Emerging artist series ‘Off the Wall’ is on at Brochstein Pavilion

Among the study groups and coffee klatches at Brochstein Pavilion this week were a group of Rice students using the popular space for something entirely different. Under the watchful eye of artist Harold Mendez, the group meticulously applied charcoal powder to large-format photographs, then gently brushed most of it off again with soft goat skin chamois.

Mendez and the students were in the process of installing his new work, “Field (Encounter),” which will hang in Brochstein for the next year. It’s the first in Rice Public Art’s new “Off the Wall” series, a partnership with the Glassell School of Art’s Core Residency Program that will bring the work of emerging artists to the Rice campus every year for the next three years.

Rice students working at the Moody Center for the Arts helped Harold Mendez install his new piece in Brochstein Pavilion. (Photos by Jeff Fitlow)

In addition to being a recent alum of the Core Residency Program at the Glassell, Mendez taught at Rice in 2013 and 2014 as part of that residency.

“It’s great to be back working with students,” said Mendez, who was born in Chicago but calls Houston his second home. “And it’s nice to be welcomed back to a project here.”

That project is a diptych that repeats an image — the edge of a field — four times as it runs along Brochstein’s south wall. Leafy bushes and brambles are barely contained by a few thin strands of barbed wire. Pulled from the Keystone-Mast Collection, which comprises over 350,000 stereoscopic photographs from across the world taken between the late-19th and mid-20th centuries, the photo is made to scale.

It’s unknown where it was taken, but Mendez chose the image for its accessibility — “Everyone can relate to a field,” he said, and project their own emotions onto the work as a result — and the way it plays against Brochstein’s floor-to-ceiling windows on all four sides.

“This piece of barbed wire is meant to bring the outside in but also to evoke the border and issues of cultural crossing,” said Alison Weaver, the Suzanne Deal Booth Executive Director of the Moody Center for the Arts, which oversees Rice Public Art.

Mendez’s work, “Field (Encounter),”is the first in Rice Public Art’s new “Off the Wall” series, a partnership with the Glassell School of Art’s Core Residency Program.

The first diptych in the series is the negative image, rendered mostly in white. The second is the photograph itself. The next two were being manipulated with charcoal and graphite by Mendez and the students. The final result would be one photograph with a velvety-black overlay and another with a silvery-gray tint.

“I wanted to make the work more cinematic so that the image looks like it’s kind of being developed or exposed for the length of the wall,” Mendez said.

“I also wanted to make something that I could work with students on,” he said. “That’s something I don’t do in my studio; I usually work by myself.”

Those students included Sid Richardson freshman Charles Kidd, who plans to study political science and foreign languages. He has an appreciation for art thanks to his sister, Julia, a Sid Rich junior who’s majoring in art history and visual and dramatic arts. They both work at the Moody Center for the Arts, a job Julia helped Charles get as she shepherded him into life at Rice.

“She’s like, ‘Hey, where do you want to work this year?’” Kidd said. “I told her, ‘Your job sounded pretty cool.’”

Despite being art enthusiasts, neither Kidd nor neuroscience major Korina Lu, a Duncan College junior, ever expected they’d be helping an artist finish and install work when they first matriculated.

“It’s great to be back working with students,” said Mendez, who taught at Rice in 2013 and 2014.

“My academic life is more scientific-based,” Lu said. “But I’ve always been really interested in art and I’ve studied art for a long time.”

That’s one of the great benefits of the Moody Center, pointed out Gillian Culkin, a Duncan College senior who’s studying Spanish and Portuguese and working alongside Lu and Kidd this semester.

“A big part of the Moody’s mission statement is about having an interdisciplinary space combining science and art in different ways,” Culkin said. “Because a lot of Rice’s campus is science students, it’s important to give everybody the space to come together.”

An opening reception and artist talk with Harold Mendez will be held Sept. 19 from 4 to 6 p.m. at Brochstein Pavilion. The exhibition will be on view at Brochstein, which is open to the public and houses a cafe, from Sept. 19 to Aug. 24, 2020.