| In a city known for rapacious real estate development and unchecked sprawl, Houston, Texas, has few untouched enclaves. But in the shadow of skyscrapers and bordered by busy freeways, an African-American community that dates back to the 1800s fiercely clings to its architecture and culture.
The neighborhood, known as the Third Ward, has been preserved in large part due to Project Row Houses, a coalition of local artists who came together in 1993 to save 22 identical shotgun houses slated for demolition. Built in the 1940s, the 520-square-foot row houses were typical construction in African-American communities of the segregated South and are iconic in their repeated geometric forms.
“We wanted to expand our artistic practice outside the studio and into the community,” says Rick Lowe, an artist and activist who spearheaded Project Row Houses. The goal was to renovate the derelict homes and thereby instill pride in the African-American culture and heritage they represented. It has since become an ad hoc arts project where the medium is the neighborhood itself.
Originally from Alabama and trained as a landscape painter, Lowe moved to the Third Ward in the 1980s. His large-scale works reflected issues in the community, but a local teenager told him that wasn’t enough. “He says, ‘If you’re an artist and are creative, why can’t you create solutions?’” Lowe says. “And that turned everything around for me.”
He and fellow artists, including James Bettison, Bert Samples, George Smith, Jesse Lott, Bert Long and Floyd Newsum saw rehabilitating the row houses in their neighborhood as a form of social art in the tradition of the German artist Joseph Beuys, who believed society as a whole is an evolving work of art to which each person can contribute creatively.
Enlisting the help of Deborah Grotfeldt, who had experience running other community arts organizations in Houston, the artists established Project Row Houses in 1994 as a 501(c)3 non-profit organization and began to raise money. “Because we were promoting the arts, saving historic structures, encouraging community development and addressing social problems, there were many funding opportunities available to us,” says Grotfeldt, who worked without pay for a year to get the organization off the ground and remained as a driving force until 2005 when she left to organize another community arts group in Los Angeles.
With her assistance, Project Row Houses quickly received funding from the National Foundation for the Arts and the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation to buy and restore the condemned houses. Neighbors hoping to put a stop to the drug dealing and prostitution rampant in the area turned out in force to help renovate them. Volunteers from Houston museums, corporations, universities and churches donated time and materials.
Project Row Houses has in the last 15 years expanded from those original 22 houses on just over one block to 50 buildings spread over eight blocks. The structures, some renovated and others newly constructed on once-vacant lots, are used for art galleries, arts-education programming, artists’ residences and low-income housing. Many of the buildings are historic, like the old Eldorado Ballroom, where blues and jazz greats like B.B. King and Count Basie once played.
Overseeing Project Row Houses today is the founder, Lowe, and executive director Linda Shearer, formerly a curator at the Guggenheim and MoMA in New York as well as the director of the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston.
The Project Row Houses campus, with children playing, barbecue grills smoking and neighbors talking on front stoops, is a sharp contrast to the surrounding streets, where there are boarded-up bungalows and trash strewn in the yards. Project Row Houses not only provides a unifying locus of activity in the form of organized arts events, arts festivals, arts classes and arts-oriented childcare programs, but it also treats the community at large as one grand art project.
“It’s like we are all members of the social fabric, the tapestry of society, you know what I’m saying?” says Jesse Lott, one of the founding artists of Project Row Houses. “So it’s the responsibility of each of us to get out there and tend to the rips and tears.”
A once-frayed edge of the social fabric is Eugene Howard, better known as “Brother N. Law,” who lives in one of the shotgun houses on the Project Row Houses campus. Howard came to Project Row Houses seven years ago after serving eight years in jail for drug offenses. “They trusted me and gave me work,” says Howard, who makes gumbo and barbecue for his neighbors whenever he has extra cash. “I’m not making trouble anymore.”
Participants in Project Row Houses’ Young Mother’s Residency Program say they were similarly given a fresh start. The program provides low-income housing, mentoring and counseling to young, single mothers for two years if they are in school and have at least a part-time job.
“You question yourself when you are a single parent and stuck in poverty,” says Assata Richards, who was a resident in the program in 1996 and now serves as its director. “At Project Row Houses, they saw the inherent value in me and helped me see it too and become successful.”
Richards entered the program when she was 23, struggling to stay in school and hold onto a job while raising her then-four-year-old son. With Project Row Houses’ support, she says, she was able to complete her undergraduate degree at the University of Houston and go on to get a PhD in sociology from Penn State. She says she returned to Project Row Houses last year to “repay my debt.”
Not every person who lives on the Project Row Houses campus or participates in its programs is transformed. “There are good parts and bad parts, but the picture is always evolving,” says Lowe. “Social art is never finished.”
Contributing to the process is the Artists’ Projects Program, in which artists from around the world spend four months on the Project Row Houses campus creating installations for seven of the shotgun houses. Community residents drift in and out of the houses, watching the artists’ progress, and the artists use the interaction as inspiration. The resulting exhibits are on view for three months before new artists arrive and the cycle begins again.
Openings for these exhibits bring out the entire community for ebullient celebrations. Likewise, events such as movie nights, dance recitals, arts lectures, drum concerts and an annual African American Arts Festival are well attended.
“Project Row Houses has preserved the community, not just the architecture,” says Garnet Coleman, who represents the Third Ward in the Texas House of Representatives and whose family has lived in the neighborhood since 1910.
Without Project Row Houses, he fears his neighborhood would have been lost to gentrification. Adjacent neighborhoods have lost their character, Coleman says, when developers built high-priced, fortress-like townhouses that destroyed the sense of community.
Moreover, he says, the new construction raised rents and property taxes, forcing longtime low-income residents to move: “Project Row Houses has shown another way by providing affordable places for people to live.”
Indeed, Project Row Houses has partnered with Rice University’s School of Architecture to renovate existing properties and create new buildings that Coleman says are a “riff” on the row house design, such as the solar-powered 720-square-foot ZEROW HOUSE which was added to the campus last year and uses zero energy.
“Project Row Houses has been very successful and can be a model for others,” says Coleman. “It is a work of art; the canvas is just larger than normal.”
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