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Obscure and Exposed: Art Installation Uses UH Campus as Canvas

School of Art professor and alumna install "The Miraculous: Houston" as part of CounterCurrent17.


Look up, look down, look all around and you can’t miss the bright yellow vinyl panels with text plastered all over the University of Houston campus. “Coog’s House” is transforming into a canvas for a public art installation called “The Miraculous: Houston” for the CounterCurrent17 Festival April 18-23. Click here to see a complete schedule of events.

“The objective of CounterCurrent is to connect Houstonians with artists and works we would never otherwise see,” said Pia Agrawal, program director, Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts, which hosts the annual citywide event by local, national and international artists. “We are bringing cutting-edge programs to Houston that surprise, challenge and inspire all of our city’s residents.”

“The Miraculous: Houston” hopes to do just that with audiences on the UH campus. The project is a larger-scaled version of the book “The Miraculous” by Raphael Rubinstein, professor of critical studies in the Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts. It contains 50 micro-narratives about the lives and works of contemporary performance and conceptual artists.

Heather Bause, a former UH painting instructor and alumna, came up with the concept to take all 50 episodes of the book and strategically “explode” them across campus. Anyone who walks around is likely to encounter these situations on a sidewalk, a bench and the side of a building. Some texts are hidden away in certain places and will require the curious to go on a treasure hunt.

Learn more in UH Central's Q&A with Rubinstein and Bause.