Project Row Houses

ZEROW HOUSE: Rice Building Workshop

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Art Lies: “Thunderbolt Special: The Great Electric Show and Dance (after Sam Lightnin’ Hopkins)”

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.

New York Times: “In Houston, Art is Where the Home Is”

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.
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