Book Release: Rothko Chapel: An Oasis for Reflection

Published by Rizzoli Electa, this beautiful new large-format volume provides photographic testimony along with the insights of scholars who give an intimate look into this sacred space, where visitors seek solace and inspiration. Commemorating the first monograph on Rothko Chapel in more than 20 years, the book’s contributors speak about the Rothko Chapel’s history and how the restoration project came to fruition.

Contributors and panelists include: Stephen Fox, architectural historian and Fellow of the Anchorage Foundation of Texas; Paul Hester, architectural photographer, Hester + Hardaway; and Pamela Smart, Associate Professor, Binghamton University; moderated by Ashley Clemmer, Director of Programs and Community Engagement, Rothko Chapel  

Rothko Chapel: An Oasis for Reflection will be available for purchase from the Chapel Shop, located at the Rothko Chapel Suzanne Deal Booth Welcome House at 1410 Sul Ross Street starting on Sunday, February 28, 10am. Local purchases onsite or for curbside pickup available only.

About the Contributors & Panelists

Stephen Fox

Stephen Fox is an architectural historian and a lecturer at the Rice School of Architecture. He is also a lecturer at the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture of the University of Houston and a Fellow of the Anchorage Foundation of Texas. Fox’s work is focused on architecture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially the architecture of Houston and Texas. In his scholarship he examines the ways that architecture engages such social constructs as class identity, cultural distinction, and regional differentiation. He has authored and/or contributed to many publications including AIA Houston Architectural Guide, The Building of Texas: Central, South and Gulf Coast, and Making Houston Modern: the Life and Architecture of Howard Barnstone.

Paul Hester

Paul Hester is a photographer of art and architecture. He received an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. His photographs are in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, the Stedelijk Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Wooster Art Museum, the National Museum of American Art, the Amon Carter Museum. He was on the faculty of the Department of Visual & Dramatic Arts, Rice University, Houston, for 15 years, where he taught courses in photography and is a recipient of the Texas Society of Architects Flowers Award. His photographs have been featured in a number of publications including Frank Welch’s Philip Johnson & Texas, Houston’s Silent Gardens about Glenwood Cemetery, Historic Texas Court Houses and Diane Keaton’s California Romantica.

Pamela Smart

Pamela Smart is Associate Professor of art history and anthropology and chair of the Department of Art History at Binghamton University. She received her PhD in anthropology from Rice University. She is currently engaged in a series of three projects on the crafting of affect. The first, Sacred Modern: Faith, Activism, and Aesthetics in the Menil Collection (University of Texas Press, 2011) addressed the shaping of aesthetic sensibility in the exhibitionary practices of an art museum, and the second is concerned with the technical production of affective atmospheres in the restoration of the Rothko Chapel. The third, on affective materiality, examines artists’ experimentation with newly developed acrylic paints in the mid-twentieth century.