America’s Cultural Treasures: This article is part of a series sponsored by the Ford Foundation highlighting the work of museums and organizations that have made a significant impact on the cultural landscape of the United States.
“As the architects and interpreters of our community, the artists cultivated an environment for us where social realities were constantly being reimagined.”
Dr. Assata-Nicole Richards, Founding Director, the Sankofa Research Institute
Everyone reading this may recognize, even intuitively, that there are critical differences between art and life. While both involve imagination, labor, skill, planning, collaboration, and resilience, they are most distinct in their starting points. Human life begins in need — the need for air to breathe, food to sustain the body and mind, built shelters to protect us. Art, on the other hand, begins in curiosity, in speculation, in envisioning, and in desire. Artists most often want to bring something into being that was not there before, suggesting a unique way to look at reality and our experience of it. At times they simply want to make something beautiful — because that too sustains us.
Project Row Houses (PRH) is founded in the intersection of these distinct arenas of human activity, in the essential idea that visual art might be utilized as a tool by a community seeking imaginative ways to meet its needs for safety and economic stability, while artists recognize that, for them, making art is just as profound a need. Based in Houston’s Third Ward neighborhood, Project Row Houses reflects an effort on the part of artists to save everyone else by saving themselves. As artist Robert Hodge, who has been affiliated with PRH for the past 20 years through mentorship by two of its founders, Bert Samples and Floyd Newsum, insists, “Art for me, to live, is a necessity, but I get that people might say that it’s a luxury.” PRH has done what few arts organizations have before or since: to make art that can seem luxurious meet real, lived necessities.
Andrew Speckhard, who has been a board member for Project Row Houses for about 25 years, recounts a story told by one of the project’s founders, Rick Lowe. Speckhard recalls that soon after starting the project in 1993, Lowe was confronted by a local student bewildered by his plan to turn several of the deteriorated, shotgun-style single-family houses in the Third Ward, an area located in the southeast Management District and the center of Houston’s African-American community, into display spaces for art. Speckhard says that Lowe recounted this incident to him. “How are you going to help me and the people like me? We don’t need artwork right now,” Lowe said in the student’s voice. “We need someone to help tutor us, to help us do well in school, to put food on the table, to do the basics. When we get the basics, then we’ll start worrying about art.”
This criticism resonated deeply with Speckhard. It was only over time, through his work with PRH, that he was able to understand how creating art and meeting basic living needs can go hand in hand.
Speckhard became involved in the project in the 1990s while he was working for Chevron at an office only two miles from the Third Ward and saw a story in a newspaper about the work that Lowe and the other PRH co-founders were doing. Interested in giving back to his community, he met with Lowe and PRH’s first executive director, Deborah Grotfeldt, and soon was volunteering his personal time. He also conveyed the project’s aims to the Chevron company, which funded several events and recruited hundreds of staff members to help refurbish and renovate multiple houses in the district.
While Speckhard believed in the aims of Project Row Houses, he initially struggled with seeing it as an art project. He admits:
“I told Rick, ‘I’m not much of an artist. If you want to call someone who loves volunteering and helping out, sign me up.’ He goes, ‘Andrew, just picture where Project Row Houses is and the six or eight blocks around it as your canvas, and you can go paint, and you can pick weeds, and you can do whatever you need to do, and that can be your art project.’”
Lowe himself had to grow into the understanding of what PRH could be and do. He arrived in Houston in 1984 as a quintessential leftist activist, a Marxist who was reading philosophy while committing himself to confronting the crucial issues of the time: the anti-war movement and environmental activism. “I came from an old-school activist background,” he says. “I was organizing throughout the ’80s. That was my thing: revolution, card-carrying member of the Communist Party.” At the same time, he began to recognize the specific needs of Black people in his own backyard.
“I had no real connection with the African-American community when I came to Houston, and so my thing was to figure out how to connect with African Americans,” he explains. “As I organized, I started figuring out I should be doing stuff for the Black community.
Part of what sensitized Lowe to the plight of local Black communities was his experience of co-curating a show of young African-American artists for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in 1991 titled Fresh Visions/New Voices. The show was sponsored by communications conglomerate AT&T. He recalls sitting in on one of the museum’s budget meetings.
“There was $2,500 to me out of the $95,000 budget. It was $2,500 for me, and then I’m looking, and all the artists weren’t getting a fee or anything,” he says. “So, out of that entire budget, $95,000, only $2,500 was going directly to a person of color, and I’m like, ‘Damn.’”
This was a moment when he understood that, even under the auspices of art projects that ostensibly sought to deal with the plight of underrepresentation, Black artists might still be exploited.
At this point, the term “artwashing” had not yet come into popular use. This occurred in 2017 when protests were organized around commercial art galleries’ encroachment on the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. Protesters claimed the presence of these galleries forced out local shops and services and drove up property prices. They also claimed that rapacious property developers were using the businesses to “artwash” a district in order to prepare it for development for a more expensive and exclusive demographic, that is to say, to prime the area for gentrification. Now, “artwash” is also used to critique corporate entities that partner with local art institutions or collectives, hoping to burnish their reputations.
Though Lowe did not use this term to describe his efforts, he recognized that something like artwashing was happening in Houston’s poorer areas in the early 1990s. To combat that trend, he did what he had been doing already: He organized artists into a union to support the arts around ideas of freedom of expression — the Union of Independent Artists (UIA), which at its high point in 1990 had 350 members. At the same time, from 1987 to 1992, Lowe was volunteering at the SHAPE (Self-Help for African People through Education) Community Center in the Third Ward and wanted to bring together the two distinct aspects of his work by having the artists in the union help the people at SHAPE confront the issue of police brutality. Yet, as Lowe explains, they resisted this invitation.
“They wouldn’t do it. They turned their backs and basically said that I was trying to use the Union of Independent Artists for my own personal agenda, which was the issues of the Black community, which wasn’t the issue,” he says. “It was freedom of expression in the arts. That was the point in time I decided: I’m done with y’all. I’m going to go find me some Black people.”
Lowe’s search for a way to bring together his deep philosophical interest in the emancipatory potential of art-making and his commitment to addressing the needs of people who looked like him in the community in which he lived brought him back to books: “I tried to read my way into understanding stuff. As an artist trying to do artwork that had real impact, I was feeling unsatisfied with making paintings even though they were directly about issues of police brutality.”
It was Joseph Beuys’s 1993 book Energy Plan for the Western Man that provided the initial spark. “I flipped through it and saw that chapter that said ‘social sculpture,’ and I went like, ‘What the hell is that?’ And then I read a little bit about it, and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s cool,’” he recalls. “At that point, while we were looking around trying to figure out what we could do as an artist group, I was trying to figure out how to use my organizing skills and my newfound interest in social sculpture. That was kind of the beginning.”
As a performance artist member of the Fluxus art movement, teacher, and researcher (like Lowe), Beuys too had sought out new connections between art and life. He coined the term “social sculpture” in the 1970s rooted in the idea that, as the Tate’s website explains, “everything is art, that every aspect of life could be approached creatively, and, as a result, everyone has the potential to be an artist.” This concept seemed to be the connective tissue that Lowe had been seeking, but how to apply it practically would become apparent only after an exploratory ride through the Third Ward.
In 1992, Lowe joined local elders and city officials on a bus tour, in his words, of the “dangerous places in the community, an area ripped apart by the ’80s crack epidemic.” Lowe listened with skepticism as the city officials recommended demolishing the rows of shotgun-style houses “because these are like drug havens.”
“This would have been gone. They didn’t have the foresight. They saw the problem as being buildings as opposed to other things,” Lowe recalls. “[That] actually was kind of a pre-gentrification activity because, generally developers, when they’re gentrifying, want vacant land. That’s the best scenario for developers, and so the community was laying it out for them.”
In the 2018 anthology Collective Creative Actions: Project Row Houses at 25, Ryan Dennis, its editor and a PRH officer who served eight years total in the roles of curator, public art director, and programs director, writes that Lowe was influenced by the paintings of John Biggers. Born in North Carolina in 1924, Biggers eventually earned a doctorate in education at Pennsylvania State University while also establishing a reputation as a preeminent artist known for his murals, drawings, paintings, and sculpture. In 1949, he founded the art department at Texas State University for Negroes (renamed Texas Southern University in 1951) less than a mile from what would become the headquarters of Project Row Houses. As Dennis conveys, when Lowe saw the dilapidated, abandoned homes, he was able to see that Biggers’s paintings of the same style of “Black vernacular architecture” represented an important architectural legacy that residents of the Third Ward weren’t fully appreciating. Lowe understood that the community would lose something vital if these houses were razed because they had fallen into disrepair.
Shotgun houses were among the most popular styles of domicile in the South from the end of the Civil War through the 1920s. They also appear across the African diasporic community, from the Caribbean to the Americas. Similar housing designs can be found in Haiti, Key West in Florida, and Chicago, Illinois.
Sol Diaz, the current docent manager and installation coordinator, emphasizes the significance of these structures. “An architectural feature of every shotgun-style house would be that the front door and the back door line up,” they explained. “People say that you could shoot a shotgun through the house without hitting any walls. But when those doors line up, a cross-breeze comes through and cools the house down. Also, we have sources that indicate that shotgun is a Creolization of the word ‘shogun,’ which is Yoruba. The architectural features of these houses have ancestry.”
Rather than allow these homes and histories to be erased, Lowe joined hands with six other artists, the co-founders of what would become Project Row Houses — James Bettison (1958–1997), Bert Long Jr. (1940–2013), Jesse Lott (1943–2023), Floyd Newsum (1950–2024), Bert Samples, and George Smith — to rescue some of the houses and use them as display spaces for their artwork. This plan meant chasing down the owner of the houses who at the time, according to Lowe, was living in Taiwan. Lowe says he contacted him several times via postal mail, and only after securing a letter of intent from the National Endowment for the Arts to provide the artists with $25,000 for the purchase of the lot did he receive a reply.
Though they initially only wanted seven houses, the owner insisted that they purchase his entire lot of 22 houses, and they did, using $32,000 of seed money garnered from the National Endowment for the Arts and other donated funds as a downpayment. According to Lowe, this meant even more investment than raising the money to make up the difference: They had to sign a lease-purchase agreement for $122,000, which in his words, “at the time seemed crazy.” At this point, the theoretical construct of “social sculpture” began to take on real meaning when it met the practical needs of writing grant applications, securing loans, creating an organizational structure, and so on. Just so, the needs of a community in crisis met with the artists’ desires to find ways to be both free in their work and relevant and helpful to their neighbors.
Lowe admits that, at first, he wasn’t sure that this odd intersection of art and life would be comprehensible or useful to the community. “I didn’t have a clue how it would change anything,” he says. “At that very early stage, I had this idea of social sculpture as this kind of community uplift, but I didn’t really grasp what it meant in relation to this thing, because in the beginning there was no framework for doing anything other than the seven of us doing an art show guerilla style, doing an art show in some of these houses. I never had the sense that Project Row Houses is only art; it’s many other things.”
Major institutions have come around to recognizing the utility of the idea of intermingling art and life to improve a community’s circumstances. In 2014, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation named Lowe to the MacArthur Fellows Program for his work on Project Row Houses.
Still, the conviction that they needed to care for a community in need clarified their mission. As Newsum summarizes, “As long as those houses served as a vehicle for sharing art, it’s an art project, but an art project with a purpose, not just displaying, but helping the community.”
Practically, this meant mobilizing volunteers, sponsors, and other support to get the houses in shape to operate both as artist canvases and as livable quarters for the residents of the Third Ward. Hasty Johnson, who was a board member of PRH for six years until his passing in February and was a longtime employee of Hines, one of the largest private real estate businesses in the world, was key to getting that initial housing block renovated and rebuilt. He mobilized volunteers and helped to secure materials. Johnson was encouraged to support PRH in part because a cost-benefit analysis of the project showed him that his work could have a meaningful impact.
“For about $35,000 a house, we brought them all up to code,” Johnson said. “We put in air conditioning. The plumbing was in terrible shape. For the amount that somebody could sponsor a fancy table at a gala, you could completely change a house and a whole family’s life.”
As of this writing, PRH maintains its headquarters on Holman Street at the beginning of a row of shotgun-style houses painted white, all with manicured, verdant lawns in the front and hand-painted signs hanging from each porch beam that indicate the business or charity that either has sponsored or is a tenant in the house. This is where Project Row Houses began. Now it directly controls 39 properties in a five-block radius. According to Brian Ellison, the current educational program manager and one of the artists in residence, PRH is “the true heartbeat of the city.” Moreover, he says, “It is a manifestation of what ‘community’ means.”
To meet the needs of a community that has begun to take deeper breaths and discover what it requires to thrive rather than merely survive, PRH has created several programs. Among the most important was the Young Mothers Residential Program (YMRP), which began in 1995 with PRH converting seven shotgun houses into homes for single mothers facing housing insecurity. One of the program’s first residents, Dr. Assata-Nicole Richards, who became the founding director of the Sankofa Research Institute, now a tenant of PRH, cites Deborah Grotfeldt as being largely responsible for starting the program.
“Because of her personal experiences of being raised by a single mother, Grotfeldt was deeply passionate about establishing the YMRP as a signature initiative that fulfilled PRH’s emerging commitment to integrating an aesthetic approach into the organization’s core programming,” says Richards.
But YMRP didn’t just provide shelter; PRH was seeking something beyond stopgap measures. In 2006, speaking to Michael Kimmelman writing for the New York Times, Richards explained that the program had greater ambitions. “We came into these houses, and they did something to us. This became a place of transformation. That’s what art does. It transforms you,” she said. “And Rick also treated us like artists. He would ask, ‘What’s your vision for yourself?’ You understood that you were supposed to be making something new, and that something was yourself.”
Another participant in the Young Mothers Residential Program, Shannette Prince, talks about all the resources that were made available to them. While she was there, she moved from being a resident into the role of program manager, which involved developing the yearly curriculum. Each Wednesday during her two-year tenure, PRH provided a two-hour workshop on finance, parenting, yoga, or self-care. For her, these sessions were the most enjoyable aspects of the job. Prince wanted the other mothers to know that “when you leave this program, you should be equipped with all the tools that you need to live a better life. I want you to parent from a place of thriving. I want you to parent from a place of opportunity, because that’s what I want you to pass down to your child. Here’s an opportunity to reset, have a springboard and do whatever else you want to do.”
The YMRP welcomed over 100 participants by the time it took on its last cohort in 2020. The current executive director of Project Row Houses, Danielle Burns Wilson, explains that the program was closed because staff found that some participants were struggling with mental health challenges that they were not equipped to properly address, and over the years there were several cohorts that did not complete the residency. “The final cohort disbanded early when some participants opted to return to live with family in the early days of the pandemic lockdown,” she adds. “It was not possible to bring on another cohort under lockdown, which gave PRH a window for evaluating the best way to move forward.” A community of people is itself a living, growing entity, and over time, its needs may change.
Through various partnerships, Project Row Houses now offers basic goods for the everyday needs of Third Ward residents. Working with the nonprofit Second Servings, they offer prepared and perishable groceries; via Bread of Life, they provide small household items and toiletries; and through Target Hunger, they have additional food distribution once a month, using a mobile pantry. Again, the project enacts its mission of meeting needs while also fulfilling desires.
Guided by their experience caring holistically for young mothers, PRH has developed a range of in-person and virtual workshops that can address the need for professional career advice. They offer workshops on behavioral health, financial literacy, digital literacy, and business skills for artists and creatives. They also run a Creative Careers program that offers both group and one-on-one coaching to guide participants in the areas of finance, career, and income support. However, undergirding all of this is the work of architectural preservation that PRH has done, which makes their programs and initiatives possible — because when human beings don’t have a stable shelter, all other needs become precarious.
Humans also need a place to gather and be social. Accordingly, a prominent emblem of PRH’s preservation efforts in the Third Ward is the rescue of the Eldorado Ballroom, which was a leading destination for live music in Houston’s Black districts during the Jim Crow era. The ballroom was established in 1939 by Anna and Clarence Dupree and hosted well-known musicians such as Johnny “Guitar” Watson, Sam “Lightin’” Hopkins, Count Basie, B.B. King, Arnett Cobb, and Jewel Brown, but by the early 2000s was in desperate need of refurbishment. In 2022, PRH launched a capital campaign with Hasty Johnson and Anita Smith as the co-chairs. Together, they raised approximately $9.8 million to purchase the land on which the ballroom sits and add key elements such as an elevator, ADA-compliant stairs, a small greenroom, a bride’s area, and a groom’s room. Project Row Houses also created a coalition with local religious, cultural, and business organizations in 2015 to constitute the Emancipation Economic Development Council (EEDC), which seeks to protect and preserve the district’s African-American culture and history.
