Image: courtesy of the artist
Biography
Billion Tekleab (b. 2000, Houston, TX) is an Eritrean-American artist based in Chicago, IL, working across sculpture, prose, and sound, with a background in performance, painting, and film. Her practice returns to one concern: who and what counts as human, and who decides. Her work presents objects as scores — instructions that people and materials can perform, resist, or complete — dissolving the line between artwork and life. She places bodies, machines, and architectures into the same frame. Tekleab treats myth not as fixed inheritance but as unfinished material. The work holds hope and fear at the same pitch, refusing to resolve one into the other. What results is a question, restaged in a different material each time.
Tekleab is currently practicing as a Sculpture MFA 2027 candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received a bachelors in the Interdisciplinary Studies of Art, Science, and History, at the University of Houston. Her works have been presented with the University of Wisconsin, Madison, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Friends Gallery, The Edgelands Institute, Houston Freedmen’s Town Conservancy, Blaffer Museum, Project Row Houses, Houston Public Library, Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, Nameless Sound at Lawndale Arts Center and The Anderson Center For The Arts.
Curriculum Vitae (contact for full cv)
Education
MFA Sculpture,
School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2027
MFA IPEF,
University of Houston, 2024 - 2025
New Art School Modality, 2024 - 2025
B.S. Interdisciplinary Studies in Art, History, and Design
University of Houston, 2024
2026, Forthcoming_Southern Survey 3, Project Row Houses, Houston, TX
2025, Cosmologies of Aliveness, Elgin Street Studios, University of Houston, Houston, TX
Group Exhibitions
2026, GEDENANA, UW Madison, Madison, Wisconsin
2025, GlitchLab Art Show, Edgelands Institute, Houston, TX
2025, contribution to sound collage by Maria Chavez, Hauser & Wirth, New York City, NY
2025, Everything We Can Possibly Hold, Friends Gallery, Houston, TX
2024, Convergence Research, Blaffer Museum, University of Houston, Houston, TX
2024, “A Metta Prayer”, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX
2024, Annual BFA Student Exhibition, Blaffer Museum, University of Houston, Houston, TX
2024, CAMHLAB, Contemporary Arts Museum at POST Houston, Houston, TX
2023, Who lit the fire?, Contemporary Arts Museum, New Orleans, LA
2023, Mental, Anderson Center for the Arts, Houston, TX
2025, GlitchLab, Edgelands Institute, Houston, TX
2023, CAMHLAB, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX
2023, Project Row Houses Summer Studios, Houston, TX
Curatorial Projects
2025, Everything We Can Possibly Hold, Friends Gallery, Houston, TX
2024, Freedmen’s Town, Aldine Library