 Community Artists' Collective facade | |
| Founder(s) | Michelle Barnes and Sarah Trotty |
|---|---|
| Established | 1987 |
| Focus | Arts education and entrepreneurship for African Americans |
| Address | 4101 San Jacinto St Suite 116 |
| Location | |
| Website | thecollective.org |
The Community Artists' Collective is a non-profit exhibition space based in Houston, Texas, USA, focused on exhibiting work by African American artists and creating more opportunities for children and adults to explore the arts.
The Collective was founded in 1987 by artist Michelle Barnes and Texas Southern University professor Dr. Sarah Trotty as an exhibition space for professional African American artists in Houston, especially African American women artists. [1] [2] It has become a platform for emerging artists that also provides educational workshops for children and adults in collaboration with organizations such as Project Row Houses and SHAPE Community Center. [3] [4]
Prior to founding the Collective, Barnes in 1983 founded the Barnes-Blackman Gallery in partnership with The Ensemble Theatre with art shown part-time in the theater's lobby prior to each performance. [5] [6] Its purpose was to bring "the African-American community into the arts at every level, from making art to administering programs." [2]
Barnes and Trotty were also founding board members of the African American Heritage Museum led by Dr. Robert Galloway that began in February 1988 and opened later that year. Located in a small space of approximately 800 square feet at 2101 Crawford Street in downtown Houston, the museum's first exhibition featured work by Texas Southern University students curated by former professor and sculptor Carroll Simms. [7]
The Barnes-Blackman Gallery moved to the Collective's first location at 1501 Elgin near La Branch in November of 1989, with the first show taking place on February 11, 1990 in conjunction with Houston Fotofest. [8] [2] [6] [9] There was no heat and no working toilets in the building that had been vacant for years before being leased by Barnes, so she was able to negotiate a lower rent in exchange for renovating the building. [6] By 1995, the Collective included various facilities in addition to its exhibition space such as a library, classroom space, photography darkroom, and a frame shop. [10] In 2005 the organization held a "Fun Razing" benefit party to celebrate the demolition of the old building with plans to replace it with a $22 million, 100,000 square foot building with 8,500 square feet for the Collective. [11] [12]
The Collective is a founding member of the Third Ward Community Cloth Cooperative which was established in 1992. [13]
It relocated to the Midtown Art Center Tea Room at 1413 Holman at La Branch for a period of time from around 2008 until 2014. [14] The Collective has been in its current location since 2015. [15]
The Collective has provided youth programming such as an eight-week summer program which allowed students to show and sell their artwork. [16] It has worked with various community organizations and the City of Houston to help youth use art to develop career goals. [17] Through after school and summer programs, Saturday classes, and workshops in art forms such as videography, ceramics, dance, literature, painting, and photography. These sessions are led by TSU art students, artists-in-residence, professional artists, and Barnes herself. [18]
Weekly on Thursdays and Fridays, the Collective hosts the Jubilee Quilt Circle where participants can learn and practice skills related to quilting and crochet. [19] The Collective held its first Quilt Raffle in 1991 to benefit its youth programming, raffling off a quilt created by Blackshear Elementary and Ryan Middle School students in the after school program. [20]
Michael Ray Charles is an American painter born in Lafayette, Louisiana. He won the Rome Prize in 2018.
African-American art is a broad term describing visual art created by African Americans. The range of art they have created, and are continuing to create, over more than two centuries is as varied as the artists themselves. Some have drawn on cultural traditions in Africa, and other parts of the world, for inspiration. Others have found inspiration in traditional African-American plastic art forms, including basket weaving, pottery, quilting, woodcarving and painting, all of which are sometimes classified as "handicrafts" or "folk art".
Dominique de Menil was a French-American art collector, philanthropist, founder of the Menil Collection and an heiress to the Schlumberger Limited oil-equipment fortune. She was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1986.
Third Ward is an area of Houston, Texas, United States, that evolved from one of the six historic wards of the same name. It is located in the southeast Houston management district.
The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive are a combined art museum, repertory movie theater, and archive associated with the University of California, Berkeley. Lawrence Rinder was Director from 2008, succeeded by Julie Rodrigues Widholm in August, 2020. The museum is a member of the North American Reciprocal Museums program.
