Arts & Letters
Creative Ideas and Endeavors
Houston’s Faces on View at Rice Gallery
R
ice Art Gallery’s fall season opened recently with “Marshland,” a new installation by street artist Gaia. This work combines painting, drawing, printmaking and collage to express the artist’s larger-than-life impression of Houston’s sprawling urban landscape, increasingly international demographic and Rice’s relationship to the city. The exhibition includes a floor-to-ceiling mural layered with images and symbols of Houston and painted on three gallery walls. A sculptural colonnade painted to mimic the formal architectural style of Rice’s Academic Quadrangle includes giant portraits of students, staff and faculty who were interviewed by Gaia during his residency. Gaia is part of an international network of self-identified street artists who view themselves as activists and use their work as a way
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to draw attention to and stimulate renewal of deteriorating urban neighborhoods. A recent graduate of Maryland Institute College of Art, Gaia is part of a local collective of Baltimore artists called Wall Hunters, whose “unsanctioned” art seeks to identify, embarrass and sometimes infuriate those absentee landlords whose vacant buildings embody what The Baltimore Sun recently called “one of Baltimore’s most visible and long-standing problems.” Gaia has had residencies at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, South Korea, and at Acrylic Walls in Johannesburg and Cape Town, South Africa. “Marshland” will be on view through Dec. 8, 2013. Rice Gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m.–5 p.m., Thursday until 7 p.m., and Sunday, noon–5 p.m. Admission to the gallery is always free. To see more images, visit ricemagazine.info/180.
Gaia, “Marshland,” 2013 Photo: Nash Baker © nashbaker.com