The Arts

The Arts in the Humanities at Rice

The arts at Rice provide students with access to Houston’s world-class arts institutions.

Inside the School of Humanities, the Department of Art History and the Department of Art provide their majors with direct access to experts, art holdings, and current projects at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and Menil Collection. These departments hold their own art exhibitions, public lectures, symposia, and film screenings in our historically significant and recently upgraded Rice Cinema. We also stage Shakespearean, Broadway, and off-Broadway theatre productions (most with all-student casts) in our Rice Theatre Program productions each semester.

And Rice offers more: The Shepherd School of Music hosts performances of symphonies, operas, and student recitals throughout the year. The planned Rice Brockman Hall for the Performing Arts Center will host stage productions, operas, and musical performances. Rice’s Moody Center for the Arts, which opened in 2017, is a new forum for students, faculty, and community artists to experiment with the arts and to produce and exhibit their work. The Moody Center for the Arts is open to the public. For more information on current talks, programs, performances, exhibitions, and film screenings in Rice Cinema, visit the RiceArts website.

And Houston offers even more: Houston is home to the Theatre District, producing Broadway shows in local theatres with local and traveling theatre companies. Houston has a number of alternative art spaces: Lawndale Art Center, one of the only institutions in Houston that is dedicated to the presentation of contemporary art with an emphasis on work by regional artists; DiverseWorks, an arts organization that commissions, produces, and presents new and daring art in all its forms through innovative collaborations that honor each artist’s vision without constraint; and Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, dedicated to the exhibition of crafts and handmade objects.

Learn more about the arts in our city: opera, theater, symphony, and ballet.

And there's more: