Friday May 9
6:30 - 8:30 pm
Location: Lawndale Art Center, 4912 Main St
FREE ADMISSION
Information: 713-743-5749 

Join us for an opening reception at Lawndale on May 9, 6:30 - 8:30 pm. The evening will begin with a reading by UH Creative Writing students and other special guests.

The Mitchell Center has been hosting The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) in residence on Houston's Buffalo Bayou since January 2008. Based on their months of interactions with CLUI, students in the UH School of Art, Creative Writing Program, and College of Architecture have produced experimental mappings of Houston, writings about Buffalo Bayou, and proposals for sustainable building and landscaping which will be on view at Lawndale Art Center from May 9 - 17.

This semester the students are observing three distinct aspects of Houston’s anatomy, with CLUI's help.  Under the microscope are the Buffalo Bayou, one of the city’s main arteries; oil, the city’s economic lifeblood; and bulk materials such as sand, gravel, stone and cement used to construct its urban body. 

Assistant professor Mat Johnson's Creative Writing Program students are using data collected during these field trips to compose non-fiction essays that reflect the essence and identity of 21st century Houston. School of Art professor John Reed’s students are creatively mapping their surroundings as a way of producing artworks, incorporating circumstances and conditions specific to Houston, including smells, climbable objects, graffiti and religious abstractions. And associate professor Patrick Peters's College of Architecture students are contributing designs and concepts for an environmentally friendly, carbon-neutral facility for possible use by CLUI researchers. 

CLUI researchers, including its founder and director Matthew Coolidge and program coordinators Steve Rowell and Erik Knutzen, have taken students on field trips to a host of local sites. Students have visited Houston’s Glendale Cemetery and Hartman Park, as well as BP’s Texas City refinery. Students also make regular visits to CLUI’s base of operations, a field office positioned on land owned by the Buffalo Bayou Partnership.