Nick Vaughn and Jake Margolin
The Fruit Jar

‍The Fruit Jar is an immersive installation by queer Houston artists Nick Vaughan and Jake Margolin exploring Southeast Texas’s LGBTQIA+ history. It is the third exhibition in the artists’ ongoing initiative inspired by Town Meeting 1, the formative 1978 gathering of 4,000 queer community members at the AstroArena. The installation is anchored by a monumental stencil depicting the façade of a building located two blocks away from the Galveston Arts Center at 2214 Mechanic that housed a gay bar called The Fruit Jar in 1978. This façade is both a monument to the unsung spaces that nurtured the queer community and a frame/screen through which to view an evolving collection of LGBTQIA+ narratives written in chalk, layered atop one another in an ever-changing canvas of queer collective history.

The exhibition will anchor a symposium on October 24th, Town Meeting 2026: Galveston Arts Center. Convening artists, organizers, and scholars to explore the history and potential of queer artistic participation, the symposium will look at examples of collaboration and co-conspiratorship between queer artists and broader LGBTQIA+ political and social initiatives to imagine future organizing.

Town Meeting 1978-2028 is the first initiative of Nick and Jake’s nonprofit, Rendezvous Center for Art. The Fruit Jar builds on a 2025 exhibition and symposium at Art League Houston and a 2026 project wall at the Moody Center for Art at Rice University. These historical gazes attempt to contain the multitude of our regions’ diverse LGBTQIA+ narratives in all of their contradictions.

‍ ‍