After Hurricane Beryl ripped through Houston last July, local families who had lost power found an unconventional form of aid. A temporary home, cooling centers, and hot meals were available at the art installation known as Project Row Houses, a nonprofit based around a set of 22 formerly condemned shotgun houses in Houston’s Third Ward. This act of community-building was a culmination of decades of work by the city’s robust artist population.
Since its founding more than 30 years ago, Project Row Houses has adapted alongside the needs of Houston locals, providing housing, babysitting services, and relief from natural disasters. But though the gathering place has expanded into a resource for the Third Ward, its core remains its art studios and exhibition space.
Twice a year, the organization welcomes seven selected artists to use one of the row houses as a space to work, exhibit, or otherwise incubate their vision. At these “Rounds,” seven of the houses are made available to artists to interpret a set theme. Past themes for the exhibits have included labor, food’s place in culture, and the changing Gulf Coast. The houses have also hosted anything from left-field musical projects to a Monopoly Club started by Houston-based artist Phillip Pyle II to train someone from the Third Ward to attend the National Monopoly Tournament.
Founding artist Rick Lowe was drawn to both Houston and the idea for Project Row Houses by another artistic building in the city. On a 1984 visit to Houston from Mississippi, Lowe and a friend stumbled upon a huge structure on an overgrown Montrose lot, located just off US 59. They poked their heads into the cavernous building and found it filled with vivid “punk-driven” graffiti, paintings, sculptures, and even an open flame. Known as the Consolidated Arts Warehouse, the abandoned space had been transformed into a blank canvas and occasional music venue, hosting punk bands like Austin’s Butthole Surfers.
Drawn to the unconventional artistic momentum coursing throughout the city, Lowe packed up his life and moved to the Bayou City permanently a year later. “Houston was different,” he says. “It had a rawness to it that was really compelling to me.”
Lowe quickly connected with the Houston art scene while making paintings reflecting issues of poverty, violence, and war. He began volunteering with the S.H.A.P.E. community center (Self-Help for African People through Education), which works to improve quality of life for Black residents in the Third Ward through programs and activities.
His early interest in the Consolidated Arts Warehouse turned to full-blown inspiration in the early ’90s on a visit to Holman Street, then considered one of the “worst” areas of Houston. On a bus tour organized by community activists, the group drove by a series of crumbling row houses slated to be razed. Lowe felt a sense of potential—the same one that had urged him to move to Houston in the first place. He saw an opportunity to turn the condemned houses into a collaborative artistic endeavor.
In 1993, an anonymous donor loaned the funds to Project Row Houses to purchase 22 of the shotgun homes. Houston artists including Floyd Newsum, Bert Samples, James Bettison, George Smith, Jesse Lott, and Bert Long Jr. assisted Lowe in getting the project off the ground.
While formulating the idea for the houses, Lowe recalled the work of the late Dr. John Biggers, a muralist and Texas Southern University professor who explored shotgun houses in his art in the 1980s. Through conversations with Biggers, Lowe learned how shotgun houses, which originated in Haiti and West Africa, were built throughout working-class neighborhoods in cities like New Orleans and Houston. Lowe also came across a book detailing the 1970s-era work of German artist Joseph Beuys, who believed that if people collectively implemented creative gumption, they could transform society; he called these cooperative activities “social sculptures.” The communal and unorthodox ethos spoke to how Lowe wanted to push boundaries.
Soon, curious neighborhood kids wanted to help the artists spruce up the abandoned houses, and their parents followed suit. Fellow artists and friends of Lowe’s came by, chipping in carpentry skills and anything else they could provide, to bring the experiment to life.
The nonprofit organization has expanded its footprint over the years, buying up surrounding real estate to create affordable housing opportunities for locals. “What’s great is that community successes are our successes,” says Danielle Burns Wilson, Project Row Houses’ executive director. When Houston artist Robert Pruitt won the U.S. Department of State’s Medal of Arts in 2023, for instance, “I just feel like all of the Third Ward won, and we all felt that,” she says. “That’s what community-based art practice breeds.”
Ultimately, Project Row Houses wants to assist Houston in its role as a gathering place for artists. To that end, Burns Wilson started the Southern Survey Biennial in 2022. The goal for the biennial, which offers a $25,000 first prize to one artist, is to become a major event that can “grow and partner with other institutions within the South,” Burns Wilson says. The most recent biennial, guest-curated by the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s Kimberli Gant, selected seven artists to create installations that embodied a Southern aesthetic. Participants like composer Jamire Williams and mixed-media artist Coralina Rodriguez Meyer each transformed a row house with their personal interpretations.
Lowe, who partially retired from Project Row Houses in 2018, says he’s been asked countless times to replicate the same blueprint in other cities. His response is always the same: “No—because Project Row Houses is specific to this area.” A place like this could only exist in Houston, where can-do attitudes have long helped sustain ambitious art within the city. “If you’re doing something that’s not harming anybody,” Lowe says of Houston, “people will either jump in and support and help, or they’ll step back and allow you the space to do it.”
