Art in the House: Project Row Houses

(This story appeared in High Performance #69/70, Spring/Summer 1995.)

Project Row Houses, photo by Stephen L. Clark.

Rick Lowe is winning tonight. It's unusual, to be sure, but part of his success is due to the fact that the hard-core regulars aren't around. Despite the fact that Rick hails from Alabama farmland, he picked up on the favorite Southern pastime of dominoes in Houston's Third Ward. "Ella, Bella and Stella!" Rick hollers, interrupting the flow of gossip about an upcoming marriage in the neighborhood. That's the domino way of calling 15 points. We're seated around the ample kitchen table at Project Row Houses, where Thursday night is a very busy night, even if you don't count the regular domino game.

PRH is Houston's most whole-hearted answer to fusing arts and community revitalization. Its grand plan includes a resident artist, a Spoken Word House, seven installation houses, a classroom and a Project Gallery (all already in place) and residence facilities, child care and guidance for teen mothers (51% of the live births in the area are to teens), summer camp and workshops. The heart of the project is the seven houses, which, twice a year, are each transformed by an artist whose work deals with themes relevant to African Americans. The shotgun-style houses are "art labs": full scale installations such as the one by Dallas artist Vicki Meek, whose interviews with former residents of the row houses informed her piece, as well as ever-changing activity sites like artist Jesse Lott's Drawing Room. Above all, artists are asked to involve neighborhood residents in the work's creation and carry on outreach activities of their own choosing during their six-month stints. Houston artist Annette Lawrence, for example, held bookmaking classes at the project ahead of time and used the books as an integral part of her "Re-Collection" installation. Involving people in the creative process, PRH believes, is better than a thousand trips to look at art on a wall.

It's Thursday night, and 17-year-old Angelbert Metoyer is in the Drawing Room, readying a two-sided painting for an exhibit in Minneapolis. Lott appears every week to guide fledgling artists such as Metoyer, a serious young man with a Tide-washed Afro whose career is on the rise. Metoyer, heading to The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the fall, says he has learned far more at PRH than in high school art class; in turn, he sometimes teaches younger kids around PRH the basics of color-mixing. His work is on view in the Project Gallery, to be followed with an exhibit by a Third Ward wood carver. Claudette Davis also awaits Lott as she practices the human figure. Art classes at the local museum school and community college didn't work for Davis. She is deaf and neither institution could provide an interpreter. At PRH, she gets along fine without one. After all, nobody lectures. Several of the paintings adorning the Drawing Room are by an 18-year-old woman from the neighborhood. She pestered Rick so persistently that he finally purchased art supplies for her out of pocket (Rick, who is barely getting paid himself, is known to be good for a hamburger or some spare change-seed money, he calls it).

It's Thursday night, and the Roots Collective (a self-described World Beat Poetry Sound System) is gearing up for its weekly poetry slam. Roots Collective is based in the Spoken Word House, where their rap-style percussion-filled readings have won quite a following in the 'hood. The Rootsies run the Street Beat after-school program, a loosely structured affair designed to give kids something to do with their afternoons. Whether they are drumming with resident artist Joseph Dixon, making videos or art, or writing, the activity is not as important as the personal touch. These African-American artists act as on-the-level mentors and real-world examples. They provide a tangible alternative that, for once, does not involve leaving the neighborhood.

It's not easy to move into a neighborhood like Third Ward, especially if you have habits unfamiliar to the neighbors. But Rick Lowe has been preparing for a long time. He moved to Houston in 1985, and became known in the region partly for his tense, political art-some called it agitprop-partly for his curatorial activities and partly for his political activism, especially in defense of funding for community arts organizations. Rick's artmaking and activism simultaneously fed off each other and competed for Rick's attention. As he painstakingly positioned himself among the overlapping networks of artists, art professionals, local politicians and African-American organizations, somewhere in the back of his mind a plan to fuse the two was hatching. Inspired by meetings with a group of fellow black artists, Rick scoured the old wards in search of a few row houses-the first structures built by freedmen in the South-where artists could do installations. He found a double row of 22, a dilapidated and abandoned one-and-a-half block compound owned by an absentee slumlord. The neighborhood, 90.8% African-American with 51% of the children under the poverty line, was in decay. To Rick's way of thinking, the situation was ideal.

