Robin Hill: Project Row Houses Round 17

Participating artists: Letitia Guillory, Mary Hawkins, Robin Hill, Michael Meazell, Angelbert Metoyer, Dune Patten, Virginia Prescott

October 2002- March 2003
Project Row Houses 
2521 Holman Street
Houston, TX 77004

Project Row Houses catalog

Project Row Houses is a community platform that enriches lives through art with an emphasis on cultural identity and its impact on the urban landscape. We engage neighbors, artists, and enterprises in collective creative action to help materialize sustainable opportunities in marginalized communities.

Project Row Houses occupies a significant footprint in Houston’s Historic Third Ward, one of the city’s oldest African-American neighborhoods. The site encompasses five city blocks and houses 39 structures that serve as home base to a variety of community enriching initiatives, art programs, and neighborhood development activities. PRH programs touch the lives of under resourced neighbors, young single mothers with the ambition of a better life for themselves and their children, small enterprises with the drive to take their businesses to the next level, and artists interested in using their talents to understand and enrich the lives of others. Although PRH’s African-American roots are planted deeply in Third Ward, the work of PRH extends far beyond the borders of a neighborhood in transition. The Project Row Houses model for art and social engagement applies not only to Houston, but also to diverse communities around the world.

My installations consisting of large-scale cyanotypes affixed directly to the wall attempt to capture wayward moments of beauty. These moments can be found in assorted, unintended accumulations of matter: air born shopping bags, a pile of Christmas tree netting, lids of coffee cups. The phenomenon of the transformation of the physical properties of a material into degrees of translucency is what interests me in this process. As wallpaper, these images fuse with the scale of a space and appropriate that space as their own. Thresholds, moldings, sills, and walls all provide elements of resistance to the paper that, when engaged, give it an uncharacteristic strength and willfulness, visually and physically. My ideas are about ideas in that I am drawn to those that seem to precede my own in random, unexpected situations. The idea of a lucky find is a contradiction ( as explored beautifully by the author Lewis Hyde). Things are found because of the life being lived tuning one to the frequencies of particular events in ones midst. Saul Williams said "Whatever you are looking for is looking for you too.

-Robin Hill