Launched in 2021 with the goal of fostering cross-campus and community engagement with the arts, the Moody Project Wall is a collaborative effort between Houston-based artists and Rice University students. For this iteration, interdisciplinary artists Nick Vaughan and Jake Margolin draw on their joint, research-driven practice, which pieces together fragments of LGBTQ+ history to uncover, reanimate, and share stories that might otherwise be lost.    

Their project, I remember this one time…, memorializes the bar tops of Mary’s Naturally, a former Houston gay bar and activist hub that operated from the early 1970s through 2009. Collaged with photographs of the bar’s patrons, these bar tops functioned as an everyday archive that preserved the memory of the city’s queer community. Here, Vaughan and Margolin translate this history into newly created sculptural tables whose surfaces—marked with empty outlines and traces—evoke the absence of the photographs embedded in the bar tops, visibly registering the loss of Mary’s Naturally and the histories it held.  

Arranged as both an installation and a gathering place, the sculptural tables extend across the Project Wall and into the floorspace of the Flex Studio, inviting visitors to sit, convene, and reflect. Throughout its run, the project hosts workshops and public programs celebrating queer life in Houston—both past and present—gathering oral histories from students, alumni, and the broader public. Painted with chalkboard paint, the Project Wall as well becomes an active writing surface that accumulates records of these exchanges, enabling the installation to serve as a living archive that reinforces the need to value, preserve, and learn from LGBTQ+ histories.  

I remember this one time… is part of Town Meeting 1978-2028, a three-year initiative by the artists to commemorate Town Meeting 1—a 1978 gathering of over four thousand LGBTQ+ Houstonians that helped establish the city’s queer support networks. In advance of its fiftieth anniversary, the initiative fosters public awareness and dialogue that will culminate in citywide programming in 2028.     

The Moody Project Wall series is made possible by the Moody Center for the Arts Founders Circle. 

About the Artists

Nick Vaughan and Jake Margolin (b. 1983, Colorado; b. 1980, California) have had solo exhibitions at the Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, TX; DiverseWorks, Houston, TX; Oklahoma City University Norick Art Center, OK; Oklahoma State University Museum of Art, Stillwater, OK, and others. They have been awarded the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellowship, the Tulsa Artist Fellowship, and served as resident artists at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, NY, among other awards, grants, and residencies. Vaughan holds a BFA in theatrical design from Carnegie Mellon University, and Margolin holds a BFA in drama from New York University