The art and creativity of Ann Harithas draws from a well of Texas culture, education, and personal history. Born in 1941, Ann spent her childhood between school in Victoria, Texas and her parents’ nearby cattle ranch. Her interest in collage was nurtured at an early age by her great aunt Mettie Harbison. Collage was a core foundation of her learning as a child then evolved to become the predominant medium through which she expressed herself.
After graduating from the University of Texas, she received her MFA from Rice University. Ann went on to open her own gallery, showing artists like Edward Hopper, Arthur Dove, Jacob Lawrence, Jesse Lott, Mel Chin, and many others. During that time, she met and married her husband, James Harithas. In the 1970s and 1980s, Ann championed the effort to direct the art world’s attention to Texas artists, and curated innovative exhibitions that were assembled and launched in collage-like fashion, overlaying styles, personalities, media, and performance that captured the public’s imagination. Her 1984 exhibition, Collision at the University of Houston Lawndale Annex is still remembered for being the vanguard of contemporary art in Texas at the time.
Ann was a founder and proponent of the Art Car movement in Houston in the 1980s. Ann particularly enjoyed how Art Cars opened creative thinking to the masses and changed the way people thought about everyday objects. Already a prodigious artist, Ann diversified her methods and application of collage and assemblage, including the creation of her own art cars. She championed this art form ultimately through the founding of the Art Car Museum in Houston in 1998.
Ann’s art gained recognition starting in the early 90s. As her collages earned the attention of curators and gallerists, her Art Cars began winning multiple awards. Ann also participated in critically acclaimed group shows in Texas, and her work began traveling to national and international exhibitions in Peru, Mexico, China, and Turkey.
In 2012, after experiencing brain trauma that resulted in significant memory loss, Ann returned to traditional collage. By immersing herself in her studio filled with years of collected images, including photographs from her childhood and medical images of her injured brain, Ann regained her identity both physically and mentally, reigniting memories once thought lost. This healing process was the inspiration behind Ann’s series Memory.
After her recovery, she founded Five Points Museum of Contemporary Art in Victoria, Texas in 2016. Since its inception, Ann curated exhibitions by Noah Edmundson, Ernesto Leon, Irvin Tepper, Corpus Christi’s Leal Brothers Lowriders, Mark “Scrapdaddy” Bradford, Jesse Lott, Travis Whitfield, and many others. Ann’s last curatorial endeavor was the mounting of the major museum exhibition Mel Chin: Points of View in conjunction with his large scale public installation Wake displayed in downtown Victoria in 2022.
Ann’s love of art as a collector, as a curator and as an artist continued throughout her entire life. She constantly kept her supplies, materials, and ideas nearby, ready whenever inspiration would happen. Ann had plans for her own exhibitions and further curatorial projects for Five Points designed to be shown well into 2024.