ROCHELLA COOPER

Born Rochella Z. Brown in South Africa on July 14, 1933, Rochella Cooper took up the flute at an early age. She studied with Rene Rateau and Nadia Boulanger in Paris at and graduated from London’s Royal Academy of Music in 1959. In 1961, she moved to Houston with her husband, Dr. Ben Cooper. In 1962, she became involved with the School of the Woods Montessori, first as a music teacher, then as director. She also established the Greenway Plaza Children’s House in 1972. In September 1973, Cooper attended a fiber arts workshop by Elsa Regensteiner at the University of Houston. For the rest of the decade, Cooper was prolific as a fiber artist with numerous large-scale corporate commissions, participation in group exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (1973 and 1979) and the Blaffer Gallery at the University of Houston (1974), and a solo exhibition at Watson/de Nagy & Company in July 1977. In 1979 Cooper was hired to direct the Houston International Festival, a downtown celebration of the arts that had evolved from the Main Street Art Happening. She grew the festival substantially, expanding to twenty downtown blocks with nine stages; some 350 artists, performers, and craftspeople; and a popular sculpture show along the bayou. In April 1986 her directorship culminated in Rendez-Vous Houston: A City in Concert, an extravagant multi-media show of sound, light, and pyrotechnics starring the French keyboardist Jean-Michel Jarre. The spectacle brought the city to a standstill and is still remembered as a highlight of the state sesquicentennial, but it was enough for Cooper, who resigned after the event and started a new enterprise, a sailing school for women called “Women at the Helm.” In 1997, she established The Artfull Garden, an outdoor sculpture gallery adjacent to her stylish home—designed by architect Frank Zeni— in the Rice Military neighborhood. A year later, she organized Texans for Alternatives to Pesticides (TAP) to advocate for healthier alternatives to weed control in the city. In 2009, she was introduced to the sport pickleball; in the decade since, she’s become a national champion. She’s continued to be involved with music all the while, singing in the Houston Symphony Chorus and the Houston Masterworks Chorus.

Notes: Pete Gershon interviewed Rochella Cooper on January 20, 2019 at her high-rise condominium on Hermann Drive.  It was one of the project’s first interviews and still one of the most successful. Cooper is an engaging speaker who presented a clear chronology of her life as an artist and organizer; very little editing was needed. In this interview, she discusses her upbringing in South Africa; her career as a musician, educator, and fiber artist; her experiences as director of the Houston International Festival including Rendez-Vous Houston; presentations at the Artfull Garden and activism with TAP. Archival images are drawn primarily from Rochella Cooper Papers, 2019-017, Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries. https://findingaids.lib.uh.edu/repositories/2/resources/385#.