Even before a lease was signed, Rick managed to marshal his friends into volunteer attack teams who would clear out rubbish, scrape paint and replace broken windows every weekend. Passers-by who asked questions were put to work. Vagrants who asked for money were put to work. Eighty-seven-year-old Miss Courtney stood guard from her yard, wielding her pistol to scare away vandals. Other neighbors watched from the safety of their porches, suspicious of a developer takeover. Couples who had grown up in the row houses and married returned to take photos, fearful that the old structures would soon be torn down, and left reassured. All heard Rick's PRH spiel, soon backed up by the first exhibit: artists made paintings on the boarded-up front windows of the Row. PRH called it the Drive-By Show.

While Rick mans the office and the domino table, Managing Director Deborah Grotfeldt is in a series of Thursday night meetings-first with the second round of installation artists, and then with a group of educators and artists to determine the curriculum of PRH's first six-week summer program. Grotfeldt, the assistant director of the Houston artspace DiverseWorks for eight years, brings sorely needed administrative and grant-writing experience to the Row, which the NEA called "a model public art project." Deb and Rick have developed a convincing public style that is part gonzo, part "the-arts-are-a-useful-social-tool" rhetoric. PRH now has a life of its own, fueled by artists, educators, funders and innovators who see the project as a chance to make a real contribution. Architecture students from the University of Houston incorporated neighborhood history into their designs for the project. The Amoco Torch Classic swept through for a week and renovated 12 exteriors with corporate efficiency. Dr. Bob Powell began "geometry drawing" classes that bring a number of artists to the Third Ward weekly. The city's largest arts organizations, community organizations and the neighboring church "adopted" houses and renovated interiors. (The neighboring Church's Fried Chicken did not). The houses were purchased with a loan from local philanthropists.

One of the most successful programs at PRH is Project Chrysalis, a one-week conflict-resolution curriculum developed by former Teach for America participants Dennis Lee and Kelly Garrett. A combination of role-playing, journal writing and art, Project Chrysalis brings in "at-risk" sixth-graders from Houston's public schools. The kids, who are mostly black or Latino, work with their teachers and PRH artists to make a "Dio de los Muertos" mural dedicated to an African-American civil rights hero. In one week they complete two art projects and 35 journal entries, as well as a series of what Lee and Garrett call "Random Acts of Kindness," a habit their teachers say stays with them. When the students return to their home school, they start a project-based club that identifies a problem in the community and implements a solution-anything from starting a recycling program to recording an oral history of the neighborhood. For his part, Lee says, he never thought he'd be teaching for so long.

Rick says he has never expected community work to be speedy. In the first months of the Project, volunteers were frequently met with broken bottles, fresh graffiti and equipment thefts. But progress has been far swifter than expected. Miracles happen every day-PRH recently found itself with a brand new security system and a donated building. Because the project is designed for historic preservation and urban revitalization as well as arts programming, it sends a message of esteem to its neighbors. It brings "cultural capital" out of the museum district and into the hood.

It's Thursday, and in a matter of months PRH will begin the next phase of its evolution. Teenage moms will move into houses fully redone by Chevron USA. They will be joined by a "mentor family" headed by the recently married Ayo Ebert, who currently lives in the Third Ward and was a teenage mother herself. The mothers will have on-site child care and job counseling. The organic integration of arts and culture with critical social services is an ambitious experiment for an artist and an arts administrator. If such a project is possible, it will happen on the Row.

Shaila Dewan is a freelance writer and photographer. Her upcoming exhibit at Houston's Lawndale Art & Performance Center documents the squatting community in East Berlin.

This story originally appeared in High Performance #69/70, Spring/Summer 1995

Original CAN/API publication: December 1999