Born in Cuba in 1983, Reynier Leyva Novo treats art as a way of thinking through the world rather than illustrating it. His practice investigates how power, memory, and belief settle into daily life and how those forces are reinforced or undone over time. Working fluidly across sculpture, installation, sound, painting, and research-based methods, Novo examines the mechanics of history—how it is shaped, obscured, and quietly carried forward. He often turns toward symbols linked to authority and ideology, not to reaffirm them, but to test what remains once their certainty dissolves. Novo avoids linear storytelling. Instead, he assembles meaning through fragments: dust, sound, altered structures, and neglected archives. These materials open broader reflections on shared experience, particularly within Caribbean and diasporic contexts marked by displacement, faith, and political pressure. His work favors attention over spectacle, tracing how personal and collective histories continue to inhabit spaces long after their visible signs have vanished. Observation, movement, and sustained presence within specific environments anchor his approach.
Gut It, Forget It. Invisible Houston
Gut It, Forget It. Invisible Houston unfolds as a multi-layered examination of place, erasure, and persistence. Developed through collaboration with local partners, the exhibition is rooted in long-term, street-level research across Houston’s wards and historic neighborhoods, with a sustained focus on the Third Ward, where Novo lives and works. Rather than approaching the city through abstraction, the project is built through walking, listening, collecting, and closely observing the tempo of Houston’s continual transformation.
The exhibition brings together three interrelated bodies of work—False Calm, Invisible Houston, and Sacred Dust. Each employs a distinct material language, yet all are concerned with what is overlooked, displaced, or quietly maintained. Together, they form an understanding of the city not as a static geography, but as a living structure shaped by memory, absence, and change.
False Calm takes the form of a large-scale installation composed of burned domestic furniture arranged throughout the gallery. These scorched objects suggest rupture and aftermath, yet they are not presented as fixed ruins. Resting among them are 3D replicas of local bird species, accompanied by recordings of their calls. Sound fills the space, shifting between harmony and dissonance, becoming an architectural element in its own right. The installation draws from Novo’s daily movement through the Third Ward, where demolition, rebuilding, and displacement occur alongside everyday routines. The furniture carries traces of domestic life, while the birds signal endurance—life continuing amid disruption. Rather than dramatizing destruction, the work registers it quietly, through material presence, repetition, and sound.
Invisible Houston centers on a monumental painting measuring nine by thirteen feet. Its surface appears restrained and uniform at first glance, dominated by a dense blue field. Embedded beneath this surface, however, is a concealed list of historic Houston buildings that have been gutted, erased, or altered beyond recognition. These references are not immediately visible. They can only be revealed through infrared imaging devices available in the gallery, allowing a second visual layer to emerge in real time. This delayed revelation reflects the way urban histories often persist—present yet inaccessible without specific means of detection.
Hovering over this hidden register is the image of a cosmonaut, borrowed from a mural that once appeared on the façade of a building in Houston’s former Graffiti Park before its demolition. Traditionally associated with futurity and progress, the figure here becomes a witness to disappearance. Once publicly visible, it now survives as a faint echo, requiring technological mediation to reappear. The work reframes progress not as forward momentum, but as a process that frequently relies on erasure.
Sacred Dust extends Novo’s ongoing Global Active Dust Collection Center into Houston’s complex religious landscape. The city’s dense concentration of places of worship—evangelical churches, synagogues, mosques, and Buddhist, Taoist, Hindu, and Islamic temples—becomes the source material for this body of work. Novo gathered dust from these sites, treating it as a physical record shaped by collective presence, ritual, and time. The material is presented alongside documentary videos that trace the process of collection, grounding the work in lived encounters rather than abstraction. Here, dust functions as evidence: a quiet accumulation of bodies, gestures, and belief systems coexisting within a single city.
Beyond the gallery, Novo initiated Open Archive: Third Ward, a year-long public call inviting residents and community organizations to contribute personal records tied to neighborhood life. Photographs, documents, audio recordings, and ephemera are incorporated not as supporting material, but as a central component of the project. The archive grows through participation rather than hierarchy, reflecting Novo’s ongoing interest in how histories are formed—and whose voices are allowed to shape them.
The phrase Gut It, Forget It captures the exhibition’s underlying tension. To gut a structure is to remove its function and memory; to forget is to accept that loss as normal. Novo’s work interrupts this process. Without offering restoration or nostalgia, Invisible Houston asks for sustained attention—inviting viewers to recognize what continues to exist beneath surfaces, and to consider how cities remember even when they appear not to.
