Interview: Dixie Friend Gay

This is an interview with Dixie Friend Gay, an artist living and working in Houston. She had grown up in western Oklahoma on a cattle ranch, made her way to New York to be an artist and eventually settled in Houston. Her work focuses on the sacredness of nature, looking specifically at the wild southern native landscape. Her detailed lush paintings have led her to create large mosaic murals and sculptures in the public realm all over the US. We have a video online that documents her most recent installation “Books of a Feather”, which consists of three 15-foot tall mosaic birds in front of the Alice M Young Library in Houston. For this interview, she talks about how to balance being a mother and an artist, advice on how to get involved in public art, and how her first public intervention was taking political action against a series of gates that were put up between affluent and minority neighborhoods in Houston.