Francesca Lally: Half Time
Francesca Lally, Formerly War Memorial Stadium, 2025. From the series Bigger, 2025. Archival inkjet print. Courtesy of the artist.
From the late nineteenth through the twentieth century, football evolved from a fringe pastime into the quintessential American cultural ritual. As the United States ascended to its role as a global superpower, football stadiums multiplied across the country, players gained mythic status, and the sport became a vital part of many communities' lives. These arenas evolved into more than mere landmark architecture; they became symbols of nation-making, perpetuating narratives of individual achievement, shifting ideas of masculinity and power, and fostering profound senses of community belonging and pride.
In Half Time, Francesca Lally turns to the VAC’s neighbor, the Darrell K Royal Texas Memorial Stadium, and stadiums throughout Texas to weave together expansive material and speculative histories. These intertwined histories range from Piranesi’s eighteenth-century fantastical prints of the ruins of Roman stadiums to documentation of present-day stories and imagined futures for Texas’s landscapes and built environments. Through archival and field research, Lally moves across broad spatial and temporal scales to reflect on the game's social, political, and cultural imprint, stadium architecture, and the different experiences of spectatorship across Texas’s geographies and people.
Francesca Lally: Half Time includes paintings, prints, photography, film, and performance, as well as a site-specific sound and camera obscura installation that projects the stadium into the art gallery, connecting social spheres and spaces. Through playful juxtaposition, Lally documents the present and excavates the past to speculate on the future of football as a defining moment of the American empire.
On February 8, Lally invites the public to come together at the Visual Arts Center for a Super Bowl Watch Party, Bad Bunny’s Half-Time Concert, and a communal celebration that holds space for the contradictions and collective imagination inherent to mass cultural events.
Francesca Lally: Half Time is curated by VAC 2024–26 Curatorial Fellow, Maysa Martins.
Presenting support for Francesca Lally: Half Time is provided by the St. Elmo Arts Residency fellowship and the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin.
About the artist
Francesca Lally is an artist from New York. Moving between photography, performance, fiber, and cinema. Her visual art practice centers time as a material and collaborator. Informed by her work as a media archivist, teacher, and researcher, she explores the poetic webs of weaving, data storage technologies, volcanoes, and language in translation. Investigating the architectural ruins of empire from the ancient Mediterranean to the contemporary United States, Lally’s recent projects consider how sites and history are built by collective memory and creative retellings, along vast geologic time scales and intimate personal ones
Lally earned a BFA from CalArts in 2019 and an MFA in Printmaking from the Tyler School of Art in 2025, where she spent her first year in residence at Temple University Rome. She has shown her work at AUTOMAT collective (Philadelphia, PA), Vox Populi (Philadelphia, PA), Echo Park Film Center (Los Angeles, CA), San Diego Underground Film Festival (San Diego, CA), Saliva (Barcelona, Spain) Bingo Gallery (Albuquerque, NM) and Entre Film Center (Harlingen, TX) among others. Her first solo exhibition, Just like a Book we can read also a Rock was held at the TUR Gallery of art in Rome, Italy. She has received support from the Independence Public Media Foundation, Scribe Video Center, and the National Film Preservation Foundation. Lally has attended residencies in the US and France, with an upcoming fellowship at Vermont Studio Center. Lally is the 2025-26 St. Elmo Arts Residency Fellow at the Visual Arts Center in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin.