Jacinto Deleon: You Weren’t There

March 5 - June 6 2026
Opening Party: Thursday, March 6th, 6pm-9pm
ON VIEW: Tuesdays-Thursdays, 3pm-6pm
Fridays, 12pm-7pm
Saturdays, 11am-4pm

You weren’t there is Jacinto Deleon’s gathering of shifting emotions revolving around the immigrant identity; intertwining the domestic with the labors of living between two ideas of home, and ideas of grief generationally felt through the prism of his environments and family.

Manila is hot, cloudy, and humid. The roaring motors, vibrant colors, pulsating religious iconographies, and the weight of concrete and steel are familiar to him, despite him not living there for any extended period of time. The Philippines has long existed in memory and dream as a utopia - yet, his personal encounter made that relationship feel newly charged, evolving questions and ideas about what it means to belong to a place he’s only ever known in fragments. Reflecting upon his experiences in adolescence tightly surrounded by immigrants assimilating in the American South and his familiar extended family in the Philippines, the work emerges from a condition of in-betweenness shaped by movement, labor, and narratives that resist easy alignment within the diaspora. Considering labor as one of the Philippines’ most enduring global exports, Deleon draws from his lived experience utilizing photography, archive, and found objects to invite viewers to notice the continuities between work, movement, history, and representation, and how these threads evolve in a time where such ambitions are ultimately threatened.

FLATS programming is sponsored by Fresh Arts and is funded in part by the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance