The Southern Survey Biennial at Project Row Houses (PRH) in Houston, Texas catches artists at a critical junction in their careers. Now in its second iteration, the biennial grants emerging and mid-career contemporary artists access to a row house in Houston’s Third Ward via an open call application targeted towards artists in the South.
In this edition, guest curator Kimberli Gant features seven artists—Nic[o] Brierre Aziz (New Orleans, LA), Rabeeha Adnan (Richmond, VA), Coralina Rodriguez-Meyer (Miami, FL), Violette Bule (Houston, TX), Amy Shissel (Miami, FL), Jamire Williams (Houston, TX), and Martín Wannam (Durham, NC)—whose work spans socially engaged practices and multicultural perspectives. Wannam addresses Central American migrants involved in the production of agriculture in North Carolina. Shissel explores the potential for evolving psychosocial geographies in the region via speculative cartographies that the artist has drawn and adapted into wallpaper. This plurality of identities and perspectives inhibits any convenient resolution to identifying what the South is—useful in this shifting political landscape, where two of the seven “battleground states” that decided the 2024 presidential election are located within the region.
This social acumen is registered by artists’ decisions to directly involve visitors in the works on display: Violette Bule asks viewers what they think about femicide and violence against Latin(x) women (and, by proxy, if they think about femicide and violence against Latin(x) women). Bule has compiled the public’s responses into a collaborative call and response, facilitated by a QR code, thus enabling a more intimate confrontation with the subject matter than visitors might otherwise be privy to in a state that regularly disappears refugees arriving at its southern border fleeing such violence with impunity. Alternatively, Coralina Rodriguez-Meyer invites visitors to step into their Arco Kuychi Matriarch Monument (2024), which imagines a reality where feminine and ancestral wisdom inform a utopia and ideals of climate and reproductive justice are realized rather than suppressed. These aims are ambitious considering the present sociopolitical reality, which other artists grappled with in more immediate terms.
The Southern Survey Biennial Prize winner Nic[o] Brierre Aziz painted his “trap house” an ostentatious hue of hot pink for the exhibition, in reference to the multihued shotgun homes that decorate his native New Orleans. Inside is a sculptural collage of syringes, empty liquor bottles, plastic toys, tins of chicory coffee, magazine copy, and Swisher Sweet wrappers referencing the addiction and opiate crises that plague the United States, particularly within low-income neighborhoods across Southern states that the exhibition is posed to address. The assortment of objects builds narrative context off of their relationship to and dissonance from one another, similar to the artists’ video collage on display: Tha Block Is Hot! (2020-2023). Named for Lil Wayne’s freshman album, the video contrasts footage of a Christie’s auction of Jean Michel Basquiat’s paintings with illustrations and historical documents that account for auctions of livestock and enslaved persons. The work is especially relevant here in an art space situated in a historically Black neighborhood whose character has been altered by gentrification and the displacement of long-term residents, not unlike others in New Orleans and across the South. The work also calls into question the language that underwrites conversations that regularly occur in the art world: What precisely does it mean to own “an Aziz” or “a Basquiat” and to commodify an artist’s likeness without considering the historical and continued impact of chattel slavery?
In relief, Houston local Jamire Williams’ row house is polished, sincere, and elegant, acknowledging the possibility that communities transcend adverse circumstances by grace. The artist positions sheet music and record players queued with vinyls of gospel music and classic church hymns alongside other articles representing the artist’s devout Christian faith, which include sparse line drawings made with charcoal and acrylics and various found objects, i.e. pews and a hymn board. Williams’ assemblage approximates the houses of worship central to community building in Southern neighborhoods not unlike the Third Ward. In fact, the current marquee of Trinity United Methodist, located caddy corner from the row houses on the corner of Holman and Live Oak, reads, “Do You Believe in Miracles?” Since Williams’ work exacts the same awe and wonder one feels when intimating with the divine, I tell you I just might.
Intended to remedy the region’s historic neglect in mainstream critical discourse due to its geographic and economic distance from the United States’ major art capitals of New York and Los Angeles, the Southern Survey Biennial represents the myriad of perspectives that inform and challenge embedded stereotypes about the South and reflect its host city’s multicultural identity, illustrating, ironically, what makes America great.
