Join us on March 12, 2022 from 3-7PM for the unveiling of Resuming Round 51: Mich Stevenson. This exhibition will be on view through Sunday, April 17, 2022.
About Resuming Round 51 | Mich Stevenson: Graves into Gardens
Curated by Sidney Mori Garrett
Round 51: Local Impact II was curated by Project Row Houses former Curator and Programs Director Ryan N. Dennis. The Round was scheduled to open to the public on March 14th, 2020, but unbeknownst to our community, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic on March 11, 2020. As the Project Row Houses curatorial team gathered in the Community Gallery to prepare for the upcoming event, Mayor Sylvester Turner announced that Houston, Texas would halt all public events for the rest of the month. That month then nearly turned into a year until the first phase of vaccinations were released on December 14, 2020.
Our Round 51 artists gracefully shifted with us as we re-imagined how to continue to engage our community. Though we redesigned the approach to Round 51 with video walkthroughs and virtual programming, we also acknowledge that the COVID-19 pandemic (alongside social uprisings, rapid climate change, and numerous injustices around the globe) had a significant impact on the Round, our artists, and our communities. With Resuming Round 51, we invite Round 51: Local Impact II participating artists back to our site to present works that they have created since March 11, 2020. In this series of exhibitions, artists will share the evolution of their Round 51 installations or present new concepts to their actively evolving practices. With the return of these artists, we reignite the key themes that sparked the first Local Impact exhibition in 2017: collaborative public art, social justice, and radical imagination.
Mich Stevenson’s Round 51: Local Impact II installation “Home Safe” was a conversation on debilitating bias resulting in the unjust loss of Black life in America. Mich created an environment for his installation which showed a path to an unrestricted future; one where Black life could escape the pains of injustice stemming from police brutality, racism and the COVID-19 reality.
Continuing Round 51’s conversation, Stevenson presents Graves into Gardens, with a piece titled Yellowjacket No.3 (previously exhibited in the 2021 Texas Biennial) and the debut of Gethsemane. Yellowjacket No.3 is a direct reference to the deadly sting of supremacy as it takes the shape of a klansmen’s hood. Juxtaposed triumphantly, is Gethsemane. Here the convex security mirrors are removed as a tool for surveillance and repurposed as planters for olive trees. In the biblical tradition, the olive filled “Garden of Gethsemane ” is the place where Jesus Christ surrendered his will to God turning over His life so that death could have no sting; so that the grave could one day become an eternal garden.
