Eli Durst:
The Children’s Melody
January 17 - March 15, 2026
![]()
The Children’s Melody
January 17 - March 15, 2026
If, as Shakespeare once wrote, “All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players,” then one might wonder: who is writing the script?
Basket Books & Art is pleased to present The Children’s Melody, an exhibition of new photographs by Texas-based artist Eli Durst and curated by Max Tolleson. With The Children’s Melody, Durst continues to explore his long-standing interest in the theatricality of everyday life, this time by focusing on the lives of young people as they encounter the very serious absurdities of collective identity formation.
In The Children’s Melody, Durst photographs young people on and off stage: in cotillion groups, dance practices, ROTC training, and school performances, among other environments. When read together, these images defamiliarize everyday life, depicting in ways both subtle and pronounced the tension and struggle between the individual and the institution, the margin and the center, the desire to conform and the desire to resist. In sequence, they lay bare how invisible cultural forces shape us into who we become, and enable moments for self-reflection, intervention, and transformation. To borrow a phrase from Judith Butler, which is itself a reformulation of Sartre: “What is done to me, and what is it I do with what is done to me?”
The Children’s Melody is on view from January 17 – March 15, 2026. On February 7, an in-person conversation between Eli Durst and curator Max Tolleson will take place at 4 p.m. at Basket Books & Art.
Eli Durst is a photographer based in Austin, Texas, where he teaches at The University of Texas College of Fine Arts. Durst received an MFA in photography from the Yale School of Art and is the winner of the 2016 Aperture Portfolio Prize, a 2017 Aaron Siskind Fellowship Grant, a 2019 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship. He is the author of three monographs: The Community (Mörel Books, 2020); The Four Pillars (Loose Joints, 2022); and The Children’s Melody (Gnomic Book, 2025). Durst’s work has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and Texas Monthly, among other publications.
Full checklist is forthcoming.
For inquiries and available works contact info@basket-books.com
Images: Alex Barber