Rice University’s public art initiatives, spearheaded by the Moody Center for the Arts since 2017, offer the campus and the greater community points of reflection, signals of belonging and moments of inspiration found at nearly every corner of campus. Through temporary installations and an expanding permanent collection, the Moody brings thought-provoking art into spaces where students, faculty and guests work, live and commune with each other. This fall’s new additions to two temporary series, the Tent Series and Off the Wall, continue the university’s embrace of artists who blur the boundaries of history, science and culture to inspire new modes of inquiry.
The Tent Series, now in its sixth round of commissions, has become one of the university’s most visible platforms for Houston artists. Three new installations by Tay Butler, Loc Huynh and Virginia L. Montgomery stretch across the Provisional Campus Facilities tents on the south side of campus. The works are temporary, but their themes are expansive, drawing from Houston’s Chinatown to the far reaches of the cosmos.
Montgomery’s work is both geographically relevant and transcendent of place and time. Through film and illustration, she offers a cinematic meditation on a local moth species while highlighting contributions that underpin our understanding of the universe. Her video installation “Moon Moth Transcends Black Hole” features surreal compositions centered on the luna moth, a species native to Houston. This footage is projected onto a vinyl mural illustrating Einstein’s field equations and Emmy Noether’s theorem. The layering of natural imagery with mathematical abstraction creates a dreamlike study of transformation and symmetry.
“In my work, I explore the idea that consciousness is not unique to humans but shared by all creatures and objects,” Montgomery said. “As an artist, I wanted to call attention to Emmy Noether’s contributions as Einstein called Noether ‘the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced.’ She emphasized the connections between symmetries, black holes and seemingly disparate concepts. Today, her pioneering work continues to shape black hole research. Through this eerie layering of moth imagery and mathematical diagrams, I bridge abstract concepts and the macrocosm, linking scientific research with the lives of small, delicate creatures.”
By invoking chaos theory’s butterfly effect alongside Noether’s foundational contributions to physics, Montgomery positions her work at the intersection of art and research, suggesting that the smallest forms of life mirror the universe’s most enigmatic structures.
Like Montgomery, Huynh reveals unexpected parallels framed by a local context. His work, “The Duel” remixes an art historical narrative by setting a famous Postimpressionist painting in a scene both familiar and layered with cultural resonance. Set inside Houston’s Hong Kong City Mall, the painting depicts two Vietnamese men engaged in a game of “cờ tướng,” or Chinese chess, before the bustle of a local food stall. Huynh’s process blends pop art aesthetics with comic-style clarity, resulting in a scene that feels both intimate and universal.
“‘The Duel’ is representative of the unique environment that Houston cultivates: a blend of various cultures that create a highly specific one,” Huynh said.
The piece consciously situates itself within the Western art historical canon. By referencing Cézanne’s “The Card Players” and its lineage back to Caravaggio and Chardin, Huynh reclaims a tradition and reorients it toward the diasporic experiences shaping Houston today. His version is neither homage nor parody. Instead, it is a portrait of belonging that straddles continents and generations.
“This is a sight that I and many Vietnamese Americans are very familiar with,” Huynh said. “It has been a great privilege to share a piece of our culture in such a unique way.”
Continuing the commentary on culture, Butler’s “Garrison” builds from his practice of collaging archival images drawn from magazines, album covers and cultural ephemera. The composition layers junglelike foliage with three Afro-futuristic figures assembled from his personal archive, alongside images of Michael Jordan, Travis Scott and Cornel West. Bold and disorienting, the collage challenges the tendency to elevate icons while overlooking the communities that sustain them.
“‘Garrison’ is inspired, or a better term to use is ‘in solidarity,’ with the Black radical tradition,” Butler said. “Since the first Black Africans to be called Americans resisted their kidnapping and slavery, Black Americans have fought against and spoke truth to power. Contrary to popular belief, Black radicals still exist. While that tradition is harder to see today with many Black Americans choosing personal privilege, comfort and proximity to the status quo, there are still communities and organizations who challenge power in service of working-class and marginalized communities. The central characters in the collage are tasked with protecting ‘Black solidarity,’ a communal ideology away from ‘Black excellence,’ an individual ideology.”
“Garrison” serves as a demand for collective participation and reimagined futures, reflecting Butler’s broader body of work that mines Black history and popular culture to question how narratives of progress are constructed.
While the Tent Series projects unfold outdoors, Off the Wall brings a different sensibility indoors at Brochstein Pavilion. The latest installation, Yifan Jiang’s “Cafeteria,” turns a familiar campus space into a site of magical realism. Inspired by her time auditing philosophy classes at Rice during her Glassell School of Art Core Residency, Jiang’s mural layers depictions of pastries with windswept oaks, birds and silhouettes of students. The work oscillates between the everyday and the uncanny.
“I wanted to show how easy it is to drift into a daydream,” Jiang said. “Sleep-deprived. Before your coffee. After a heavy lunch. Staring off, zoning out. And then you see something in a place you’ve seen a hundred times before: a sun-bleached wallpaper of bread on a cafe wall. But this time, something’s off.”
“Cafeteria” captures that dissonance, turning routine into reverie. The seemingly banal illustrations of pastries are based on photographs of actual goods sold in a variety of Houston bakeries, many of them from the city’s panaderías. The overlaid shadows were hand-painted on site across two days while students, staff and faculty watched the Brochstein transform. Her use of magical realism points to the limits of language in capturing what hovers between perception and imagination, a theme that recurs across her practice in painting, sculpture and animation.
Taken together, these new works reaffirm the mission of the Moody: to create an environment where scholarship and creativity converge. By commissioning artists rooted in Houston yet engaged with global traditions, the university sustains a collection that is both rigorous and responsive.