On Place, Memory, and People
Medici Roasting Café has been a neighborhood cornerstone for 16 years, nestled along busy Guadalupe Street bordering the university. Over the years, this area has transformed as its once humble and town-like beginnings are now filled with new businesses, a constant flow of students rushing to class and downtown city traffic. Tall walls, once empty, display an artist’s surreal drawings, full of creatures and unblinking eyeballs. It’s fitting, then, that Sam Berg, the artist behind these images, believes art needs people, and people need art. When commenting on his recurring eyeball motif, he explains how he loves what they represent: perception, awareness, cognition—thinking and connecting, being in the same moment with others.
Artwork by Sam Berg.
Berg lives here in Austin because it gives him a platform to share his art, to be part of the collective experience.
“If I were living in a small town, it’d be almost impossible to get my start as an artist,” Berg said. “I need to make it. I need to show people.”
Berg, a recent graduate from the University of Texas at Austin, studied Radio, Television and Film. While Berg loves film, he is always doodling and has been since he was eight years old, reading “Calvin and Hobbes” comic books. Now, Berg doodles to make a living in Austin and lives by one rule: no compromising on being creative. Berg sells his art on the streets, from Red River and South Congress to Barton Springs—classic Austin spots. In Medici Roasting Café, Berg’s art has captured visitors’ attention, still and staring while they wait for their coffee.
“I feel like a lot of people don't really see art as a way of living or as an identity,” Berg said. “A big part of it is putting your heart out there—an invitation for people to be vulnerable with me.”
Berg’s business is what he calls an “open journal”. Berg’s open journal of Austin contrasts with Zahra Martinez’s carefully curated space at the Visual Arts Center nearby. While Berg’s art invites the raw, immediate gaze of passersby, Martinez’s exhibition spaces ask for reflection, immersing visitors in layered memories.
Artwork by Zahra Martinez.
Martinez’s artwork has a textured, organic quality, reminiscent of natural landscapes and forces. Her pieces often swirl with color, creating the impression of layered elements, like rock or water. These abstract forms evoke patterns feeling timeless, as if they could be traces of something deeply rooted in the earth—a slow, quiet unfolding inviting viewers to pause and contemplate.
“I’m okay with destroying my artworks and making new ones. Everything is temporary,” Martinez said, encapsulating her approach to both art and memory.
Memories, however, are what she holds closest.
“My grandmother lived in a wooden house in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico,” Martinez said.
After Hurricane Maria in 2017, her grandmother’s house was ransacked by water, photo albums were lost and what remained was muddy and damaged.
“My grandmother was never scared of the ocean,” Martinez said. “But, she never loved it either. It took things away from her. She would walk the beach, collecting shells.”
Rooted in her grandmother’s life and passing, this connection gives Martinez’s work quiet strength and an acceptance of impermanence. On her journey as an artist, Martinez encounters others searching for themselves in their work, navigating influences from other writers and artists while embracing a path they must walk alone—a process mirroring healing through grief.
She expressed deep gratitude for the artists who helped co-cultivate her exhibition, especially Helen Jones, her former professor, who encouraged her to bring such private, quiet emotions into a public space.
Together, they created a “zone in between” at the Visual Arts Center where public perception and intimate grief could meet and find expression.
Jones’s own work carries a similar weight, exploring themes of memory and loss through photography. Similar to Martinez, Jones finds ways to honor those she’s lost, retracing her mother’s footsteps along a familiar road. Through her photos, she holds onto the fragments of shared experiences, transforming physical spaces into places of remembrance.
Photographs by Helen Jones.
I first encountered Jones’s project, “To Light and Then Return”, in Martinez’s exhibit, “Retracing the Rubicon”. On a white podium sat a book, open and inviting me in. As I turned the pages, images built—a slow accumulation of time, places, shadows and whispers of light. Ashes placed on a white linen cloth, antlers and a jawbone, a creek shimmering under the moon. Old family photos, faces frozen on a worn sofa and a scanned note in faded handwriting: “Helen’s hair, March 30, 1977.” “Retracing the Rubicon” was about living with grief, about what remains and how artists tend to memory.
Jones grew up in a small Vermont town, in an apartment with her mother and the lingering presence of her father, whom she lost at a young age. A room filled with his things, unchanged. She spent years digging through them, piecing together his story. She believes space taught her how to look, how to see—spaces as palimpsests, layered with hidden histories and mysteries, each object a quiet witness.
“I think about this quote by Lucy Lippard, from the book ‘The Lure of the Local’,” said Jones: “One place cannot be isolated from its network of other places and meanings.”
Helen’s photography is shaped by this way of seeing. She takes photos as she travels, especially when revisiting places. “To Light and Then Return” depicts a road trip from the West Coast to Vermont. Jones imagined she’d scatter her parents' ashes and have a kind of ceremony, only for the ashes to remain buckled into the front seat. As she traveled to places she knew her mother would have loved, it became a quiet process of observation—preserving envelopes of poetry, pausing to photograph and collecting her father’s quirky math equations.
In Jones’s photographs, I see how objects speak. They’re small, important things: interiors arranged with intention, out-of-place objects, marks left behind, details built up slowly, unintentionally, over years. As I neared the end of the photo book, I felt I’d drifted through a portal, seeing grief as she saw it, feeling its weight and tenderness wash over me as she felt it.
Berg captures moments. Jones’s work holds time. Martinez’s art honors memory.
Together, they show how places hold onto meaning, how they gather the fragments of past and present, the unspoken threads linking us all. Each artist's work blends together, images of immediacy, of loss, of persistence, of everything shaped by space and objects. Jones quoted Bell Hooks in thinking about places like mysteries, vessels of inner lettings: “She was certain that the way we lived was shaped by objects, the way we looked at them, the way they were placed around us. She was certain that we were shaped by space.”
Places are never merely spaces; they’re alive with people, stories and quiet details. We are shaped by the spaces we inhabit and by the memories they hold.