Estee Marie’s first solo exhibition opened in September, two days before her fortieth birthday. She had been making the work for years and calling herself a closeted artist.
Marie is a Houston multidisciplinary artist and poet who also works as an educator, a chaplain and a grief counselor, and she moved from Los Angeles three years ago. The exhibition, Wave After Wave, went up at Blended Tapestry Art House. “I was so silent about what was going on,” she said of the years before it.
She is direct about what she carries and about not wearing it. “I am a woman who luckily does not look like what I’ve been through,” she said.
Her other work runs the same line. Color of Us is an immersive exhibition about colorism, funded by a Houston Arts Alliance grant and built out of Nina Simone’s 1966 song Four Women. These Dry Bones is a poetry collection drawn from Ezekiel 37. The Heart Pour is a workshop that puts abstract painting and color psychology next to writing prompts. Her Birth Month Flower Series is twelve floral portraits. Before Houston she hosted a spoken word show called Speak on Time Warner Cable in California and a faith-based open mic called Mouthpiece.
Her husband, Brandgier Bradley, said she has a tendency to doubt herself, and described finding her still at work at three in the morning.
Her own line is shorter than anything else on the wall. “You’re never too old to begin again.”
