Southern Survey Biennial
Project Row Houses
2521 Holman St Houston, TX 77004
October 12 2024 - February 9 2025
Opening Saturday October 12 2024
Curated by Dr Kimberli Gant with support by Cydney Pickens

Round 57 features installations in PRH’s historic row houses on Holman Street from Rabeeha Adnan (Richmond, VA), Nic[o] Brierre Aziz (New Orleans, LA), Violette Bule (Houston, TX), Carolina Rodriguez Meyer (Miami, FL), Amy Schissel (Miami, FL), Martin Wannam (Durham, NC), and Jamire Williams (Houston, TX).

Project Row Houses (PRH) is proud to present the second iteration of our Southern Survey Biennial: a survey of recent works created by contemporary visual artists living and working in “The South.” Artists based in the southern region of the United States offer installations in PRH’s seven art houses located on Holman Street.

This exhibition highlights the collective creativity of Southerners, while providing more viable opportunities specific to the region; specifically residents of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.

Artist Coralina Rodriguez Meyer transforms the shotgun style abode in Houston's historically redlined nieghborhood into a full spectrum habitat. Arco Wasa Kuychi Matriarch Monument sanctuary installation at Project Row House offers rest, restoration and resistance traditions to the institution's uninhibited habitat. Transforming sterile, institutional walls into vibrant sanctuaries; the scintillating retablo resists assimilation with multisensory, kinetic documentary sculpture and photography.

Translated as "Back Bridge Rainbow", the work celebrates ancient Andean rituals such as the deity Kuychi whose rainbow is an auspicious yet mournful symbol for the petrified son of the sun God. Combining ancestral pre-colonial traditions with trans-disciplinary solidarity across American diasporas, the work continues Gloria Anzaldua’s This Bridge Called My Back. Artist
Coralina Rodriguez Meyer’s installation translates their matriarchal resistance work across media and advocacy with climate and reproductive justice leaders in collaboration with their neighbors. Vibrant, kinetic fertility effigies recal mummification rituals cultivated in the Mama Spa Botanica collaborative workshop (2007-present). Documentary sculptures from Mother Mold birth mask textile casts, Flora Aura carnival palm weavings, Linea Negra photographs, Foliage Obscura hurricane debris paintings on serape textiles nest PRH viewers.

Conceived in the interior domestic sanctuaries where doulas preserve indigenous craft traditions while safely delivering life in a state with the highest maternal death rate in the US. The works translate embodied knowledge across neighbors, genders, generations and geography.

Welcoming viewers to the underground fertility network thriving in FL, a spiraling fertility effigy warns viewers of the texture and complexion of the American Castas system. The retablo merges painting, carnival palm weaving, documentary sculpture and photography into an immersive habitat of iridescent light. Culminating in a full spectrum “Virgen Gruta” Mother Mold monument, the tableaux documents endangered flora, fauna and activists surviving redlines, while hovering above rising tidelines. Flowing iconography from the Sacred Valley to the Saltwater underground railroad, from the Buffalo Bayou aquifer to our democratic fertility today, the work honors living and ancestral community organizers risking their lives to strengthen interdependent solidarities in America. Evolving beyond the impact of plantation labor systems on LGBTQIA+ melanated families today, the polychromatic installation celebrates endangered, syncretic plantology wisdom. The lifesaving work of doulas, griots, quipucamayocs, advocates and botanicas across media and discipline illuminates neon rituals vibrating in native narratives. FL families are preserved in statues to overcome deadly statutes in FL where maternal and infant mortality rate is 2x national average at 200 deaths x 100,000 live births (NIH 2023). Linea Negra photographs document fertile families overcoming man made and natural disasters in Miami ranging from legislation, hurricanes, urban heat zones, climate gentrification or species collapse.

Mama Spa Botanica project (2007-Present) is a full-spectrum cultural medicine workshop restoring dignity and divinity to vulnerable, yet unvanquished people, plants and hybrid habitats. Collaboratively created by, of and for LGBTQIA+ melanated kin, the works are moving monuments to survivors of conflicting climate and reproductive health crisis in America. Documentary sculpture, photography and agency-building workshops translate syncretic liberation theologies to future ancestors.

Mother Mold monuments cast pregnant people into fertility effigies using mummification rituals in documentary sculptures of intimate waste & environmental ephemera cast in domestic construction materials.

Installation photographs by Alex Barber

https://projectrowhouses.org/rounds/round-57/