Otis Houston Jr.

Otis Houston Jr. (born 1954, Greenville, SC) lives and works in East Harlem, New York. He is a self-taught artist who began making work after taking an art class while incarcerated. Since 1997, he has maintained an ongoing presence under the Triborough Bridge on the FDR Drive in New York, where he stages impromptu performances and a site-specific installation of signage and sculpture.

Houston Jr. has presented solo exhibitions in New York City at Gordon Robichaux (2021) and Room East (2017) and two-person exhibitions at Gordon Robichaux (with Florence Derive, 2018) and Cave (with Miles Huston) in Detroit, MI. His work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including at apexart (curated by Sam Gordon), Room East, the Broodthaers Society of America, Socrates Sculpture Park (curated by Chelsea Spengemann), and CANADA in New York City; Parker Gallery and Marc Selwyn Gallery in Los Angeles, CA; Rebecca Camacho Presents (curated by Bob Linder) in San Francisco, CA; and F in Houston, TX.

Profiles of the artist have appeared in The Paris Review, Hauser & Wirth’s Ursula magazine, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Art Newspaper, The Brooklyn Rail, ARTnews, Hyperallergic, and Contemporary Art Daily. In 2022, the first monograph dedicated to Houston Jr.’s work, Can’t GO Unless WE ALL GO, was published by Gordon Robichaux and Post Present Medium.

Images and videos of his work taken by daily commuters and passersby populate YouTube and numerous blogs. Houston’s album of original songs, America, was released in 2006 on iTunes and reissued in 2020 as a vinyl record published by Post Present Medium. BLACK CHEROKEE, a twenty-two-minute documentary on the artist directed by Sam Cullman and Benjamin Rosen, was released in 2012.