Art inspired by Hurricane Harvey will “Flow” through downtown park

MEDIA ADVISORY

Katharine Shilcutt
713-348-6760
kshilcutt@rice.edu

Art inspired by Hurricane Harvey will “Flow” through downtown park
Buffalo Bayou’s banks become canvas for Rice U. professor’s newest video project Nov. 9

HOUSTON – (Oct. 16, 2019) – Over two years have passed since Hurricane Harvey flooded Houston, but as memories of the storm fade, Rice University Artist-In-Residence Allison Hunter is looking to revive them with her newest work.

VADA professor Allison Hunter spent this summer testing her new project, “Flow,” at Sesquicentennial Park. (Photos courtesy of Allison Hunter)

“Flow” is an outdoor public multi-video project commissioned by Aurora Picture Show and designed for downtown’s Sesquicentennial Park, 400 Texas Ave., where it will be shown Nov. 9 in two 20-minute performances at 7 and 9 p.m.

During “Flow,” images of moving water will be projected on surfaces throughout the park, beginning at the bottom of the grand staircases that rise up from Buffalo Bayou. Audiences will follow soprano Katie Loff of the Houston Grand Opera Chorus as she moves through the park from projection to projection and sings over a soundtrack composed by Jake Sandridge, a Rice University doctoral student at the Shepherd School of Music.

“I thought there was an urgent need to call awareness to the lack of preparation that we’ve been doing as far as a city,” said Hunter, full-time faculty in Rice’s Department of Visual and Dramatic Arts and a visual artist who has worked in photography, video, drawing, sculpture and installation for the past 25 years — the last 15 of which she’s spent in Houston.

Despite the thundering sounds and images of rushing waters that will fill the normally quiet corners of Sesquicentennial Park during “Flow,” Hunter hopes dredging up memories of Harvey will also be therapeutic.

“It’s also a healing, cathartic experience, because it’s not just about horrible trauma,” she said. “It’s also the beauty and power of water.”

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Related materials:

Additional information and images from “Flow” can be found at allisonhunter.com/art/flow.html.

This news release can be found online at news.rice.edu.

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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 3,970 undergraduates and 2,934 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is just under 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for quality of life and for lots of race/class interaction and No. 4 for happiest students by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance.