SWA Houston Hosts Salon on Six: Memory Match

In their annual art salon, SWA Houston worked with local artists Farima Fooladi and Brad Tucker to present Memory Match, an exhibition that invites the viewer to reconsider the places we often take for granted and the memories attached to them.

The SWA Houston art salon series is a recurring conversation about how the built environment shapes the way we live. This year’s edition, held June 11, featured an exhibition with works provided by Houston’s Inman Gallery and a panel exploring how memory and play intersect with the experience of place. Curated by SWA Landscape Designer Triciajane Asuncion and Principal Natalia Beard, the salon brought together artists Farima Fooladi and Brad Tucker alongside voices from public art, architecture, and development to consider a question central to SWA’s own work: what makes a space feel like it belongs to you?

Farima Fooladi’s paintings draw from her upbringing in post-revolutionary Iran, where social and political upheaval reshaped public and private life. Her work often centers on leisure swimming pools, kites, and tennis courts — showcasing their ability to act as carriers of memory and markers of normalcy within disrupted environments.

Brad Tucker’s approach is rooted in the visual culture of suburban skate parks and offbeat humor. His sculptures and works on paper use foam, roughly painted plywood, and sharp language play to invite improvisation and reclaim space through irreverence. Together, Farima and Brad explore how play preserves connection and memory, even as the environments around us continue to change.

The evening’s panel, moderated by Triciajane, included public art curator Piper Faust, architect and Rice University professor Troy Schaum, and Houston developer Randy Wile. Across disciplines, the group explored how stories become embedded in physical space, where joy surfaces in unexpected corners of the city, and what it means to design places that hold meaning long after the moment has passed. For SWA, whose work is grounded in the belief that landscape is essential infrastructure, Memory Match reminded the audience that the places people remember most are rarely accidental — they are designed, or at least imagined, with care.

Farima Fooladi and Brad Tucker’s art on display at SWA’s Houston studio.