UH: Public Art on Campus

Public Art UHS, founded in 1969, looks after the University of Houston System's art collection, and hundreds of its works sit on the main campus, many outdoors where anyone can walk right up to them. This loop starts at the Wheeler Avenue edge of campus and heads through the Arts District, past the grove at its heart, to the library and the residential side of campus. Along the way you'll meet a dancing couple in fiberglass, a color machine made of 2,000-plus aluminum pieces and a bronze winged figure. Go at dusk if you can: one stop lights up with text after dark.

The University of Houston treats its campus as an open-air gallery. Public Art UHS, founded in 1969, cares for the UH System's art collection, and many of its works sit outdoors on the main campus where anyone can walk right up to them. This walk strings together some of the most striking pieces, from pop-inflected sculpture to works that change with the light.

You'll meet Luis Jiménez's Fiesta Jarabe, a towering pair of Mexican hat dancers in the glossy painted fiberglass he borrowed from sign-making; Jiménez, born in El Paso, taught art at UH. Carlos Cruz-Diez's Double Physichromie, completed in 2009, uses thin parallel slats that mix colors in your eye, so the piece shifts as you walk its length. Outside the Moores School of Music stands Stephen de Staebler's Winged Woman Walking X, a weathered bronze more than nine feet tall that takes the ancient Winged Victory as its starting point.

The Arts District's grove, reopened in 2025 with an amphitheater and native plantings, ties the performance and gallery buildings together. Near the library, Jim Sanborn, best known for the Kryptos sculpture at CIA headquarters, created A,A, whose surfaces carry passages in languages from Arabic to Chinese.

Go near dusk if you can: after dark, Sanborn's work projects its text across the library walls, turning the last light into part of the art.