BIO

Dixie Friend Gay is an award-winning visual artist. Her artistic production encompasses public art, sculpture, painting and drawing. She is best known for her numerous public art commissions, including those at Dallas Love Field Airport, Indianapolis International Airport, City of Brea, CA and Eastern Washington University, and Charlotte International Airport. Whether large scale architectural projects or intimate paintings, Friend Gay’s work is fueled by awareness of the natural world.

Her public art has been recognized multiple times by Americans for the Arts “Public Art Year in Review” and has received several Craftsmanship Awards. Friend Gay was recognized as Texas Artist of the Year by the Texas Commission for the Arts. Her work can be found 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, numerous medical centers throughout the United States, and many others.

Originally from Oklahoma, Dixie Friend Gay moved to New York, where she earned her Master’s in Studio Art from NYU, before relocating to Houston in 1989.

STATEMENT

The solitude and total immersion deepen the satisfaction of stroking colors onto canvas. Painting is the ecstasy of building a relationship through private conversations and then, as the final varnish is applied, a disentanglement from that intimate other. What always follows is the anticipation of the next new liaison that will be better than any before, perfect, pure and so alluring. Perhaps this coming together and letting go is universal to the creative process.

Central to the newest series of paintings is the divining of an altered state of consciousness, a celebration of disorientation. The elation of nature distorted through the psyche, twisted by technology, is echoed in the final flicks of paint. In public art, my approach is to fuse the constraints of the space and the needs of the client so seamlessly with my own vision that the resulting project feels as though nothing could have existed alone.

Artist at work