique and rich to the experience, and what’s beautiful is all the works don’t belong to one institution, and it helps you to see similarities and differences between campuses, cultures and organizations. All these works, united and individually, bring something different to the conversation.
DT: What are you hoping that an audience experiences through this exhibit?
AB: People should think about where we’ve been … and where we are today. What rights have been gained? What rights have been lost? How did we end up in the current situation that we’re in? At (the exhibit’s) core is understanding. After I graduated college, my grandfather wrote me a letter, which I include in the early introduction of The Black Yearbook. One of the closing lines he writes in his letter to me is, “In all thy getting, get understanding.” As people take in the work and think about … what has happened and where we would like to go, (they) should question everything. Question the impermanence, question the space, question the people that make the decisions that uproot our lives and tell us what we can and can’t do.
