Roots to the Row

Roots To The Row

ON VIEW: JULY 2, 2022 – AUGUST 7, 2022 

Docents at Project Row Houses play an integral role within the organization by maintaining and honoring its oral history through storytelling, guided tours, and supporting a cohesive bond between art and community. Many have met Emily Areta, Sol Diaz and Trinity Pasco-Stardust at the front desk, or have run into the around our site as they’ve helped install our rounds, supported art programming, or as they steward the seven artist houses along the row. In addition to their Docent roles on site, Areta, Diaz, and Pasco-Stardust each have their own artistic practices bringing them together as a team, and guiding them as they contribute to Project Row Houses.

In this inaugural show, we celebrate the jaunt each artist journeyed to the row. Through painting sound, video and multimedia storytelling, each artist shares their history, memory and roots. Together, these works intertwine and continue the tradition of Project Row Houses as a living social sculpture – creating art in community with one another and shaping the world around us.

Emily Areta (MLE Music) is a local DJ, sound artist, educator and arts administrator from Southwest Houston. She is an open-format DJ centering Afro-Caribbean and Afro-diasporic sounds, traversing genres and time periods in each of her sets. Her musical influences draw from her Panamanian heritage, Texas upbringing, and future sounds that she sculpts through her own production. She is co-founder of Juicebox, a platform for Black and Brown women, queer and trans/gender non-conforming DJs and founder or Tumbao a musical archive and sound experience focusing on the evolution of Afro-Caribbean music. She alos host Play Date, a weekly residency every Monday at The Flat Houston. Emily is a student at Houston Community College’s Audio Recording Technology program and has a B.A in Latin American Studies and Legal Studies from Scripps College in Claremont, CA Where she wrote her thesis on the impact of salsa music on the formation of Pan-Latinx identity.

Sol Diaz, is a visual artist and arts administrator living and working in their native city of Houston. Their experiences as a queer person of Cuban and Mexican descent inform their work as they craft an animist vision of growth in marginal spaces and explore the poetic relationship between nature and man. Diaz received their B.A in humanities with a Culture Studies Concentration from the University of Houston – Downtown in 2021. Recently, Diaz was featured within and on the cover of Lo Familiar y lo perdido, a collaborative publication between Mujeres Malas and Fifth Wheel Press. Diaz participated in Project Row Houses’ Summer Studios Residency in 2018 and 2021, Diaz received funding by The Idea Fund for their community-based project, The Place I Know, currently in progress.

Awilda (Trinity) Pasco-Stardust is a Black Afro-Latina woman, part of the LGBTQ community, multiple sclerosis (MS) warrior, and a single mom of three boys. Her artwork reflects at the head cornerstone of intersectionality. Trinity grew up between New York City and New Orleans, Louisiana. The influences of these locations established her hunger for creativity. Stardust’s art trek blossomed in 2011 when she first had the opportunity to work at Project Row Houses. It was here where she held her first curatorial project titled Mythos by Bards. She has also taught a creative sign language art class at PRH and Parker Elementary’s after school program. In 2018, Trinity was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis and now uses the therapy of creating art for healing. She is a participant of Art League’s Healing Art Program and a recent graduate of Artist Inc. Professional Development Class of 2020. She has exhibited work at the Art League Gala in 2019 and 2020. Stardust currently has work on view at Texas Southern University in The City Wide African American Arts Exhibition through Sunday, August 28, 2022.