Project Row Houses: Twenty-Two Shotgun Houses and Thirty Years

In nineteen ninety-three, artist Rick Lowe and six colleagues walked into a block of condemned shotgun houses in Houston's Third Ward with two hundred twenty-two dollars and a theory.

The theory was borrowed partly from the German artist Joseph Beuys, who had argued that art could function as social sculpture, reshaping not just how people see but how they live. Lowe's version of this was specific and local: rather than converting the twenty-two houses into galleries or selling them for renovation, the group would keep them in use as the neighborhood already needed. Affordable housing. An artist residency for young women of color. A community meeting space. A healthcare clinic. The art would be the preservation of the community itself.

Project Row Houses has operated continuously for more than thirty years. It has survived multiple waves of gentrification pressure in the Third Ward, survived the death of its benefactors, survived the period when the neighborhood emptied and the period when developers arrived with offers. The twenty-two shotgun houses remain. The residency program continues. The model has been studied and replicated in cities across the country, but the original sits on Holman Street in the Third Ward, three blocks from Emancipation Park, in a neighborhood where the history of Black Houston is not preserved in glass cases but in occupied buildings on occupied land.

The two hundred twenty-two dollars the group started with in nineteen ninety-three is the kind of detail that sounds apocryphal but is part of the organization's own founding record. Sometimes the origin story is just the origin story.