Designed by acclaimed Los Angeles-based architect Michael Maltzan to bring together the Rice community and the Houston public and enable innovative artistic work to flourish, the $30 million, 50,000-square-foot Moody serves as an experimental platform for creating and presenting works in all disciplines, a flexible teaching space and a forum for creative partnerships with visiting national and international artists.
Open and free to the public, the Moody is dedicated to trans-disciplinary collaboration in the arts, sciences and humanities, and establishes a new arts district on the campus as it stands close by the distinguished Shepherd School of Music and the permanent James Turrell Twilight Epiphany Skyspace.
The Moody provides facilities including art gallery space, a 150-seat black box theater, a gallery for experimental performance and a café. Its defining feature is the light-flooded, interdisciplinary maker lab at its core: an atrium with immediate access to surrounding resources that include a wood shop, metal shop, paint booth, rapid prototyping areas, studio classrooms, technology lending library and audiovisual editing booths.
The inaugural season of artworks in the Moody includes Olafur Eliasson: Green light – An artistic workshop (through May 6), Thomas Struth: Nature & Politics (through May 29), Diana Thater: The Starry Messenger (through February 1, 2018), teamLab: Flowers and People, Cannot be Controlled but Live Together — A Whole Year per Hour (through August 13), Google - Tilt Brush (an interactive experience for visitors to use a new 3-D paintbrush developed by Google), Proof by David Auburn (March 1-5) and An Iliad, played by Leon Ingulsrud and original music composed and performed by students from the Shepherd School of Music (March 30 – April 2). Details of the exhibits can be found here.
Public hours of operation include Tuesday to Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. The center is closed Sundays, Mondays and holidays. Maps are available at rice.edu/maps.