Brower Center’s 2026 annual juried exhibition, Flow State.

Nation-states draw up maps to establish their borders as immutable; this fiction conflicts with our personal experiences of geographic locations as impressions of moments in space and time. Concerned with the inherent transience of place, Piyaali B. Samanta creates a dense visual narrative of her family’s migration history spanning India, Venezuela, and the Bay Area. Over the decades of her life, she observes transformations in the landscapes and the very names of places that were once so familiar to her. As she questions how human-built forms impact communities and ecosystems, she grapples with the loss of past family homes and the impossibility of returning to beloved locations as they exist in her memories.

Exhibition Date: May 26 to August 20, 2026