VISUAL ARTS + MUSEUMS

The Rothko Chapel presents The Rothko Chapel and the Transformative Power of Art, A Series. Free and Open to the Public.

This series will celebrate the artistic and spiritual import of the Rothko Chapel, bringing three speakers with close ties to Mark Rothko and the Chapel.

Schedule of Speakers:

About Painting and What It Can Do
Brice Marden,  Artist
Saturday, January 29, 3pm
American painter Brice Marden was featured in the exhibition Marden, Novros, Rothko: Painting in the Age of Actuality at Rice University in 1975. Marden and David Novros exhibited their work with four paintings from the Chapel commission.

Marden’s early work was characterized by luminous monochrome panels; his works of the last twenty years have incorporated calligraphic gestures and heightened color. In 2006, critic Peter Schjeldahl described him as "the most profound abstract painter of the past four decades."

Painting and Patronage
David Novros, Artist
Saturday, February 12, 3pm
David Novros is an American painter and muralist of geometric abstraction, many of them large-scale installations, and many of them known for the recurring motif of right-angled L shapes. In 1975 Novros and Brice Marden exhibited their work at Rice University with four paintings from the Chapel commission in Marden, Novros, Rothko: Painting in the Age of Actuality.

Novros will speak about the public dimensions of creating major commissions like the murals in the Rothko Chapel and aspects of patronage.

In 2006 Novros told interviewer Phong Bui, “I learned a lot from seeing the way [Rothko’s] work was treated by “patrons.” Only the de Menils understood what he was after. I think that the pain one has to endure to get anything profound made in a public place makes the activity a form of masochism. Those artists who continue to pursue that ambition are a form of endangered species.”

Acts of Faith
The Reverend Susan J. Barnes
Saturday, February 19, 3pm
The Reverend Susan J. Barnes will address the overarching issue of faith and spirituality in the lives and enterprises of the Menils—of which the Rothko Chapel was the first outward and visible sign: the first Act of Faith.

A native Houstonian, Barnes was present at the installation of the Rothko paintings in the Chapel and was a keen observer of its early years in the life of Houston. An art historian and member of the Episcopal clergy, she is the author of The Rothko Chapel: an Act of Faith, published in 1996. She is currently senior associate rector of St. Matthews Episcopal Church in Austin, Texas.