BIO

Dixie Friend Gay is an award-winning visual artist whose work spans public art, sculpture, mosaic, ceramics, painting, and drawing. Originally from Oklahoma, she earned her Master's degree from New York University and now lives and works in Houston, Texas, where she maintains a full-time studio and public art practice. Her artwork is fueled by a deep awareness of the natural world at both the microscopic and macroscopic levels.

Friend Gay is known for her numerous public art commissions across the United States, including projects for Dallas Love Field Airport, George Bush Intercontinental Airport, Indianapolis International Airport, Charlotte International Airport, the City of Brea, California, the Port of Miami, and the Washington State Public Art collection.

Her artwork has been recognized multiple times in Americans for the Arts’ “Public Art Year in Review”, received numerous Craftsmanship Awards, and she was named Texas Artist of the Year by the Texas Commission on the Arts. Her work is held in the collections of the Federal Reserve Bank in Houston, Texas, Huntington Museum of Art in West Virginia, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, and others.

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STATEMENT

My work explores systems: weather patterns, geological strata, water flow, plant growth, microbial life. Growing up on an isolated ranch, the raw power of nature instilled a visceral awareness of cycles of growth, collapse, death. Now living in an urban landscape, those forces, intensified by human intervention, breach the spaces we build.

I construct paintings as terrains, using old canvas, tarps, and recycled fabric to create surfaces that direct the flow of paint. Layers of detailed painting, drawing, sanding, and incision record erosion, decay, rupture, saturation and collapse.

The work reflects a state of entanglement. What reads as landscape also reads as body. Macro and micro converge, revealing the same forces across scales. Through this reciprocity, the work explores interconnectedness, vulnerability, and the continual processes of change that bind us to the world around us.