The American artist Dixie Friend Gay is best known for her large-scale public art projects, which include a glass mosaic mural at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport, the central plaza for Sylvan Rodriguez Clear Lake Park, two installations for The Woodlands in Montgomery County, a Byzantine mosaic mural at Indianapolis International Airport, a 25-foot-tall metal spider called Arachnophilia in Austin, and The Great Heron at the Oso Bay Wetlands Preserve and Learning Center in Corpus Christi.

On a much smaller scale, Gay has produced art in many different media. Over the years she has produced sculptures, prints, drawings and paintings, sometimes combining two or more techniques in one piece. Several of her paintings contain sculptural elements, especially those made before 2003, while paintings made since then often feature warped and tangled landscapes. Of her sculptures, the Chrysalides, haunting hollow fibreglass figures, are the most prominent, reappearing in several forms over the years.

Dixie Friend Gay grew up as Dixie Friend in the rural panhandle of western Oklahoma, raised on a cattle ranch – wide horizons, prairie ecology, flowers and grasses, birds and weather patterns have always been a central theme of her art. She studied art at Oklahoma State University, and for three years taught art in Oklahoma public schools. In 1975 she moved east to New York, where she married, had her two children, and enrolled at New York University, earning her Masters in Studio Art in 1989.

Soon after graduating Dixie and her family moved to Houston, Texas, where she established a home studio arrangement while raising her young children. This was the decisive career moment, as Houston in the late 1980s was rapidly expanding and investing in civic art for installation in its parks, libraries, schools and airports. Her combination of teaching experience, natural history observation and large-scale painting ability made her work eminently suited to municipal commissions.

Exhibitions of Dixie’s work  have included a solo exhibition, Moments in Nature: The Paintings of Dixie Friend Gay, in 2008 at the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts, and a group exhibition, The Texas Aesthetic III: A Survey of Contemporary Texas Regionalism, in 2010 at William Greaves Fine Art. Her work is held in public collections including those of the Art Museum of Southeast Texas, The Grace Museum, Huntington Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.

Dixie Friend Gay’s website can be found here.