Visiting Artists

World-renowned, interdisciplinary artists are invited to visit the University of Houston main campus to engage with students, faculty, staff and the general public. The Mitchell Center offers various opportunities to engage with these dynamic artists who cross disciplines, support artistic experimentation, foster collaboration and inspire experimental thinking and creativity. Artist visits vary in length and type and are determined by the artist’s project.

2024-25 Season

a black woman with platnium blonde, straight hair looks at the camera with a neutral face

Indira Allegra

Indira Allegra is a conceptual artist and founder of Cazimi Studio. Cazimi Studio uses weaving as a framework to creatively transform tension within different sites. The studio is unique in its emphasis on performance, publication and the integration of spiritual care as preferred design solutions. Thinking as a poet, threads of connection are discovered between seemingly disparate experiences. Moving as a weaver, these connections are interlaced into a greater whole.

Allegra's work has been featured in The Art Newspaper, Artnet, Art Journal, BOMB Magazine, SF Chronicle, e-flux, All Arts and ARTFORUM and in exhibitions at the Museum of Arts and Design (New York, NY); Center for Craft Creativity and Design (Asheville, NC); John Michael Kohler Arts Center (Sheboygan, WI); Gray Area (San Francisco, CA); the Museum of the African Diaspora (San Francisco, CA) and San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles (San Jose, CA) among others.

Allegra's writing has been featured in Theater, TEXTILE: Cloth and Culture, American Craft Magazine, Panorama Journal, Leonardo and Material Intelligence among others. Their monograph Blackout (Sming Sming Books) is in the collection of major art museum libraries nationwide. Allegra has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Burke Prize, Creative Capital, United States Artists Fellowship, Gerbode Choreographer Award, Art Matters Fellowship and CripTech Metaverse Fellowship.

a young man who may be in his early thirties or late twenties has light skin and is wearing jeans and a sage green hoodie. he is sitting on what looks to be a wooden bench inside his art studio.

Saif Azzuz

Saif Azzuz is a Libyan-Yurok artist who resides in Pacifica, CA. He received a Bachelor’s Degree in Painting and Drawing from the California College of the Arts in 2013. Azzuz has a forthcoming solo exhibition at Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, TX in 2025 and has exhibited widely in the bay area including exhibitions at 1599dt Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Adobe Books, San Francisco, CA; Anthony Meier Fine Arts, San Francisco, CA; CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, CA; de Young Museum - Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA; Galerie Julien Cadet, Paris, FR; ICA SF, San Francisco, CA; Pt.2 Gallery, Oakland, CA; Ever Gold [Projects], San Francisco, CA; NIAD, Oakland, CA; Rule Gallery, Denver, CO; Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York, NY; Jack Barrett, New York, NY and K Art, Buffalo, NY. Azzuz is a 2022 SFMOMA SECA Award finalist and has participated in the Clarion Alley Mural Project and the Facebook Artist in Residence program.

The Mitchell Center is co-comissioning new work from Azzuz for Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions at Blaffer Art Museum.

Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions Exhibition Information >

a black woman with a short buzz cut that is platinum blond looks directly into the camera. She is sitting at a reflective table and wearing a blue and white floral patterned dress, an eye of ra necklace, gold apostrophe earrings, and tortoise shell glasses.

Ja’Tovia Gary

Ja’Tovia Gary is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist working across documentary, avant-garde video art, sculpture, and installation. The artist is deeply concerned with re-memory and employs a rigorous interrogation and apprehension of the archive in much of her work. She seeks to trouble notions of objectivity and neutrality in nonfiction storytelling by asserting a Black feminist subjectivity, and applies what scholar and cultural critic bell hooks terms “an oppositional gaze” as both maker and critical spectator of moving image works. Intimate, often personal, and politically charged, her works aim to unmask power and its influence on how we perceive and formulate reality. Gary’s films and installations serve as reparative gestures for the distorted histories through which Black life is often viewed. Black spiritual technologies, ancestral legacies, and the interiority of Black life often pull focus in Gary’s multivalent works.

The artist has exhibited at the Hammer Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum, MoMA PS1, Dallas Museum of Art, Centre Pompidou, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Locarno Film Festival, New Orleans Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Anthology Film Archives, Film at Lincoln Center, and Harvard Film Archives, among other spaces. She has received generous support from the Ford Foundation, Cinereach, Sundance Documentary Institute, and Field of Vision. Gary has received fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Creative Capital, and Field of Vision, and is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow.

a white woman with chin length brown hair wears a black tophead a necklace that looks like bones. she looks at the camera unsmiling. she has white face makeup on.

Alex Julyan

Alex Julyan is a visual artist, curator and producer based in London, UK . She works independently and collaboratively, creating exhibitions, installations, public projects and complex live events. Her work focuses on disrupting and transforming ideas, places and situations by using everyday materials and methods to great effect. Alex embraces chance, risk and spontaneous action in her work, this includes ambitious collaborations with leading musicians, architects, and scientists – as well as the public.

In recent years Alex has been artist in residence in an English forest, an ethnographic museum and a rural village in Portugal as well as creating projects in the street and transforming whole buildings with performers. As well as working in public programmes at Tate Modern, The Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Library, she devised the Royal opening by Queen Elizabeth of The Frances Crick Institute (a world-class science institute in London). Her artworks have been shown at the Royal Academy, English National Opera and many other venues across the UK. Whatever the project demands, her focus is on creating extraordinary and unusual experiences for participants and audiences alike.

an El Salvadoraian man with a mid-length beard and hair cut close to his head looks away form the camera. he is wearing a black jacket that looks to be made of a reflective material such as satin. there is decorative embroidery or patches near the shoulders.

