Published May 13, 2011
Sasha Dela from …might be good: “I was able to catch up with Linda Shearer, Executive Director of Project Row Houses (PRH), upon her return from the ArtTable 30th Aniversary Celebration in New York, where she was recognized as an ArtTable Honoree. Her work in Houston has been invaluable. First arriving in 2007 to serve as the interim director of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, she became the executive director of Project Row Houses in 2009. She has recently co-curated PRH’s Round 34: Matter of Food with Ashley Clemmer-Hoffman, which remains on view through June 19th.”
Read the entire article at …might be good.
Published April 10, 2011
As part of Round 34: Matter of Food at Project Row Houses, Rojas has devoted his installation to the adoration of corn, bringing to life its divine allusions to Mexican and Native American cultures, while creating his own. After studying the flexible crop’s references, especially at a time when it rules as a genetically modified organism (GMO), Rojas’s work is interactive, thoughtful and playful.
Read the entire article at Houston Culture Map.
Published Mar 29, 2011
Round 34: Matter of FOOD emerged as an opportunity to not only address issues of nutrition, accessibility and sustainable urban farming practices but to also celebrate how food traditions enrich lives, create connections and preserve history both in our Third Ward community and beyond.
Read the entire article at Majic 102.1.
Published March 28, 2011
Project Row Houses regularly plays host to art that promulgates direct political messages as much as it engages the aesthetic sensibility. Visitors should be ready to encounter a wide range of approaches to the central theme. At one end of the spectrum, “Spirit House” by Tamalyn Miller, presents art objects exhibited in space, as you might expect from any art gallery. She crochets clothesline and electrical cords into enormous doilies, which have an unexpected magical influence, protecting the house from evil. Miller’s artworks are the exception in this show: the other projects are much more about involving the local community in ongoing processes, providing tools for living, and restoring traditions.
Read the entire article at Houston Press.
Published March 26, 2011
Food is culture.
Project Row Houses’ Round 34: Matter of Food uses that as a departure point to inspire artists Tarsha M. Gary, Michael Pribich, RootDown H-Town, Toni Tipton-Martin & Luanne Stovall, Jorge Rojas and Tattfoo Tan to create their own environment.
CultureMap goes “Art and About” to chat with New York-based art activist Tattfoo Tan, who has used his passion for eco-friendly living to better himself and the communities around him, guerilla style.
Read the entire article at Culture Map Houston.
Published March 2011
This is a neighborhood consisting of several blocks of shotgun houses in Houston’s Third Ward, some of which are open to the public as art spaces. The rest are subsidized housing for single mothers and offices for nonprofits. The idea was to preserve a fast-disappearing, traditionally black housing type and to use it as a springboard for community development.
Read the entire article at Travel and Leisure.
Published February 6, 2011
A block of 22 shotgun houses from the 1930s had been abandoned and overgrown with weeds. Enter artist and community activist Rick Lowe, who rallied organizers and volunteers to renovate the homes, and Project Row Houses became a mixture of workshops and galleries for artists in residence.
Read the entire article at the Los Angeles Times
Published February 2011
It is not through formal concerns that Project Row Houses’ Round 33: The Seventh House is understood as a collaborative project. Rather, it is as the viewer walks from one shotgun house to the next, each hosting a site-specific project by an individual artist, that subtle interrelationships in the work reveal themselves. According to the curators Edgar Arceneaux and Nery Gabriel Lemus, the exhibition is intended to express a dialogue that informed several years of numerous discrete collaborations between the artists on view, most of whom studied at or are affiliated with the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. In fact Houston’s Third Ward, the neighborhood where the Project Row Houses are situated, is an apt location for dealing with the cultural, social, and political problems that are at the heart of most of the artists’ work.
Read the entire article at …might be good.
Published January 2011
The seventh house, serving to embody the essence of past and present dialogues and collaborations between the artists, also functions as a reading room and think tank for community members and visitors to Project Row Houses.
Read the entire article at Glasstire
The MetLife Foundation Innovative Space Awards are unrestricted cash awards that recognize best practices in artist space development.
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Read the entire article at Introspective Magazine
Over a decade before widespread toxic mortgages led to the worst national housing crisis in history, artist Rick Lowe was addressing the issue of affordable housing through art with Project Row Houses, a neighborhood-based nonprofit art and cultural organization located in Houston’s largely African-American Third Ward.
Read the entire interview on The Huffington Post.
by Andrea Grover
Published February 2010
One of the potential hazards of moving to a small town is that you may end up the Mayor. Such is the case with Travis Whitfield, an artist who was so enamored with the rural town of Keachi, Louisiana (pronounced Kee-chi), that he settled there, and inadvertently became the town’s appointed archivist, preservationist, historian and finally, Mayor.
Read the entire article at Glasstire
Issue No. 64 Winter 2009
Although Sam “Lightnin’” Hopkins was born in Centerville, Texas (north of Houston), he called the Bayou City home and Sugar Hill, then a subset of the Third Ward, his musical laboratory. Hopkins was a prolific guitarist who penned nearly 1,000 songs between the mid-1940s and his death in 1970. The Third Ward was his muse and stomping ground; he played clubs up and down Dowling Street, which runs perpendicular to Holman Avenue, home of Project Row Houses.
It’s no coincidence, then, that Round 29 of artist installations at Project Row Houses was conceived and designed to celebrate this venerable icon.
Nathaniel Donnett by William Cordova
Published Winter 2008
Octavio Paz once wrote, “There is nothing worse than a labyrinth without a center.” He was meditating on the reality of cultures that end up psychologically castrated due to a lack of understanding regarding their own past and meaning—due, that is, to a lack of center. Hidden in his comment is the suggestion that we ought to acknowledge the dualities that cultures have to negotiate in order to prevent themselves from going adrift. “At the exit from the labyrinth of solitude we will find reunion and plentitude, and harmony with the world.”
Read the entire article at Art Lies
Published: December 17, 2006
On a strangely balmy late autumn afternoon, while the art world busied itself in Miami with beachfront reservations and limo drivers, Rick Lowe was, as he generally is, on Holman Street in southeast Houston’s predominantly black Third Ward, greeting another out-of-towner.
In the gloaming, decrepit houses and weedy lots dotted some surrounding blocks, on the edges of which were new double-garage brick homes — signs of encroaching gentrification, an unwanted side effect of Mr. Lowe’s work.
Although it’s hard to tell at a glance, this stretch of Holman may be the most impressive and visionary public art project in the country — a project that is miles away, geographically and philosophically, from Chelsea and Art Basel and the whole money-besotted paper-thin art scene.
Read the full article
