Adraint Bereal: As It Appears
Adraint Bereal, Homecoming, 2019. From the series, The Black Yearbook, 2019-24. Archival inkjet print. Courtesy of Nina Johnson Gallery, Miami.
Opening Reception:
Fri. Oct. 16, 5–8 p.m.
In 2019, while attending the University of Texas, artist Adraint Bereal set out to create a visual and discursive archive of Black student life on campus. Motivated to bring visibility to an underrepresented Black student population, Bereal embedded himself among his peers to document their stories and photograph them. Recognizing the universal resonance of these stories, he quickly expanded his local research to campuses nationwide. Through candid photographs, intimate portraits, and interviews, Bereal mapped out a constellation of student experiences across public universities, trade schools, HBCUs, and Ivy League colleges, compiling the images and texts into a published compendium designed as a gesture of historical intervention and revision. He called this series The Black Yearbook.
Adraint Bereal: As It Appears expands on The Black Yearbook project, juxtaposing archival images, texts, and video from UT and Austin repositories with over thirty photographs, essays, and interviews with Black students attending American universities. Photographs of current and recently enrolled students share space with historical materials that reflect pre-segregation, civil rights era, and recent social movements, expanding the context of individual experiences to include collective efforts to increase Black visibility and inclusion on campus. But rather than default to an objective, linear account of history, Bereal instead prioritizes personal narratives, illuminating the unfinished, fragmented, and ever-evolving landscape of Black collegiate life in the U.S.
As It Appears is a homecoming exhibition for the UT Austin alumni, marking Adraint Bereal’s first institutional solo exhibition and featuring the largest presentation of works from The Black Yearbook series to date. Presented within the context of a university art center, the exhibition frames recent popular and collective histories as narratives still being actively written, inviting the complexities of subjectivity to complicate institutional hierarchies and histories.
Adraint Bereal: As It Appears is curated by Max Fields, Director.
Support for Adraint Bereal: As It Appears is provided by the Texas Commission for the Arts, C.C. Marsh, the Leonian Foundation, the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin, Suzanne Deal Booth, and Nina Johnson Gallery.
About the artist
Adraint Khadafhi Bereal (b. 1998) is an artist from Waco, Texas, based in New York, NY. Bereal uses film, photography, text, and design to untangle social, cultural, and political apparatuses that form and influence identity and cultural representation. His 2024 publication, The Black Yearbook (4 Color Books / Penguin Random House), examined Black student life in colleges across the US. His work has been written about internationally on platforms including The New York Times, The Atlantic, Texas Monthly, Print Magazine, Aperture, and Vice, among others. In 2025, Bereal’s work was included in the exhibition Blackland Prairies at the Visual Arts Center at the University of Texas, curated by VAC Assistant Curator Melissa Fandos and VAC Curatorial Fellow Maysa Martins. His work is held in the permanent collection of the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) and is represented by Nina Johnson Gallery. Bereal graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree from the School of Design and Creative Technologies.