Guadalupe Maravilla

Combining sculpture, painting, performative acts, and installation, Guadalupe Maravilla grounds his transdisciplinary practice in activism and healing. Engaging a wide variety of visual cultures, Maravilla’s work is autobiographical, referencing his unaccompanied, undocumented migration to the United States due to the Salvadoran Civil War. Across all media, Maravilla explores how the systemic abuse of immigrants physically manifests in the body, reflecting on his own battle with cancer. Maravilla received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts and his MFA from Hunter College in New York. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; and the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, among others. He has received numerous awards and fellowships including a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, 2019; Soros Fellowship: Art Migration and Public Space, 2019; MAP Fund Grant, 2019; Franklin Furnace Fund, 2018; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship, 2018; Art Matters Fellowship, 2017; Creative Capital Grant, 2016; Joan Mitchell Emerging Artist Grant, 2016; and The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation Award 2003.

a white man with short light gray hair looks intently into the camera without smiling. he is outside in a wooded area.

Stephen Montague

Stephen Montague was educated in the US before going to Europe first as a Fulbright Scholar (Warsaw), but since 1974 based in London from which he tours internationally as a composer, pianist, and conductor. Recent commissions have included the Royal Ballet, The BBC Promenade Concerts, UK New Music Biennale, London’s Southbank and Barbican Centres, and a BT commission for the London Symphony Orchestra performed by an additional 14 UK orchestras. In addition to his compositional activities he is a frequent guest speaker on contemporary music, and a conductor specializing in new music.

a white man with light gray hair wears a red polo and navy baseball cap. he is posed on a white background and looks into the camera with a soft smile.

Jack Reuler

Jack Reuler founded the Mixed Blood Theatre at the age of 22 and served as its Artistic Director through 2022. Mixed Blood disrupts injustice, models equity, and creates community, using theatre as a vehicle for artistry, entertainment, education, and effecting social change. To that end he has produced and directed 151 world premieres and scores of comedies, musicals, extravaganzas, and chamber theatre pieces in regional theaters, commercial theater, university theaters, summer stock theaters, and theaters for young audiences from Juneau to Jacksonville and La Jolla to Off Broadway.

In 2010 Theatre Communications group presented Jack with its Peter Zeisler Award, for “exemplifying pioneering practices in theatre, dedication to the freedom of expression, and for being unafraid to take risks in the advancement of the art form.” Jack has received the Ordway’s Sally Award for Vision, Actors’ Equity’s Spirit Award, and the St. Paul Foundation named him a Facing Race Ambassador. He was presented with the Ivey Award for Lifetime Achievement and was named a Local Legend by the United Negro College Fund. At APAP, he was presented with the Met Life Access Award on behalf of Mixed Blood for the theatre’s disability initiatives. He is a founding member and former president of the National New Play Network.

a Russian woman looks off away from the camera. she has dark brown and bright blue hair. the parts of her hair that are blue are twisted into braid like pigtails that cascade in front of her face. she has two black hearts under her eyes. she looks to be in her mid thirties.

Nadya Tolokonnikova

Conceptual artist and political activist Nadya Tolokonnikova is the creator of Pussy Riot, a global feminist protest-art movement. In 2012, Pussy Riot performed the song “Punk Prayer” in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, opposing the reelection of Vladimir Putin to the Russian presidency. The performance and the group’s subsequent arrest and show trail brought Pussy Riot a global following. Tolokonnikova was sentenced to two years' imprisonment following the performance. While in prison, she went on a hunger strike raising awareness for the inhumane prison conditions in Russia. Since her release, she has continued to engage in guerrilla performances condemning political repression in Putin’s Russia and the war in Ukraine.

Along with other Pussy Riot group members, Tolokonnikova co-founded Mediazona, an independent Russian news outlet. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, she raised $7 million in aid for Ukraine through cryptocurrency. Tolokonnikova has performed at major music festivals and events worldwide. "Punk Prayer" was named by The Guardian among the best art pieces of the 21st century, and she's released music with the likes of Big Freedia, Tom Morello, MARINA, Boys Noize and Tove Lo. She is the author of “How to Start a Revolution” (Penguin, 2016) and “Read & Riot: A Pussy Riot Guide to Activism” (Harper Collins, 2018). In March 2023 the Russian government put Tolokonnikova on their wanted list.

a man stands behind a large tropical green leaf, which he is holding in front of his face. He is wearing all black and his features and age are hard to make out due to the obstruction of the leave. Brown hair and blue eyes are visible behind the leaf but no facial expression can be seen.

James Webb

James Webb is an interdisciplinary artist, known for his site-specific interventions and installations. His practice often involves sound, found objects, and text, invoking references to literature, cinema, and the minimalist traditions. By shifting objects, techniques, and forms beyond their original contexts and introducing them to different environments, Webb creates new spaces of tension. These spaces bind Webb’s academic background in religion, theatre, and advertising, offering poetic inquiries into the economies of belief and dynamics of communication in our contemporary world.

Webb has had solo exhibitions at numerous institutions including, amongst others, Liljevalchs Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden (2024); Art Institute of Chicago, USA (2018); SPACES, Cleveland, USA (2018); Norrtälje Konsthall, Norrtälje, Sweden (2018); Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, United Kingdom (2016); Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen, Norway (2015); CentroCentro, Madrid, Spain (2013); Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa (2012); and mac, Birmingham, United Kingdom (2010).

FEATURED WORKS

Indira Allegra
Saif Azzuz
Ja'Tovia Gary
Alex Julyan
Stephen Montague
Guadalupe Maravilla
Jack Reuler
Nadya Tolokonnikova
James Webb