ROBERTA HARRIs
Roberta Harris with MS Heart artwork
Roberta Harris was born in Passaic, New Jersey, and grew up in Houston, Texas. She has lived in New York, Washington, D.C., and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Roberta studied at University of Houston, Parson’s School of Design, and Hunter College in New York. She was chosen to do Independent Study at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1972. Her paintings and sculptures have been exhibited nationally and internationally and her work has been included in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Kimbell Museum, Fort Worth, TX; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Houston, TX; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston TX; Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach, CA; Victoria Art Museum, Victoria, TX; Oslo Kunstforening, Norway; National Women’s Museum, Washington, D.C; Albuquerque Museum of Fine Arts; Tyler Museum of Art, Tyler, TX; Holdsworth Gallery, Sydney, Australia; and the University of Texas Art Museum, Austin, TX.
garden of delights : primal possibilities
SEPTEMBER 9 - OCTOBER 14, 2023
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
HEIDI VAUGHAN FINE ART is proud to present Garden of Delights: Primal Possibilities, an exhibition of works of art by Roberta Harris. The show, which features abstract mixed media paintings on canvas, opens on Saturday, September 9, at 11 am. A special reception with the artist will take place on opening day from 5 pm to 8 pm at the gallery, located at 3510 Lake Street at Colquitt in Houston's Gallery Row. An artist talk is scheduled for Saturday, October 7, at 1 pm. The exhibition runs through October 14, 2023. Gallery events are always offered free to the public.
Garden of Delights: Primal Possibilities is a continuation of Harris's long preoccupation and engagement with birds, grids, and symbols. As a young child, she played and explored under a canopy of trees next to her home. Vivid in her memory is the feeling of being deep inside a dense green space permeated with the enchanting sounds of birds, the scents of green nature, and the beams of light that filtered through the canopy of trees. The textured covering on the ground, made up of leaves, sticks, water, and moss, bunched randomly in piles, was especially interesting to her.
Harris aims to portray the essence of that magic in all she creates. Randomness and imperfection are happily embraced. The material of paint allows her to recreate a particular world that exists clearly in her imagination. Harris believes vulnerability is imbued in all existence, and the desire to hold on to nature, to nurture it and not lose it, was very much on her mind as she created the works in Garden of Delights: Primal Possibilities.
AVAILABLE WORKS
Roberta’s work is included in numerous private and corporate collections including MTV Corporation, New York; Chase Manhattan Bank, New York; Frito-Lay, Dallas, Texas; Dynegy, Houston, TX; Compaq (Hewlett-Packard), Houston, Texas and Texas Heart Institute, Houston, Texas. She was on the faculty of Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, Houston. She has been a visiting lecturer at the Kimbell Art Museum, Ft. Worth, Texas; Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Brookhaven College, Dallas, Texas; the University of Houston, Houston, Texas; the Menil Collection, Houston, Texas, and has served as an Advisory member of the Art and Architecture Panel, Texas Arts Commission; Houston Arts Festival; Cultural Arts Council of Houston and the Art League of Houston. In 2009, The Women’s Museum, Dallas (a Smithsonian Institution) honored Roberta with a retrospective of her work covering the period of 1985 to 2009. She was a Huntington finalist in 2014 and in 2015 had her third retrospective at the Katy Contemporary Arts Museum. She lives and makes art in Houston, Texas.
From left to right: Climbing To The Moon, Letter To The Moon, And The Light Comes In
Mixed media, plaster on canvas
48 x 36 inches
2021
$8,000 each
