Town Meeting 1978-2028

Nick Vaughan & Jake Margolin

Main Gallery

On view: May 16 – July 20, 2025

Symposium: June 7 & 8, 2025

Town Meeting 1978-2028 is an exhibition and symposium inspired by “Town Meeting I”, a pivotal 1978 convening of 4,000 LGBTQIA+ Houstonians at the Astro Arena, which galvanized Houston’s emerging LGBTQIA+ rights movement and helped lead to the creation of major institutions like The Montrose Center and The Montrose Clinic. It marks the beginning of a three-year initiative by queer interdisciplinary artists Nick Vaughan & Jake Margolin to inspire, facilitate, and develop programming in 2028 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of “Town Meeting 1”.

The exhibition comprises a monumental “wind drawing” based on archival images of “Town Meeting I” created by stenciling unfixed charcoal powder on paper and blowing it away, leaving a ghost-image that highlights the ephemerality, beauty, and loss of queer histories. The “wind drawing” surrounds a series of custom modular conference tables modeled on the bar tops from Mary’s Naturally, the gay bar that served as a center of Houston’s queer community for decades. 

These conference tables will anchor a two-day symposium grounded in the legacy of ‘Town Meeting 1’ and other contemporaneous queer movements/organizations that aims to inspire and seed a new wave of artistic organizing and cross-community collaborations. The gathering will combine expert panels of community elders, scholars of queer visual culture, activists and community stakeholders, with community building activities and experimental, artist-lead programming such as commissioned manifestos, guided somatic practice, a meme development thinktank and vocal workshops. These programs will facilitate collaboration between often siloed community members and organizations and catalyze programming around the 50th anniversary of “Town Meeting I” in 2028.

The symposium will be documented by a slate of queer Houston poets, and these poems along with other material generated during the symposium will be compiled into a chapbook to be distributed free of charge to all participants.

A full list of presenters/panelists will be released in early May.

The symposium will be free and open to the public. Registration will be required and will open in early May.

Town Meeting 1978-2028 is the first supported program of Rendezvous Center for Art, a nonprofit founded by Nick & Jake whose mission is to foster public understanding of the contributions of the LGBTQIA+ community by supporting the creation, public presentation and social engagement programming of interdisciplinary artwork that examines the rich diversity of queer experiences.

Rendezvous Center for Art gratefully acknowledges the generosity of major sponsors of "Town Meeting 1978-2028": Beverly McPhail & Kevin Kulish, Sara Rosenbaum & Dan Hawkins, Dr. Don Bacigalupi & Daniel Feder, Jereann Chaney, The Terrence McNally Foundation, Scott & Judy Nyquist, John Bradshaw Jr, Natilee Harran & Michael G. Powell, Sharmon J Hilfinger & Luis Trabb Pardo, and Nina Rubin, and The Whitehall Hotel.

This project is made possible with the support from The Idea Fund. The Idea Fund is a re-granting program administered by DiverseWorks, Aurora Picture Show, and Project Row Houses and funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and numerous individual donors.

About the Artist

Nick Vaughan & Jake Margolin are Houston-based interdisciplinary artists creating an ongoing series of fifty installations made in response to little-known pre-Stonewall queer histories from each state. This multi-decade endeavor draws from recent groundbreaking academic work, the artists’ own archival research, and significant time spent learning from and collaborating with local LGBTQ community members.