Rice’s Boniuk Center and high school students to unveil mural March 2 at Bread of Life homeless shelter

MEDIA ADVISORY

David Ruth
713-348-6327
david@rice.edu

Jeff Falk
713-348-6775
jfalk@rice.edu

Rice’s Boniuk Center and high school students to unveil mural March 2 at Bread of Life homeless shelter

HOUSTON – (Feb. 26, 2013) – Two dozen Houston-area high school students who explored the theme of a lifelong spiritual quest through painting will unveil their creation — a 7-by-64-foot mural titled “Epiphany in All Eyes” – at 3 p.m. March 2 at the Bread of Life homeless shelter. The mural was the students’ capstone project as part of the third annual Sacred Sites Quest (SSQ) organized by Rice University’s Boniuk Center for the Study and Advancement of Religious Tolerance.

Who: Twenty-four Houston high school students in the SSQ program.

What: Unveiling of a 7-by-64-foot mural, “Epiphany in All Eyes.”

When: Saturday, March 2, from 3 to 4:30 p.m.

Where: Bread of Life, 1703 Gray St.

The celebration is free and open to the public. The mural will remain on permanent display on the walls outside of the Bread of Life building.

The students, who attend 15 different schools in Greater Houston, volunteered for the project, aimed at enhancing religious literacy, promoting interfaith dialogue, collaboration and tolerance and enabling participants to leave a creative legacy as a permanent public artistic expression. They partnered with the Museum of Cultural Arts Houston (MOCAH) and the Art Project, Houston, a therapeutic art program of the Bread of Life, in creating the mural that they will unveil.

Before they created the artwork, the students spent three months exploring a dozen different sacred sites, including temples, churches, mosques and chapels, around Houston. The mural functions as a visual narrative of the students’ shared experience and the meaning they derived from their visits to places of worship.

“Our SSQers’ mural is both epic in scale and strikingly beautiful,” said Mike Pardee, executive director of the Boniuk Center. “The fact that they conceived, designed and painted it while collaborating with professional artists from MOCAH and The Art Project, Houston makes their achievement all the more impressive.”

Rice University’s Boniuk Center is dedicated to nurturing tolerance among people of all and no faiths, especially youth, and to studying the conditions in which tolerance and intolerance flourish. For more on the Boniuk Center, go to http://boniuk.rice.edu.

Members of the news media who want to attend should RSVP to Jeff Falk, associate director of national media relations at Rice, at jfalk@rice.edu or 713-348-6775.

-30-

Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews.

Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,708 undergraduates and 2,374 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice has been ranked No. 1 for best quality of life multiple times by the Princeton Review and No. 2 for “best value” among private universities by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance. To read “What they’re saying about Rice,” go to http://tinyurl.com/AboutRiceU.