Located on Rice University’s 112-year-old campus, the Moody Center for the Arts looks conspicuously new. The Byzantine-inspired sandy and pinkish buildings that have always filled Rice’s 300 wooded acres look like monuments to the past: intransient, stately, and somewhat impervious. The Moody, with its floor-to-ceiling glass, clean lines, and copious number of oversize windows, stands as a marked architectural departure. It feels modern, yes, but perhaps most important, it feels open.

“I think of the Moody as a hinge between the campus and the community in the sense that we can make the intellectual capital of Rice more available to the public, and then we can also bring in voices from Houston and further afield to the campus that wouldn’t otherwise be here,” says Alison Weaver, founding executive director of the Moody.

Since opening in 2017, the Moody has charted a singular course. Open to the public and always free, the space serves two distinct audiences: Rice University students and faculty, and the Houston community at large. Designed by architect Michael Maltzan, the Moody’s award-winning building combines sleek museum reverence with looser communal intention. It’s a social space. A small café operated by Lemond Kitchen sells sandwiches and salads. Gallery areas are accompanied by classrooms, a 150-seat performance hall, and a woodworking and metal shop for Rice students, among other nooks inviting participation.

Historically, Houstonians have felt proud of Rice, but not necessarily part of it. For generations, Rice focused inward, serving its own community who paid and worked hard to be there. Ivory towers and ivy-covered gates come to mind. Over the eight years of its existence, though, the Moody has signaled a shift at the university. Along with other on-campus gems such as the Shepherd School of Music, the museum proves what can be gained when elite institutions welcome the rest of the world in, not just to watch, but to participate. “We invite people to share their own creative practice, not just to observe our work,” Weaver says.

Recent fall and upcoming spring events at the Moody underscore Weaver’s point. In October 2024, one of the Moody’s signature series, Dimensions Variable, featured conversations with three disparate creators about their individual processes: origami expert Kyle Fu, chef Chris Shepherd, and jazz saxophonist Warren Sneed. The fall 2024 exhibition Do Ho Suh, In Process was an unprecedented journey into the mind and makings of an internationally renowned artist. In 1999, Suh began work on The Bridge Project, a media-jumping, research-based exploration of identity and displacement. He eventually collaborated with architects, engineers, and designers to draft plans for a bridge that would connect his homes in Seoul, New York, and London in 2010.

The decades-long project is a metaphor, but it’s literal, too—and that duality attracted Suh to the Moody. The artist embedded himself within an engineering class at the university last year, working with students to develop three different bridge designs. In Process features the resulting plans. “The Moody was the perfect location for this exhibition,” Suh says. “As a site of learning and research, it’s ideally suited to an exploratory and experimental mode of display. As a university, the team was brilliantly open to collaboration on the project as opposed to working on a checklist of completed works. It’s been very exciting for me.”

In March 2025, the Moody’s annual Spring Fling will celebrate the arts hub turning eight years old. The party always includes a musical guest, and it’s typically an artist Houstonians might expect to hear at a Cactus Music or Heights Theater show. Past Spring Fling headliners have included indie darlings such as the Tontons and Kaitlin Butts.

“Our most successful form of reaching people has been through meaningful partnerships and inviting people to bring their own creative voices into the building,” Weaver says. “So we’re not simply putting something on view and hoping people see it. We do that, but, also, we’re inviting people to bring their own experience.”

The Moody’s “meaningful partnerships” have led not just to unique programming, but to successfully addressing its most pressing challenge: Aside from traditional avenues like advertising, how does a new arts incubator and exhibition space let the city know it exists? By inviting outsiders to both see the space and actively help to define it. The experiment is working. By the end of 2023, the Moody’s visitor numbers were up 118 percent since its launch.

An overview of the organization’s programming thus far highlights the Moody’s ambition. In 2017, the Moody connected with Interfaith Ministries of Greater Houston to host Green light, an exhibition and hands-on workshop conceived by celebrated Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, in which participants learned how to construct modular green lamps, symbolizing what the exhibition notes describe as a “green go-ahead light to asylum seekers, refugees, and economic migrants” to engage in community, creativity, and understanding.

That same year, revered German photographer Thomas Struth sat down for a public discussion at the Moody with chemist, nanotechnologist, cancer researcher, and Rice professor Dr. James Tour. A 2019 partnership with NASA commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing with a variety of events, including a panel with Brooklyn-based artist Matthew Day Jackson and former NASA astronaut and International Space Station commander Leroy Chiao. Artist Emeka Ogboh worked with José Ceja and Ian McDonald from Astral Brewing to create a stout-based beer inspired by the food, music, and stories of Houston’s large Nigerian population in 2022.

Two years later, Open Dance Project’s Annie Arnoult created an immersive dance theater production based on Georgia O’Keeffe’s time in Texas. ClayHouston, the Iraqi Forum of Houston, Houston Audubon, Basket Books, Pride Chorus Houston…a cursory glance at partnerships over the past year alone is cultural chaos in the most delightful sense, with Moody right there at the heart of it all. The upcoming spring 2025 exhibition, Breath(e): Towards Climate and Social Justice, will host topical artworks and urgent conversations in the energy capital of the world.

“We’re bringing serious experts in their fields, whatever those fields are, and we’re attempting to do something new,” Weaver says. “That’s something I wish Houston and Texas got more credit for outside of our state. We are a place that embraces new ideas.”

Houston’s radical openness is amplified not only by giving original thinking a chance, but also by bankrolling it. Breakthroughs require space, time, and money—all of which the Moody has built into how it operates.

In 2024, Nick Flynn—the poet, playwright, and University of Houston professor—came to the gallery with an idea. Would they host a reading of his poetry, which would be accompanied by AI images generated from his work and then projected onto a screen in real time? The performance was followed by a discussion on the ethical implications of artificial intelligence.

“I didn’t know what was going to happen that night, and Nick didn’t either,” Weaver says, laughing. “We were both totally comfortable with that. I think that’s one of the nice things about being part of a university. We have a certain latitude to experiment.”

Anna Mayer, an acclaimed ceramics artist and professor at the University of Houston, was one of six artists selected to contribute to the Moody’s summer 2024 exhibition, Resonant Earth. Using what she calls “gleaned clay” from Houston and Marfa, Mayer created anthropomorphous ceramic tools that would ultimately be hung in twos.

“I wasn’t exactly sure how the wall would work—the pairs of ceramic instruments on the wall, how it’d be installed,” Mayer says. “I thought it’d be in pairs, but I wanted the chance to get in there and do some mock-ups to see what different things might feel like. The Moody was really helpful with that. They didn’t need me to come in knowing exactly what I was going to do and just bang it out as quickly as possible. They were very open to trying things out and seeing what happens in real time.”

Indeed, leaving room for a process to unfold creates more possibilities. It’s also an empowering message for anyone who walks through the door. As Houston’s newest museum, the Moody was born in the shadows of giants, some of which have existed for more than a century. “There was wide understanding that Rice did not need to build their own art museum,” Weaver says. “Many universities have their own art museum, but we have the Menil Collection, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and others in town that have amazing, universal collections and have been collecting for many years.”

Instead, the Moody was conceived as a museum-quality exhibition gallery pulling double duty as a salon, where art serves as the catalyst for conversations about the pressing issues of our time, as well as an ongoing safe space for those conversations. Art can be both provocateur and comforter, asking tough questions as it ensures everyone has value and a voice. The Moody isn’t content with merely celebrating or preserving art. It proves why art matters.