Four new murals unveiled in Houston
Why it matters: The Big Art. Bigger Change. initiative has added more than 50 murals since 2022, making public art more visible in and around downtown Houston.
The big picture: The murals, created by both local and international artists, focus on Houston's identity while addressing global themes like the climate, empowerment, peace, love and inclusivity.
What they're saying: "This truly is art with a purpose. This series is about more than just creating a public art culture in downtown Houston," Harris County Precinct 1 Commissioner Rodney Ellis said at a press conference unveiling the art this week. Ellis helped to create the mural series.
"These murals aren't just art. They're calls to action. I hope that they inspire the next generation to contribute to the fight, because justice belongs to all of us and starts here."
If you go: The new murals explore themes of women's empowerment, peace, climate resilience and disability advocacy.
📍 Where to find them:
Main Street Garage (1111 Main St.)
McIntyre's (901 Commerce St.)
Channel Garage Building (426 Austin St.)
Wyndham Hotel (8686 Kirby Drive, near NRG Stadium outside downtown)
Go deeper: Check out a map of all the Big Art. Bigger Change. murals in Houston so far.
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Boston Globe
3 days ago
- Boston Globe
Thomas Sayers Ellis, poet of ‘percussive prosody,' dies at 61
Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Mr. Ellis's high school nickname was Sticks, not just because he deployed them on the drums but also because he was skinny. In a poem with that title, he used the language of percussion to connect the violence he saw in his father, whose strength he revered as a child, with his own development as a writer: Advertisement I discovered writing, How words are parts of speech With beats and breaths of their own. Interjections like flams. Wham! Bam! He went on: My first attempts were filled with noise, Wild solos, violent uncontrollable blows. The page tightened like a drum Resisting the clockwise twisting Advertisement Of a handheld chrome key Poet and composer Janice Lowe, another Dark Room founder, said in an interview that Mr. Ellis's work was 'very much rooted in musicality, in all kinds of Black musical and linguistic traditions and in the way people play with language.' She added, 'It can fly you into the surreal, into jazz or film, or root you in something familial -- whatever he was dialoguing with -- but it never rests, never stays in the familiar. It always travels and transforms and transgresses.' Mr. Ellis was prone to linguistic pyrotechnics, both on and off the page. He was an omnivorous reader of the literary canon and an avid book collector, particularly of those writers not yet in the canon, notably people of color. He was also a film, poetry, and music buff whose interests ranged from Gertrude Stein and French New Wave films to Bootsy Collins and George Clinton. In 1986, he was living in a Victorian house in Cambridge, with poet Sharan Strange and others when he and Strange began putting together a library of works by Black authors of the diaspora. They housed it in a former darkroom on the third floor, and they called the collection 'The Dark Room,' a name they liked as a pun for a room full of 'Black books,' as Strange wrote in an essay for the literary magazine Mosaic in 2006. When James Baldwin died the next year, Mr. Ellis, Strange and their housemates made a pilgrimage to his funeral in New York City. It was a heady literary event -- Toni Morrison, William Styron, Maya Angelou, and Amiri Baraka all delivered eulogies -- and it galvanized them to create a collective that would honor and support writers of color. They already had a name, the Dark Room, and, with Lowe, they began to host readings in their living room. Advertisement They were electric events, with music and art installations, and everyone wanted in. Alice Walker called and asked to read. Derek Walcott, the Caribbean-born Nobel Prize winner, read, and so did Michael S. Harper, the poet laureate of Rhode Island. The collective grew to include, among many others, Kevin Young, now the poetry editor of The New Yorker, and Pulitzer Prize winners Tracy K. Smith and Natasha Trethewey, the country's poet laureate from 2012 to 2014. Jeff Gordinier, writing in The New York Times in 2014, called the Dark Room 'a flash of literary lightning' akin to the Beat poets and the Black Arts Movement. The collective lasted, in various forms, until 1998, and the members held reunions in subsequent years. 'You need other people who think like you, maybe, who read like you, maybe, who walk and breathe like you, maybe,' Mr. Ellis told an audience in Santa Fe in 2013 during one reunion tour. 'You think you're adding something that's needed, that you don't see. There's something about that, that never ends, no matter who you are and where you are.' In a poem that Mr. Ellis titled 'T.A.P.O.A.F.O.M. (The Awesome Power of a Fully-Operational Memory),' he wrote: Memory, Walcott says, moves backwards. If this is true, your memory is a mothership minus the disco-sadistic silver all stars need to shine. Tell the world. A positive nuisance. Da bomb. When that poem was included in 'The Best American Poetry 2001,' he had this to say about it, in an author's note: Advertisement 'In the poem, I am working on my own brand of literary activism, which I call Genuine Negro Heroism. Genuine Negro Heroism (GNH) is the opposite of HNIC (Head Negro In Charge), and incorporates pee-pure modes of black freak, black folk, and black soul behavior.' Thomas Sayers Ellis was born Oct. 5, 1963, in Washington. His mother, Jeannette (Forbes) Ellis, managed a restaurant; his father, Thomas Ellis, was a pipe mechanic. Thomas Ellis attended Dunbar High School but spent much of his time at the city's block parties and go-go clubs. His girlfriend at the time, Sandra Andrews, gave birth to his son, Finn, when he was 17 and she was 19. Mr. Ellis attended Alabama State University on a scholarship and then moved to Cambridge, where he took classes at Harvard with poet Seamus Heaney. 'In a city where everybody acts like they've read everything,' poet and publisher Askold Melnyczuk said of Cambridge, 'he actually had.' Melnyczuk was an early booster of Mr. Ellis's; he included his work in 'Take Three: Agni New Poets Series' (1996), which he edited. In addition to 'The Maverick Room,' Mr. Ellis was the author of the chapbook 'The Genuine Negro Hero' (2001), 'Skin Inc.: Identity Repair Poems' (2010), and 'Crank Shaped Notes' (2021), a collection of poems, essays and photos about the go-go music he loved. Mr. Ellis, who had taken photos since his go-go days, was a sharp street and portrait photographer. He earned a master of fine arts from Brown University in 1995. He taught at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., among other institutions, and earned numerous awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim. Advertisement In 2014, he and jazz saxophonist James Brandon Lewis formed a band they called Heroes Are Gang Leaders, after a chapter in Amiri Baraka's 1967 collection of short fiction, 'Tales.' Playing an enticing mashup of poetry, jazz, funk and more, the group swelled to 12 members and performed with such guests as Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, singer and poet Lydia Lunch, and jazz bassist William Parker. Mr. Ellis and Lewis often squabbled during rehearsals. Mr. Ellis had a habit of recording jam sessions and then memorizing the music, and he was annoyed when they weren't later reproduced, down to the note. 'His memory was phenomenal, and he'd get so irritated,' Lewis said in an interview. 'I'd say: 'Thomas, we're improvising. We're not supposed to be memorizing.'' In addition to his son, Andrews, Mr. Ellis leaves a brother, James; four grandchildren; and one great-granddaughter. In early 2016, a year before the #MeToo movement took off, Mr. Ellis was a visiting professor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop when a women's literary group known as Vida published, online, a collection of anonymous accounts of what it said was sexual misconduct by Mr. Ellis. His classes were canceled, and Jia Tolentino, writing in Jezebel, reported on the Vida post and its ethics in an article headlined 'Is This the End of the Era of the Important, Inappropriate Literary Man?' The New Republic picked up the story, as fodder for a piece about the workshop's reputation for the bad behavior of its male professors. For his part, Mr. Ellis made no public comment about the incident. Soon after, he moved to St. Petersburg, and he was named the city's first photo laureate in 2023. Advertisement 'Language is always changing,' Mr. Ellis told The Missoula Independent, a weekly independent newspaper in Montana, in 2009. 'Language is not finished. Language is the thing that if you stay connected to it like I do, eat it enough, carry it with you enough, it will rejuvenate you. 'I don't mean 'save you' in a religious sense, but it will save you from a certain kind of dogma or mundane, boring existence.' This article originally appeared in
Forbes
4 days ago
- Forbes
Jay Ellis And Rabbit Hole Blend Whiskey And Art In New Collaboration
