Rice’s Boniuk Center to unveil mural March 3 at Museum of Cultural Arts Houston

What does a religiously and culturally tolerant society look like? A group of Houston-area high school students answered that question by painting a four-piece mural as part of the second annual Sacred Sites Quest (SSQ) organized by Rice University’s Boniuk Center for Religious Tolerance. The mural will be unveiled at 3 p.m. March 3 at the Museum of Cultural Arts Houston.

A group of Houston-area high school students painted a four-piece mural as part of the second annual Sacred Sites Quest organized by Rice University's Boniuk Center for Religious Tolerance.

The students will be there for the celebration, which is free and open to the public. The Museum of Cultural Arts Houston (MOCAH) is located at 908 Wood St., near the University of Houston downtown campus. The mural will remain on permanent display on the walls outside MOCAH.

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.

Before they created the artwork, the students spent three months exploring a dozen different sacred sites 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, including temples, churches, mosques and chapels.

“This is a very special, truly unique group of SSQ students,” said Mike Pardee, executive director of the Boniuk Center. “When they started their quest together back in October, most were total strangers to each other. By now, however, their collaborative creative process in the MOCAH studio is transforming them into a synergistic artistic team. They feed off each other’s energy and ideas. And the inspiring artwork they’re producing is as visually beautiful as it is conceptually profound.”

This is the second such mural created as part of the SSQ program. The first, which is on display at the Interfaith Ministries of Greater Houston headquarters, was named the Best Public Art Project for 2011 by the Houston Press.

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/.

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