Public Art

Early Works:
Early in my ceramic journey, I had the opportunity to work on three outdoor ceramic murals, working with Spark Park: School Park Program, (two with) Museum of Fine Arts Houston Education Center, City of Houston, & Houston Independent School District. Elementary School installations for: Thompson (assisted Huey Beckham, lead), Ryan, and Looscan.
Working alongside Huey Beckham on the Ruby L Thompson Elementary ceramic installation, it changed my artistic focus from painting to ceramic arts. We hand formulated glaze colors like mad scientists with a penchant for geology and with the help of my younger sister, Ginger, her and I glazed all 40 feet of tiles during Spring Break. With other undergraduate students, we loaded over 3,000 lbs. of tiles in gas kilns at Texas Southern Univ and Univ of Houston before onsite installation in the summer of 1999.
The Ryan Elementary mural tiles were glazed on on-site at the newly built MFAH Beck Building in 2000. I was placed in the front exhibition room with a sign out front featuring me as a local artist and a description of the Spark Park program partnered with the MFAH Education Center. I think the project was started by mosaic artist, Marsha Dorsey Outlaw, and she went to the school and got mock-up drawings of Houston: past, present, and future that the children sketched out. The completed installation was on four sided columns one for each time iteration (three total) in the playground area.
Before starting graduate school I completed the third mural at Looscan Elementary and it was created at my studio space in the East Downtown area (a warehouse now called El Rincon Social) that I shared with a handful of architects run by the late Si Dang of Andria Design. This mural was based loosely on a book called “The Rainbow Fish”. I barely completed the works before heading up Univ of North Texas to start my Masters program.
It was also during this time that I met architect Dwayne Bohuslav, and assisted in the fiberglass fabrication of the installation of “Organ Grinder” suspended in the atrium of the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture at Univ. of Houston. I think I was chosen because I was the only one who knew how to truly work with mixing fiberglass, owned coveralls and a proper respirator, and showed up consistently. The Cornell Journal of Architecture described the work as “exploring emerging interactive forms caught between the organic and technological.” This sculpture was part of the closing reception for the International Sculpture Conference that year in 2000.
Later Works:
After graduate school I created outdoor works for groups shows at Russ Pitman Park in Bellaire, TX. The first exhibition was called “Preserving Space” where I made dozens of pale, anorexic looking ceramic corn stalks where the corn was a molded grenade criticizing GMO foods and the food industry labeling high fructose corn syrup as a “natural” ingredient. I was struggling with my health and was not diagnosed with Hashimoto’s Disease yet.
The second sculpture I created with artist friend, Lisa Qualls, and that show was called “Defining Green”. We played on the idea of hedges/or bushes.