Artists in Houston are taking stock of the storm’s devastating impact and the long process of rebuilding that lies ahead.
More than a week after Hurricane Harvey slammed Texas’s southeast Gulf Coast, Houston artists are only now beginning to evaluate the extent of damage to their studios and take stock of lost artworks. That’s a difficult task in any post-catastrophe situation, but it’s made more complex by Houston’s sprawling size and the ways in which artists set up their practices in a metropolitan area that’s more than 10,000 square miles — an area larger than the state of New Jersey. One of the nation’s fastest growing cities, Houston has a population of over 6.4 million, and with little in the way local zoning regulation, development has sprawled virtually unchecked. The city’s major art museums — almost all of which are located in a central area of Houston — emerged from the storm for the most part unscathed. The city’s artists, however, did not fare so well.