Jay Ellis drinking a cocktail with Rabbit Hole in it. For actor and producer Jay Ellis, whiskey has always been more than a drink. 'It reminds me to savor the moments we have with people,' said the actor known for his roles in Insecure and Top Gun: Maverick. 'So much of it, for me, happens around connection — with friends, family, people I work with.' That ethos of presence, creativity, and storytelling now lives in a bottle, thanks to a new limited-edition single barrel release that is a collaboration between Ellis and Rabbit Hole founder Kaveh Zamanian. A Meeting of Minds—and Palates The collaboration began with a conversation. Zamanian, a former psychologist turned whiskey entrepreneur, had heard about Ellis's love for bourbon and his passion for storytelling. The two met in Park City, Utah, during the Sundance Film Festival, where Zamanian brought a selection of samples for Ellis to taste. 'We sat and tasted through different options,' Zamanian recalled. 'It was a really collaborative, fun process. We talked about what stood out, what felt distinct. Jay has a great palate and a clear creative vision.' The final selection? A single barrel selection of Dareinger, a riff on a core Rabbit Hole offering that is a wheated bourbon finished in Pedro Ximénez sherry casks—rich, smooth, and layered. 'You can have it neat or in a cocktail. It's got depth and balance.' Dareringer Single Barrel Pick with Jay Ellis. The Bottle as a Canvas The bottle's design is just as intentional. Created by South Korean fashion illustrator Kasiq Jungwoo Lee, the label features a modern reinterpretation of Lewis Carroll's White Rabbit—complete with a skateboard and an Apple Watch. 'The skateboard came from my daughter,' Ellis said with a laugh. 'She kept asking for one, and my parents finally gave in. So when I saw that detail, it just clicked.' Other elements are persona to Ellis: the green in the rabbit's jacket is Ellis's favorite color, and the green-and-yellow palette nods to his childhood love of the Seattle SuperSonics. The watch, he said, is a symbol of time—how we spend it, and who we spend it with. 'It was a really cool process,' he said. 'They let me have an imprint—my own expression—through the artist. That doesn't happen often with brand collaborations.' Rabbit Hole Distillery Whiskey as Storytelling For Zamanian, openness to creative input is part of Rabbit Hole's DNA. Since founding the distillery in Louisville in 2012, he's made it a mission to challenge convention—not just in whiskey-making, but in how the industry presents itself. 'I wanted to make manufacturing look attractive,' he said during a recent tour of the Rabbit Hole facility. 'We designed the distillery to be transparent, beautiful, and educational. Every step of the process is visible.' That philosophy extends to the brand's core releases, each of which is named with intention and rooted in local history or personal meaning:Cavehill, a four-grain triple malt bourbon, pays homage to generations of Louisville distillers and the historic Cave Hill Cemetery, where many of bourbon's pioneers are a high-rye bourbon, honors Christian Heigold, a German immigrant and stonemason who settled in Louisville after the Civil War and carved patriotic symbols into his home as a response to anti-immigrant a sour mash rye, celebrates Louisville's rich boxing heritage and the city's legacy of turning local talent into world a sherry-cask finished bourbon, is a tribute to Zamanian's wife—'the daring ringer' who inspired him to take the leap into whiskey-making. 'Every name tells a story,' Zamanian said. 'It's not just about drinking—it's about connection, about learning something new.' Zamanian is known for telling lesser-known stories in whiskey. He's also behind Mary Dowling Whiskey, named after an unsung historic female distiller, and co-authored a book about her. One of the most striking features of the distillery, where both Rabbit Hole and Mary Dowling is made, is a commissioned art piece by Brooklyn-born artist Jeremy Dean. Created in response to Executive Order 13769, which banned travel from several Muslim-majority countries, the piece weaves together threads from the U.S. flag and the flags of the banned nations. It's a quiet but powerful statement about inclusion and identity. 'We don't preach,' Zamanian said. 'We live by example. Art is one way we express our values.' Jay Ellis, Kaveh Zamanian Supporting the Next Generation That commitment to creativity and community is also what drew Ellis to the partnership. Through his short film program, Intrinsic, Ellis supports emerging filmmakers by funding and mentoring their first projects. Rabbit Hole is now contributing to that mission by donating camera equipment and offering additional support to selected filmmakers. 'There are so many barriers for young artists,' Ellis said. 'If you can help open one door, that can change everything.' Zamanian agreed. 'We started sponsoring Sundance because we believe in that ecosystem—of discovery, of giving people a shot. This partnership with Jay is a natural extension of that.' A Shared Vision Both Ellis and Zamanian are outsiders who found their way into traditional industries—Hollywood and Kentucky bourbon, respectively—and brought fresh perspectives with them. Their collaboration is a testament to what can happen when creativity, intention, and craft come together. 'This isn't just about whiskey,' Zamanian said. 'It's about creating something meaningful.' Ellis echoed the sentiment. 'It's personal. It's about savoring the moment, telling stories, and building something that lasts.' The collaboration ($125) is available at Rabbit Hole Distillery in Louisville, Kentucky for a limited time.
