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A truly inspiring story of how public art is being used as a vehicle for neighborhood revitalization and community building in Houston.
"Although it’s hard to tell at a glance, this stretch of Holman may be the most impressive and visionary public art project in the country."...
"Mr. Lowe, a lanky, amiable, remarkably youthful-looking 45-year-old artist from Alabama, moved to Houston 21 years ago and lives here in the Third Ward, where he founded Project Row Houses. In 1990, “a group of high school students came over to my studio,” he recalled. “I was doing big, billboard-size paintings and cutout sculptures dealing with social issues, and one of the students told me that, sure, the work reflected what was going on in his community, but it wasn’t what the community needed. If I was an artist, he said, why didn’t I come up with some kind of creative solution to issues instead of just telling people like him what they already knew. That was the defining moment that pushed me out of the studio.” ...
"Mr. Lowe realized: art can be the way people live. ...And the Third Ward could be his canvas. He was inspired by John Biggers, the late African-American muralist who painted black neighborhoods of shotgun houses like the ones on Holman Street and showed them to be places of pride and community, not poverty and crime. “It hit me,” Mr. Lowe recalled, “that we should find an area like the one that Biggers painted that was historically significant and bring it to life.”
"Behind him as he spoke, a phalanx of 22 gleaming shotgun houses stretched across two blocks. Built in 1930 as tenant shacks, derelict by the early ’90s, they were bought by Mr. Lowe and a coalition of artists and others. To Mr. Lowe they were like “found objects.”
Read the rest of the story in today's New York Times (sub req).
Great story. Stories like these lead me to wonder who are the leaders to be in a creative economy? Reminds me of Ben Zander's "Leading from any chair" in "The Art of Possibility" from Harvard Business School Press.
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