Hometown Glory

Taking off: Houston artists win national honors for airport and Montrose tunnel work

The program to fill Dallas Love Field Airport with all manner of public art has earned national recognition: Houston artist Dixie Friend Gay's North Texas Sunrise has been named one of the year's top public art installations in the United States by Americans for the Arts, Public Art Year in Review.

Friend Gay used around 300,000 pieces of mosaic and hand-glazed ceramic tiles to depict a sunrise breaking behind a field of Texas wildflowers, which represents the vanishing prairie landscape. It has a prominent position in the airport's main lobby.

It is the only national program to specifically honor public art. Led by three highly regarded artists, the network highlighted 37 pieces across the country.

Also recognized was Houston artist Patrick Renner, who created an enormous installation along Montrose Boulevard for the Art League of Houston. Spanning 180 feet in length along the esplanade, the colorful, serpentine structure titled “Funnel Tunnel” responds to the orientation of the trees and lighting conditions in the small park where it was built. The work is composed of reclaimed wood woven through a steel skeleton.

Public Art Year in Review is compiled annually by Americans for the Arts Public Art Network. It is the only national program to specifically honor public art. Led by three highly regarded artists, the network highlighted 37 pieces across the country.

North Texas Sunrise is one of 15 pieces of public art on display at Love Field and one of 11 commissioned under the relatively new Love Field Art Program. All pieces are now in place; two final works were installed earlier this year.

Friend Gay, who was named Texas Artist of the Year in 2003 by the Texas Commission for the Arts, has created massive award-winning mosaic murals installed at Bush Intercontinental Airport, the Port of Miami, Indianapolis International Airport, Sam Houston State University and Texas A&M Galveston.

Dixie Friend Gay, left, in file photo

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Photo by Bill Olive

Dixie Friend Gay, left, in file photo

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3,000 years of art

Acclaimed BBC series inspires massive new religious art exhibit at MFAH

Living With the Gods brings divine art to Houston

"The Stream Crosses the Path" by John Biggers

One of the many divinely inspired works at MFAH

For as long as humanity has had gods, people have painted, sculpted, sung, danced, carved, woven, performed, and sketched to connect with them. The desire to touch the divine with our own creations is one of the few universal constants across history and geography.

That is why the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston is presenting Living with the Gods: Art, Beliefs, and Peoples, October 27, 2024-January 20, 2025. The massive exhibit is the capstone of the MFAH’s centennial celebration and will cover a remarkable 11 galleries. The collection includes more than 200 pieces from across 3,000 years and every continent except Antarctica.

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Living with the Gods exhibit The exhibit will include this Hanukkah lamp.Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Instrumental in bringing this collection to life is Neil MacGregor. A former director of the National Gallery in London, MacGregor created a phenomenal BBC radio series and authored a book (both also called Living with the Gods) to detail the way humans have used art to honor and placate our deities.

“Neil MacGregor’s acclaimed 2017 BBC radio series and book brilliantly chronicled this enduring form of human expression,” Gary Tinterow, director and Margaret Alkek Williams chair of the MFAH, said in a statement. “We are honored that he brought that perspective to Houston, making it visible through objects chosen from our own collections as well as some truly exceptional loans.”

The pieces on display are both modern and ancient. MFAH has arranged them thematically, focusing on depictions of water, the cosmos, animals, and more. Among the most notable are a Pentecostal altarpiece on loan from the Padro, Madrid that depicts the resurrection of Jesus; a silver urn used by Maharaja Madho Singh II, an Orthodox Hindu, to drink only water from the Ganges River when he traveled overseas for the coronation of King Edward IV; and Bedu masks from Africa’s Ivory Coast used during funeral dances and purification rituals.

“This exhibition is about how people everywhere have made beautiful things to negotiate their place in time and in the world; and how we use works of art to think about how we relate to each other,” MacGregor added. “Putting art into that context allows for a different conversation. In museums, many great objects can lose their original purpose, which was spiritual. An exhibition of this kind can give that purpose back to them, allowing a new and deeper approach to great and familiar works.”

Many of the items in the exhibition rarely leave their home countries for display, showing how remarkable the organization of such a collection is. It is a unique opportunity for Houstonians to see the art and tools used to reach across the void and communicate with something transcendental.

Ticket information can be found on the MFAH website.