New York Times
5 days ago
- New York Times
Thomas Sayers Ellis, Poet of ‘Percussive Prosody,' Dies at 61
Thomas Sayers Ellis, a poet, photographer and bandleader who explored race, music, politics, academia and family in dazzling, erudite and often funkified verse — 'percussive prosody,' he once called it — and who was a founder of the Dark Room Collective, a noted community of Black poets, died on July 17 at his home in St. Petersburg, Fla. He was 61. His son, Finn Andrews, said that the cause was unknown, but that Mr. Ellis had been suffering from respiratory issues. Mr. Ellis grew up in Washington, and he was captivated by its hometown sound, go-go music — a funky, jazzy, wildly percussive form that sprung up there at the turn of the 1970s. He played drums in a few bands before starting his own, and he named his first book of poetry 'The Maverick Room' (2005), for a beloved local go-go club. In that book, he paid homage to the music and how it marked him. Mr. Ellis's high school nickname was Sticks, not just because he deployed them on the drums but also because he was skinny. In a poem with that title, he used the language of percussion to connect the violence he saw in his father, whose strength he revered as a child, with his own development as a writer: I discovered writing,How words are parts of speechWith beats and breaths of their like flams. Wham! Bam! He went on: My first attempts were filled with noise,Wild solos, violent uncontrollable page tightened like a drumResisting the clockwise twistingOf a handheld chrome key The poet and composer Janice Lowe, another Dark Room founder, said in an interview that Mr. Ellis's work was 'very much rooted in musicality, in all kinds of Black musical and linguistic traditions and in the way people play with language.' She added, 'It can fly you into the surreal, into jazz or film, or root you in something familial — whatever he was dialoguing with — but it never rests, never stays in the familiar. It always travels and transforms and transgresses.' Mr. Ellis was prone to linguistic pyrotechnics, both on and off the page. He was an omnivorous reader of the literary canon and an avid book collector, particularly of those writers not yet in the canon, notably people of color. He was also a film, poetry and music buff whose interests ranged from Gertrude Stein and French New Wave films to Bootsy Collins and George Clinton. In 1986, he was living in a Victorian house in Cambridge, Mass., with the poet Sharan Strange and others when he and Ms. Strange began putting together a library of works by Black authors of the diaspora. They housed it in a former darkroom on the third floor, and they called the collection 'The Dark Room,' a name they liked as a pun for a room full of 'Black books,' as Ms. Strange wrote in an essay for the literary magazine Mosaic in 2006. When James Baldwin died the next year, Mr. Ellis, Ms. Strange and their housemates made a pilgrimage to his funeral in New York City. It was a heady literary event — Toni Morrison, William Styron, Maya Angelou and Amiri Baraka all delivered eulogies — and it galvanized them to create a collective that would honor and support writers of color. They already had a name, the Dark Room, and, with Ms. Lowe, they began to host readings in their living room. They were electric events, with music and art installations, and everyone wanted in. Alice Walker called and asked to read. Derek Walcott, the Caribbean-born Nobel Prize winner, read, and so did Michael S. Harper, the poet laureate of Rhode Island. The collective grew to include, among many others, Kevin Young, now the poetry editor of The New Yorker, and the Pulitzer Prize winners Tracy K. Smith and Natasha Trethewey, the country's poet laureate from 2012 to 2014. Jeff Gordinier, writing in The New York Times in 2014, called the Dark Room 'a flash of literary lightning' akin to the Beat poets and the Black Arts Movement. The collective lasted, in various forms, until 1998, and the members held reunions in subsequent years. 'You need other people who think like you, maybe, who read like you, maybe, who walk and breathe like you, maybe,' Mr. Ellis told an audience in Santa Fe, N.M., in 2013 during one reunion tour. 