Historic Market Square Park

A variety of public art calls Market Square Park home celebrating our history as well as our heroes.

MALOU FLATO

Mosaic fountain and benches

Created for the park in 1991, and augmented in 2000, the artist hand-painted ceramic tiles to evoke the feel of Market Square during the late 19^th and early 20^th century.

Malou Flato was born in Corpus Christi, Texas and earned a B.A. in Theater Arts from Middlebury College in Middlebury, VT in 1975. She and her husband divide their time between Austin, Texas and Paradise Valley, Montana just north of Yellowstone National Park.

Flato works among multiple mediums and disciplines including sculpture, ceramics, painting and drawing. Flato is perhaps best known for her mosaics such as the San Antonio Mission scenes on the Houston Street bridge in San Antonio

Her work in ceramic tile includes murals near a school in Seattle, Logan Airport in Boston, Massachusetts, several Central Market locations in Texas, and Breckenridge Children’s Hospital in Austin, TX. She has also integrated her work with technology, blending digitally scanned still images with paint and using computers to map out paintings before creating them.

Her work is on display at the McMurtry Gallery (Houston, TX), Visions West Gallery (Livingston, MT), The Hunt Gallery (San Antonio, TX), and The Davis Gallery (Austin, TX), among several others.

PAUL HESTER

Photography

A Houston-based photographer, Hester has incorporated his historic photographs of Market Square and downtown Houston with new steel cutout forms and installed them onto the fence along Milam Street. A porcelain enamel photographic time-line added to the northeast corner tells the vivid story of the site from 1873 to 2009.

Paul Hester earned a B.A. from Rice University in 1971 and an M.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1976. He was the founding president of the Houston Center for Photography in 1982.

Hester has been teaching a beginning photography course in the Department of Visual Arts at Rice University since 2003. He is also an architectural photographer for the Rice Design Alliance’s Cite magazine. He owns and operates Hester + Hardaway – a photography company – with his creative partner, Lisa Hardaway.

Hester’s work has been exhibited at The Menil Collection, Rice University, The University of Houston College of Architecture, Williams Tower, and The Houston Public Library in addition to an extensive list of books and magazines. His work can also be found among the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and the National Museum of American art in Washington, DC.

KETRIA SCOTT

Lauren's Garden

Scott’s three cast-bronze elements are made up of two vine-like tendrils that seem to grow from the fountain in Lauren’s Garden and appear to be eternally reaching towards each other and a young tendril with a new leaf emerging. The entire piece is inlaid into the granite disk in front of the fountain.

Houston sculptor Ketria Scott is largely self-taught in her discipline. She graduated from Stephen F. Austin State University in 1989 without taking a single sculpture class until enrolling in 3D design during her final semester, sparking what would become a lifelong passion.

After graduation, Scott took a job working in the non-profit sector as an administrator. She was able to use her sculpturing skills to repurpose toys for children with cerebral palsy. Although happy working for non-profits, Scott’s calling remained art. She met Jim Neikirk who owned an ornamental ironworks shop and volunteered at the Orange Show. Neikirk taught her how to weld, and a new career path was forged.

Scott currently works at the Ken King Foundry, crafting bronze work of local and national sculptors on projects ranging in scale from the intimate to the monumental. She has advanced skills and experience in mold making, welding and metal fabrication. Her work at Ken King includes a large contemporary sculpture for the Guggenheim in New York, and a planter series for the Museum of Fine Arts Houston.

JAMES SURLS

Points of View

The 25-foot painted steel and wood sculpture Points of View was created for the park in 1991. Previously positioned at the center of the park, it now stands above a gentle water feature at the base of the dining trellis.

James Surls is a world renowned modernist sculptor best known for his unpainted wooden sculptures. His work is among the public collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Los Angeles County Museum, The Contemporary Art Museum Houston, Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, and many others.

An East Texas native, Surls graduated from Sam Houston State Teachers College in 1966 and from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1968. He taught at Southern Methodist University in Dallas from 1969 through 1976 before moving to Splendora, Texas to raise his family. Surls then moved to Roaring Fork Valley in Colorado in 1997 where he has lived ever since.

His work is currently on display at the Barbara Davis Gallery in Houston and the Gerald Peters Gallery in Santa Fe and New York. Surls also spent several years working with the Lawndale Alternative Space in Houston, Texas.

RICHARD TURNER

Historic Remnants

Turner repurposed obscure architectural fragments, including objects from demolished downtown buildings. You can see the majority of the pieces along the curved walkway next to the dog runs in what we call our history walk.

Richard Turner is co-director of the Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University in Orange, California where he also teaches sculpture, design and Asian art history.

Turner has been an active public artist since 1980, working individually and with design teams on projects ranging from police stations to waste water treatment plants, public parks to light rail. His team’s work for Portland Oregon’s light rail stations won a Presidential Award in 2001. His work is currently on display in Houston, Los Angeles, San Diego, Anaheim, Seattle and Portland.

Turner received his B.A. from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio and his M.F.A from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He has also studied in Taiwan and in India as a Fulbright Scholar. Turner resides in the city of Orange, California.