Process, Performance, and Artistic Patronage on Display at DORF

A microscope, a greenhouse, a fishbowl – there are plenty of apt analogies for DORF Gallery’s upcoming artist residency under glass fostering outside-the-tank creativity this summer. The artist-run contemporary gallery won Best New Experimental Art Gallery from the Chronicle when it opened in 2018 and has maintained a steadfast dedication to innovative programming. This summer’s Fishbowl Residency, whose name nods to the space’s floor-to-ceiling windows and the experimental addition of opening artists’ creative process to the public, turns a longstanding art tradition on its head.

“Fishbowl Residency grew from a desire to highlight the creative process over a finished product,” says Sara Vanderbeek, executive director and curator of DORF. “We wanted to create space for artists to move through experimentation, risk, uncertainty, and vulnerability, while inviting audiences to a behind-the-scenes encounter with the unpredictable, usually invisible labor of creative practice.”

Like most residencies, artists will receive a stipend and curatorial support from the gallery to enable professional development, but this monthlong experience embraces performance arts by adding weekly open studio hours for the public to take a peek at their process. 

“There’s a lot we can play with in terms of what’s visible to the public and what it means to be artists on display,” says inaugural resident Andie Flores, a local artist whose time in the fishbowl will invite guest artists and onlookers to experience “collaborative experimentation across disciplines including choreography, painting, tattooing, illustration, woodworking, scripting, and music-making.” 

One part theoretical theatre piece, one part testing ground, there’s no telling what creations will emerge under the fishbowl spotlight. Onlookers might see costume creation or set design or play rehearsal – or the less glamorous brainstorming and deliberation that exciting artwork requires. Flores will take the first stab at filling the sun-lit gallery space with the beginning scraps of an emerging show.

“I really want to play with fabric, I really want to think about all the elements needed to make a performance,” the multimedia artist muses. A freshly minted Ph.D. holder, Flores is coming off of several narrative-driven collaborative projects and is approaching her stay in the personal think tank as a time of transition and freeform creation with no clear objective in mind. “I’m really, really interested in creating a brand-new character,” she says, “and trusting myself to experiment with that.”

“Usually the part that nobody sees is all the ideating, all the decision making, and having to remake decisions,” says the fishbowl’s second resident (and Flores’ frequent collaborator) Sam Mayer. “Now it’ll all be visible and exposed.” When he steps among the window panes in July, it’ll be a similar period of creative upheaval.

“I’m excited to architect a new space for other people that maybe I’m not the center of,” says Mayer. “I’ve put so much of myself on display for the past six years.”

Those six years have been spent performing different iterations of poolboy, an in-person and online autobiographical exploration of “performance of self inside of algorithmic capitalism – in a sort of dumb and fun party way,” to put it in Mayer’s own words. Though so much of his poolboy series has been spontaneously collaborative with friends and audience members, Mayer, a Michener Center for Writers graduate, thinks of himself as a playwright before all else. It’s time to pick up the pen, he says, and, in the eyes of the public, try to figure out “who am I outside of this alter ego and what kind of art will I make?”

When Mayer wraps up in early September, Houston-based political puppeteer and printing press collective Kitchen Table will bring their provocative posters, community-centered creation, and larger-than-life marionettes to the gallery for the summer’s final installment.

This article appears in May 29 • 2026.