Black Water, Green Fruit — Basket Books & Art Gallery

Natasha Bowdoin & Sarah Welch:
Black Water, Green Fruit
November 1 - January 11, 2026

Basket Books & Art is thrilled to announce Natasha Bowdoin & Sarah Welch: Black Water, Green Fruit an exhibition of recent work on paper, wall, and sculpture. The show, which runs November 1 - January 11, 2026, is accompanied by “They’re Out There!!,” a zine published by Mystic Multiples, the printing imprint run by James Beard and Sarah Welch.

Black Water, Green Fruit is a wily thicket seething out of revolting ground; it is the unruly abundance of a few parched seeds, planted at a time when the perpetual transmissions of modernity had slowed to a creep, calling up a collective reckoning with a nefarious intracellular parasite. Black Water, Green Fruit is also affection, care, and determined curiosity for the earth’s bewildering complexity, and its myriad co-inhabitants. The writhing cluster of images that forms the corpus of Black Water, Green Fruit is inspired by a half-century of Eco-Horror, a sub-genre of film and fiction born of environmental anxiety and fear of nature. In these tales, nature serves as the antagonist, its rage awakened by human presence, hubris, meddling or interference. Common tropes include snakes and wild women, colonizing spores, frogs out for vengeance and crocs on the loose. And yet, Black Water, Green Fruit is no dystopia, no wasteland – it is instead a verdant elsewhere teeming with the flora and fauna of an ever restless planet.

Sarah Welch is an artist and illustrator in Houston, Texas. She is part of the printmaking duo Mystic Multiples and a past co-organizer with literary & visual arts organization, Zine Fest Houston. Welch has participated in artist residency and study programs at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, The Wedding Cake House, Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, MacDowell, Wesleyan University, Lawndale Art Center, and Centraltrak at University of Texas Dallas. Welch has exhibited throughout Texas and the US Gulf Coast. She is a recipient of grants and support from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation,The Arch and Anne Giles Kimbrough Fund Award (Dallas Museum of Art), The Houston Arts Alliance, and The Idea Fund (The Andy Warhol Foundation). Welch’s work is included in the City of Houston art collection on display at IAH Airport.

Natasha Bowdoin (b. West Kennebunk, ME) is a visual artist working in the space between painting and installation. Her work has been presented widely in solo exhibitions including most recently with In the Night Garden, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX; Sideways to the Sun, Moody Center for the Arts, Houston, TX; Maneater, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA; and Lunar Spring, Visual Arts Center of Richmond, VA. She has been awarded numerous artist residencies and fellowships, including the Core Artist-in-Residence Program, Museum of Fine Arts Houston; the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program; the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts Artist-in-Residence Program, Omaha; and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant. She is an Associate Professor in Painting and Drawing at Rice University in Houston, TX where she lives and works.

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Images: Alex Barber