In the sixth round of commissions for the Tent Series, the Moody extends its engagement with Houston-based artists by inviting Tay Butler, Loc Huynh, and Virginia L. Montgomery (VLM) to create large-scale temporary artworks that will foster conversation throughout the 2026 academic year. Featured on Provisional Campus Facilities (PCF) Tents, located on the south side of campus, across Loop Road from Herring Hall, these three works offer poignant expressions of creativity, innovation, and connection. Read on to learn more about each work below.

Tay Butler
Garrison, 2025
Vinyl, original work: digital collage of scanned archival images 
Commission, the Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University

What does it mean to be in community? What is culture? 
When will we reject the seduction of elites and excellence and choose sacrifice and solidarity? 
How far does your love go?

—Tay Butler

Tay Butler creates original collages from found images extracted from cultural objects such as magazines, newspapers, posters and album covers. The resulting compositions reanimate historical narratives, scrutinize present perceptions, and imagine alternative futures. Through these material excavations, Butler explores the intersecting histories of popular culture, race and identity, mining the past to question perceived notions of community, culture and social progress.

Garrison is a digital collage comprised of images from Butler’s extensive personal archive. Three Afro-futuristic liberators appear before a background of jungle-like foliage. Excerpted images of famous Black men from the fields of athletics, entertainment and academics, including Michael Jordan, Travis Scott and Cornel West, reference Black notions of excellence from the recent past. These fantastical androids stand in quantum entanglement with the nearby figures, highlighting the dangers and limitations of categorization. A call to community engagement and socio-political participation, Garrison imagines a more equitable future made possible through individual and collective action.

About the Artist
Tay Butler (b. 1980, Milwaukee, WI) is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Houston, Texas. He received a BFA in Photography and Digital Media from the University of Houston and an MFA in Photography at the University of Arkansas. After retiring from the US Army and leaving a career in engineering, Butler began an artistic practice driven by an appreciation for Black history and the Black archive. Butler’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Lawndale Art Center, Houston; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Project Row Houses, Houston; and the Louise J. Moran Fine Arts Courtyard, Houston. His work has been featured in group exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; ArtPace, San Antonio; the Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN; and the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. His awards include the Individual Artist Fellowship from the Arkansas Arts Council; the Idea Fund grant from Diverse Works; and First Prize in the 2019 Citywide African-American Artists Exhibition at Texas Southern University. He currently teaches Art & Design at San Jacinto College. 

Loc Huynh
The Duel, 2025
Original work: Acrylic, enamel, and oil on wood
Commission, Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University

The Duel is representative of the unique environment that Houston cultivates: a blend of various cultures that create a highly specific one.

—Loc Huynh

Artist Loc Huynh creates vibrant, figurative paintings that blend Vietnamese, Chinese, and Texan cultural imagery, while conveying a distinct visual language emblematic of his identity as a second-generation Asian American. Drawing on the history of painting and the graphic arts, Huynh combines stylistic cues from Pop Art with the design sensibilities of comics and cartoons, while incorporating autobiographical anecdotes. To create his paintings, Huynh begins by meticulously sketching his subjects—drawing them from memory or photographs—before using airbrushing and spray painting techniques to infuse his scenes with saturated colors that evoke familiarity and warmth.

Set in Houston’s Hong Kong City Mall, The Duel depicts two Vietnamese men playing cờ tướng (Chinese chess) against the lively backdrop of a local Vietnamese food stall, Quan Binh Minh. This playful, everyday scene speaks to notions of placemaking and belonging, capturing a fleeting moment where communities from the Asian diasporas convene. Pointing to his interests in art history, The Duel was inspired by French Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne’s (1839-1906) The Card Players (1890-92), an oil painting that pays homage to the Provençale countryside through a contemplative scene of farm workers playing cards. 

Coincidentally, Cézanne’s The Card Players was inspired by similar works by European master painters before him, including Italian painter Caravaggio (1571-1610) and French painter Jean Siméon Chardin (1699-1779). Through this lineage, Huynh’s The Duel is rooted in the Western art historical canon, yet reappropriates the card playing genre to construct a scene that incorporates Eastern and Western traditions while remaining grounded in the present day. 

About the artist
Loc Huynh (b. 1992, Austin, TX) graduated with a BFA from Texas State University in 2016, and an MFA from the University of North Texas in 2020. His work has featured in solo exhibitions at the Museum of the Southwest, Midland, TX; Martha’s, Austin, TX; Inman Gallery, Houston, TX; and New Release Gallery, New York. Select group exhibitions include presentations at the Orlando Museum of Art; Zona Maco, Mexico City, with Rusha & Co., Los Angeles; Stiltsville, Miami, with Half Gallery, New York; Hashimoto Contemporary, Los Angeles; and Brooklyn Academy of Music, among others. He has participated in the Vermont Studio Center Residency, Johnson, VT; Wassaic Project, Wassaic, NY; Bunker Projects, Pittsburgh, PA; Asia Society Texas’s Artist on Site, Houston; and the Lawndale Artist Studio Program, Houston. He currently lives and works in Houston, TX.
 

Virginia L. Montgomery
Moon Moth Transcends Black Hole, 2025 
HD video and vinyl
Commission, Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University

The artist Virginia L. Montgomery (VLM) explores in her work the idea that consciousness is not unique to humans, and that all creatures and objects are sentient beings. Drawing from surrealism, mysticism, neuroscience, and physics, she combines aspect of these different fields in whimsical and introspective projects that encompass video installations, photography, sculpture, and performance. 

For the Tent series, she created a live action dreamscape of Luna moths (Aticus Luna), a unique moth species that is native to Houston. The video illustrates themes of metamorphosis and cosmology through the juxtaposition of two theories, the “Butterfly Effect”—a concept within chaos theory that highlights how small actions can have large consequences—and Emmy Noether’s Theorem, which highlights a connection between symmetries in physical systems and conservation laws. The animated images are projected over vinyl decals that represent mathematical calculations depicting Albert Einstein’s Field Equations and Emmy Noether’s Theorem. Einstein emphasized the connections between seemingly disparate concepts, such as symmetries and black holes, and he stated that Noether was "the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced.” Today she is acknowledged for her pioneering work and her theories continue to impact black hole research. Through the eerie layering of close-up shots of the moths and mathematical diagrams, Montgomery combines abstract concepts and macrocosm, the close study of moths, to create a bridge between scientific research and life forms, small and big. 

About the artist
Virginia L. Montgomery (b. 1986, Houston) received her BFA from The University of Texas at Austin in 2008 and her MFA from Yale University in 2016. Her work has been shown in solo presentations at the New Museum, New York; Time Square Arts, New York; Wright Lab at Yale University, New Haven, CT; Lawndale Art Center, Houston; Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany; among others. She has also exhibited in group exhibitions at institutions including SculptureCenter, NY; Socrates Sculpture Park, NY; Ballroom Marfa, TX; Blanton Museum, Austin, TX; Contemporary Austin, TX; The Hessel Museum at Bard College, NY; Banff Centre, Canada; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Denmark; Tate Film at Tate Modern, London, UK; among others. She is the recipient of different awards, such as the Foundation for Contemporary Arts' Relief Grant (2020), Big Medium's Artist Relief Fund (2020), Socrates' Artist Fellowship (2018), Yale University’s Susan H. Wedon Award (2016), and Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship Nominee in Sculpture (2016). She lives and works between Austin and Houston. 

The 2025-2026 Tent Series was organized by Alison Weaver, Suzanne Deal Booth Executive Director; Frauke V. Josenhans, curator, and Noor Alé, Curator, Moody Center for the Arts. This series is made possible by the Moody Center for the Arts Founders Circle.