Diverseworks is located in a 10,000-square-foot red brick warehouse on East Freeway a few blocks north of downtown Houston. It was established in 1982 by a group of Houston artists led by Charles Gallagher, who desired exhibition and studio space during a period when local artists received minimal support from Houston’s galleries and museums. Using New York City alternative spaces such as the Kitchen and P.S. 1 as models, the artists pooled their resources to establish a center in the historic Foley Building on Travis Street. Despite a flood that left the gallery a foot underwater, DiverseWorks opened in May 1983 with an exhibition of four East Texas artists and a performance by saxophone player Richard Landry.

The organization mounted retrospectives of the work of local artists such as Mel Chin (1985), Jesse Lott (1987), and Dee Wolff (1989), and functioned as a venue for performances and installations that had limited commercial appeal. Their support of challenging work by local artists, especially those who were too young or controversial to be featured in the city’s galleries and museums, contributed to Houston’s emergence as a leading art center in the 1980s.

Exhibitions are frequently organized around political themes. Mothers of the Disappeared (1989) featured Houstonian Richard Lewis’s photographs of members of Co-Madres, a group that provides support to relatives of those who have reportedly been arrested, kidnapped, or killed by Salvadoran “death squads”. Perhaps the most successful exhibition to date was Project: Houston (1990), organized by Deborah Brauer, who invited over forty architects, artists, scientists, and engineers to collaborate on projects geared toward the future development of Houston. Outstanding among the various projects were proposals to restore historic Freedman’s Town in the Fourth Ward qv. build an urban wetland featuring native plants in Buffalo Bayou Park, and turn a warehouse into a shelter for abused women and children. DiverseWorks has also participated in fund-raising efforts to benefit Amnesty International and Art Against AIDS.

Diverseworks continues to stimulate audiences’ minds and expand the definition of contemporary art. Under the direction of Co-Executive Directors Diane Barber and Sixto Wagan, DiverseWorks will commission ten new works and exhibitions that feature some new and familiar faces, all of them having strong artistic voices to comment and explore the issues of contemporary society. Their specialty — a series of cross-disciplinary projects that underscore the organization’s practice of blurring the lines between visual and performance art is getting a necessary support – money, rehearsal time, production support under the DW protective wings.

“Contemporary artists are no longer masters of a single discipline. The creative culture has developed practitioners who bring experience and professionalism from different sectors of their lives to explode the boundaries of their craft. Performance Artists continue to more deeply integrate technology and visual objects; artists act as cultural anthropologists, focusing on details to comment on the change (or its lack) in society; writers are historians cultivating histories to define a new shared experience. The artists use their work to explore and explode issues, so that DiverseWorks is the starting place for dialogue” says Sixto Wagan — Co-Executive Director, Performing Arts Curator