'You think you're adding something that's needed, that you don't see. There's something about that, that never ends, no matter who you are and where you are.' In a poem that Mr. Ellis titled 'T.A.P.O.A.F.O.M. (The Awesome Power of a Fully-Operational Memory),' he wrote: Memory, Walcott says, moves this is true, your memory is a mothershipminus the disco-sadistic silverall stars need to shine. Tell the world.A positive nuisance. Da bomb. When that poem was included in 'The Best American Poetry 2001,' he had this to say about it, in an author's note: 'In the poem, I am working on my own brand of literary activism, which I call Genuine Negro Heroism. Genuine Negro Heroism (GNH) is the opposite of HNIC (Head Negro In Charge), and incorporates pee-pure modes of black freak, black folk, and black soul behavior.' Thomas Sayers Ellis was born on Oct. 5, 1963, in Washington. His mother, Jeannette (Forbes) Ellis, managed a restaurant; his father, Thomas Ellis, was a pipe mechanic. Thomas attended Dunbar High School but spent much of his time at the city's block parties and go-go clubs. His girlfriend at the time, Sandra Andrews, gave birth to his son, Finn, when he was 17 and she was 19. Mr. Ellis attended Alabama State University on a scholarship and then moved to Cambridge, where he took classes at Harvard with the poet Seamus Heaney. 'In a city where everybody acts like they've read everything,' the poet and publisher Askold Melnyczuk said of Cambridge, 'he actually had.' Mr. Melnyczuk was an early booster of Mr. Ellis's; he included his work in 'Take Three: Agni New Poets Series' (1996), which he edited. In addition to 'The Maverick Room,' Mr. Ellis was the author of the chapbook 'The Genuine Negro Hero' (2001), 'Skin Inc.: Identity Repair Poems' (2010) and 'Crank Shaped Notes' (2021), a collection of poems, essays and photos about the go-go music he loved. Mr. Ellis, who had taken photos since his go-go days, was a sharp street and portrait photographer. Mr. Ellis earned an M.F.A. from Brown University in 1995. He taught at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., among other institutions, and earned numerous awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim. In 2014, he and the jazz saxophonist James Brandon Lewis formed a band they called Heroes Are Gang Leaders, after a chapter in Amiri Baraka's 1967 collection of short fiction, 'Tales.' An enticing mash-up of poetry, jazz, funk and more, the group swelled to 12 members and performed with guests like Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, the singer and poet Lydia Lunch and the jazz bassist William Parker. Mr. Ellis and Mr. Lewis often squabbled during rehearsals. Mr. Ellis had a habit of recording jam sessions and then memorizing the music, and he was annoyed when they weren't later reproduced, down to the note. 'His memory was phenomenal, and he'd get so irritated,' Mr. Lewis said in an interview. 'I'd say: 'Thomas, we're improvising. We're not supposed to be memorizing.'' In addition to his son, Mr. Andrews, Mr. Ellis is survived by a brother, James; four grandchildren; and one great-granddaughter. In early 2016, a year before the #MeToo movement took off, Mr. Ellis was a visiting professor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop when a women's literary group known as Vida published, online, a collection of anonymous accounts of what it said was sexual misconduct by Mr. Ellis. His classes were canceled, and Jia Tolentino, writing in Jezebel, reported on the Vida post and its ethics in an article headlined 'Is This the End of the Era of the Important, Inappropriate Literary Man?' The New Republic picked up the story, as fodder for a piece about the workshop's reputation for the bad behavior of its male professors. For his part, Mr. Ellis made no public comment about the incident. Soon after, he moved to St. Petersburg, and he was named the city's first photo laureate in 2023. 'Language is always changing,' Mr. Ellis told The Missoula Independent, a weekly independent newspaper in Montana, in 2009. 'Language is not finished. Language is the thing that if you stay connected to it like I do, eat it enough, carry it with you enough, it will rejuvenate you. 'I don't mean 'save you' in a religious sense, but it will save you from a certain kind of dogma or mundane, boring existence.'