In 1997, to more comprehensively preserve the character of the Third Ward — which is prime for gentrification given its proximity to Houston’s downtown — PRH collaborated with the Rice Building Workshop, through which graduate architecture students at Rice University planned and designed new homes for the district. The program administrators, Danny Samuels and Nonya Grenader, attest that as of 2018, 54 apartment units had been added to the neighborhood, all following the template of the area’s vernacular architecture and priced to be affordable for current residents. The students in the program designed duplex apartments that offered more living space in a similar physical footprint. Eight of the units built on Division Street, just behind PRH, were the first new affordable housing created in the Third Ward in 20 years. This project led to the development of the sister organization Row House CDC, which is dedicated, as its website notes, to “develop[ing] affordable housing, public spaces, and facilities to preserve and protect the historic character of the Third Ward.”
Trinity Pasco-Stardust, PRH’s current resident community coordinator, explains the ways in which this preservation effort is tied to people in the Third Ward feeling enabled in their lives and connected to those around them. She argues that other new construction projects in the neighborhood often do not entail, as the original shotgun house does, a space for civic interaction, where we come together as strangers who need not be estranged.
“The death of the porch is going to be the death of community because that’s where community starts. It starts on the porch,” Pasco-Stardust says. “I often tell people there’s no such thing as Southern hospitality, there’s such thing as a porch, you know?”
The architectural device that pushes us out of our privatized lives to interact with our neighbors is the key to community, Pasco-Stardust reminds us. Its place in the ecosystem of the Third Ward proves that our exchange of feelings, information, and ideas is key to making us ready and able to care for each other, makes the village capable of raising every child born in it.
As much as PRH labors to meet the practical needs of residents, it began as an art project and its “rounds” are the principal way the art comes forward. The rounds started in the year of PRH’s founding, 1993, with an exhibition conceived by Jesse Lott: The Drive By, which invited a variety of artists to create installations on the exterior of each house so the work would be visible from the street while the homes were being renovated.
Since then, Project Row Houses has produced two rounds of artists’ installations each year. According to Diaz, they’re organized by various themes such as critical race theory, the Gulf Coast manifestations of the Anthropocene, and the motherhood mortality rate of Black mothers in the US healthcare system. The rounds clearly pertain to topical ideas, but more than that, they aim to close the gap between art and life.
“It’s an entire community of people that don’t go to museums, and so, how do I let these people see my artwork? I could just put it out here on the street,” says Phillip Pyle, the current chair of the board of trustees. “That was the core of this whole thing: All of the houses are sculptures. They’re supposed to all be sculptures, and their guts are some artist’s installation, just able to make things for the neighborhood.”
The benefits of the rounds don’t just accrue to the residents of the Third Ward — they also impact the artists themselves. Rabéa Ballin, now an artist in residence, has been associated with PRH for 12 years. She talks about how she has grown since she first came to know Project Row Houses, when she assumed she was one kind of artist.
“Before an opportunity to activate a house, many of us didn’t think of our work in terms of the possibility of being installations,” Ballin explains. “It makes you think out of the box. Letting the architecture be a part of the work, especially as a primarily 2D artist in the beginning — now I don’t think of myself as that at all, probably because I’ve been in a round three times now. It completely changed the way I look at work and I did work.”
PRH Co-founder Bert Samples says that this is precisely what they hope to do: “We created an environment that challenges artists to expand their vision and horizon rather than thinking that they’re doing work that can fit in a gallery space.” Project Row Houses tells artists: You do not have to fit where you are now. You do not have to compromise your being to be meaningful to the people you live with. This understanding allows for a deep synergy, with artists testing the boundaries of themselves and their agency, and other Third Ward residents coming to see art not as frivolity, but as attention and care, conscientiously applied.
Ultimately, PRH is shaped by Rick Lowe’s commitment to addressing the needs of Black people while also seeking to be an artist led by a vision of something beyond what is immediately perceptible. The goal of the project is to benefit artists, patrons, and viewers, all at the same time, as if we are all neighbors in the same community, all talking to each other from the porch, our needs for the moment at bay, our fantasies given a moment to fly and glide, breathing pure air.
Brian Ellison came to his own poetic understanding of social sculpture as “the nuances that live in between everything we see every day, the beauty that hides in plain sight.” Yes, this is representative of the artist’s perception.
On the other hand, Diaz is more functionalist in their assessment.
“We’re using that [art] as our medium to sculpt the social fabric around us,” they say. “So as social sculpture, we’re inviting folks to envision the people and environments, society in general, as one grand living, breathing, constantly changing work of art and we each are artists.”
Can we all be artists, even when we aren’t committed to making objects of no utilitarian value, created only to impel thought, feeling, and conversation? Project Row Houses tells us “yes.” It also shows us that our lives can be about much more than simply living.
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.