CARRIE MARIE SCHNEIDER

Carrie Marie Schneider is a Houston-based artist interested in the reimagining of social space through organized, community-based projects. After earning a BFA in Fine Arts and Culture and Politics from Maryland Institute College of Art, she built her own MFA program by auditing courses at Houston universities, culminating in a 2017 fellowship at the Katherine C. McGovern College of the Arts at the Center for Arts and Social Engagement at the University of Houston’s Katherine C. McGovern College of the Arts. Schneider’s socio-cultural interventions have included Hear Our Houston (2011-2013), which encouraged city residents to chart and record self-guided audio tours based around personal stories about neighborhood landmarks; her temporary multimedia installation Care House (2012) which transformed the suburban home in which she grew up into a memorial for care and loss; and with Alex Tu, she revived the Art Guys’ Human Tour, a 40-mile trek across Houston’s urban landscape in 2013. With Jennie Ash, she organized the Houston chapter of Charge, an advocacy project developed to give artists “a voice at the table” at a time when the arts are being used to lure conventions, sports events, and new residents to the city, usually without equitable compensation. After four years of presentations, the project culminated in 2016 with Charge House, an Project Row Houses installation with a broad range of programming including a roundtable discussion facilitated by Mel Chin. Since 2015, she’s worked as a self-described “curator, matchmaker, and moderator” of public talks between U of H faculty and CounterCurrent festival artists. In 2014, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston presented Incommensurate Mapping, a solo exhibition of Schneider’s work and “excavated past visions of the museum’s potential as a civic space” through a reexamination of the goals of past CAA/CAMH directors Donald Barthelme and Sebastian “Lefty” Adler rooted in the museum’s own archives.

Pete Gershon interviewed Carrie Marie Schneider at her home in Houston on June 19, 2019.