Third Ward TX

Streaming video - 2015

THIRD WARD TX - a documentary about community, art, and real estate. How do we bring back a once thriving community—one with a vibrant African American history and culture? What was good and positive and sustaining for the people who lived there? What would this look like now? Once change is in motion—how can we manage gentrification so that it doesn’t drive out long-time residents? THIRD WARD TX introduces the artists and neighbors of Project Row Houses who successfully confront their community’s decay and reimagine such a place. In 1993, a step ahead of city of Houston demolition crews, a group of artists and volunteers, led by Rick Lowe, clean up two blocks of abandoned shotgun houses and paint the boarded up doors and windows fo...r a “drive by” exhibit to draw attention to this deteriorating neighborhood. THIRD WARD TX traces how Lowe, a 2014 MacArthur “Genius Award” winner, and Project Row Houses parlay that action into a decades-long transformation of the Third Ward neighborhood with visionary thinking about art, low-income housing, community building and inner-city renewal. THIRD WARD TX has been used to provoke and focus discussion in classrooms and at international conferences among people concerned with creating equitable, livable and stimulating communities. THIRD WARD TX has been featured at the 2008 Loeb Bruner Forum at Harvard Graduate School of Design; Real Community is Real Art, symposium in Austin, Texas; The 2008 Regional Equity Conference in New Orleans; and Art in the Contested City at Pratt Institute in New York City, among many others. more