Lily Cox-Richard: Berm

Lily Cox-Richard’s new sculpture installation inventively challenges social and material hierarchies related to labor, craft, and natural and man-made environments. Inspired by the concept of the berm, a term that refers to an artificially raised bank or ridge that may serve as a fortification line or a separation barrier, Cox-Richard’s work uses reclaimed materials, crafted objects, and the space around them to push up against institutional frameworks and existing architecture to explore modes of viewing, perspective, and accessibility. 

Within the exhibition at DiverseWorks, concrete aggregates made from old bricks, oyster shells, glass and other debris have been ground down by the artist to reveal other facets of embedded structural systems. The installation takes place within the bottom seventeen inches of the gallery, adhering to and highlighting the particulars of the MATCH (Midtown Arts and Theater Center Houston) architecture: finished wood flooring, ground-level windows, and a patterned brick walkway just outside. The view through the low windows, from the sidewalk, becomes the prime vantage point for the exhibition. Viewers are invited to further shift their perspective by looking through custom scopes, lying on a dolly, or simply taking a knee.

This project expands Cox-Richard’s investigations into the relationships between natural resources, stewardship, labor, landscape, and the built environment in the rapidly developing area of Midtown Houston.

About the artist
Lily Cox-Richard’s sculpture engages familiar forms and materials that have become unmoored from their original contexts and roles. She mines this distance by digging into their cultural and materials histories and forging new paths between them. She has been awarded an Artadia grant, a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, a postdoctoral fellowship in the University of Michigan’s Society of Fellows, and residencies at the Core Program, Millay Colony, RAIR Philadelphia, and the MacDowell Colony. Recent solo exhibitions include Yvonne (Guatemala City), Artpace (San Antonio, TX), She Works Flexible (Houston), Hirschl & Adler Modern (New York), Vox Populi (Philadelphia), and the Hudson River Museum (New York). She has an upcoming exhibition scheduled for the Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin (Fall 2019). Lily Cox-Richard lives and works in Richmond, VA, where she is assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts.

Support
Lily Cox-Richard’s residency in Houston was supported by DiverseWorks in partnership with Flying Carpet Creative.

This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, Texas Commission on the Arts, the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance, the Houston Endowment, the Brown Foundation, Inc., and the Wortham Foundation.