The Harmon Foundation was established in 1921 by white real-estate developer William E. Harmon (1862–1928). The Foundation originally supported a variety of causes, including playgrounds and nursing programs, but is best known for having funded and collected the work of a large group of African-American artists, many of whom would go on to become widely recognized. After 1947, the foundation expanded its work in the arts to include supporting African and Afro-diasporic artists. The foundation was among the first organizations in the United States to support opportunities for contemporary African-American and African artists to travel between the United States and Africa to study, exhibit their work, and meet other artists. Mary B. Brady was the director of the foundation from 1922 until 1967.
The quilts of Gee's Bend are quilts created by a group of women and their ancestors who live or have lived in the isolated African-American hamlet of Gee's Bend, Alabama along the Alabama River. The quilts of Gee's Bend are among the most important African-American visual and cultural contributions to the history of art within the United States. Arlonzia Pettway, Annie Mae Young and Mary Lee Bendolph are among some of the most notable quilters from Gee's Bend. Many of the residents in the community can trace their ancestry back to enslaved people from the Pettway Plantation. Arlonzia Pettway can recall her grandmother's stories of her ancestors, specifically of Dinah Miller, who was brought to the United States by slave ship in 1859.
The San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles is an art museum in Downtown San Jose, California, USA. Founded in 1977, the museum is the first in the United States devoted solely to quilts and textiles as an art form. Holdings include a permanent collection of over 1,000 quilts, garments and ethnic textiles, emphasizing artists of the 20th- and 21st-century, and a research library with over 500 books concerning the history and techniques of the craft.
Michael Francis James is an American artist, educator, author, and lecturer. He is best known as a leader of the art quilt movement that began in the 1970s. He currently lives and maintains a studio in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Project Row Houses is a development in the Third Ward area of Houston, Texas. Project Row Houses includes a group of shotgun houses restored in the 1990s. Eight houses serve as studios for visiting artists. Those houses are art studios for art related to African-American themes. A row behind the art studio houses single mothers.
Wini "Akissi" McQueen is an American quilter based in Macon, Georgia. Her artistic production consists of hand-dyed accessories and narrative quilts. Her techniques for her well-known quilts include an image transferring process. In her work, she tackles issues of race, class, society, and women. Her quilts have featured in many museum exhibitions, including the Museum of African American Folk Art, the Taft Museum, the Bernice Steinbam Gallery, and the William College Art Museum. In 2020, her quilts were featured in a retrospective dedicated to her textile art at the Museum of Arts & Sciences in Macon, GA.
Lovie Olivia is an American multidisciplinary visual artist. She uses the media of printmaking, painting, and installations to explore themes of gender, sexuality, race, class and power.
Deborah Colton Gallery, located in the West University neighborhood in Houston, Texas, showcases established and emerging contemporary artists from around the world who work in traditional mediums such as painting, works on paper, sculpture, video, and photography, as well as emerging forms such as performance, conceptual future media, and public space installations. Since its inception in 2000, Deborah Colton Gallery has sponsored exhibitions featuring artists from Asia, the Middle East, Russian, Canada, Latin America, and Europe; the Gallery also promotes Texas artists, providing a visual forum to raise awareness of both local and international cultures and promote cross-cultural exchange of ideas. In addition to exhibiting the works of affiliated artists, Deborah Colton Gallery provides consultation services to individuals, corporations, and institutions, helping them to acquire specific works through a comprehensive program of collecting.
Rhythm of Structure is a multimedia interdisciplinary project founded in 2003. It features a series of exhibitions, performances, and academic projects that explore the interconnecting structures and process of mathematics and art, and language, as way to advance a movement of mathematical expression across the arts, across creative collaborative communities celebrating the rhythm and patterns of both ideas of the mind and the physical reality of nature.
Alvia J. Wardlaw is an American art scholar, and one of the country's top experts on African-American art. She is Curator and Director of the University Museum at Texas Southern University, an institution central to the development of art by African Americans in Houston. She also is a professor of Art History at Texas Southern University. Wardlaw is a member of the Scholarly Advisory Council of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and co-founded the National Alliance of African and African American Art Support groups in 1998. Wardlaw was University of Texas at Austin's first African-American PhD in Art History.
Ryan N. Dennis is an American curator and writer who currently serves as Senior Curator and Director of Public Initiatives at the Contemporary Art Museum Houston (CAMH). She was appointed in June 2023 after serving as Chief Curator and Artistic Director at the Mississippi Museum of Art's Center for Art and Public Exchange (CAPE). She previously served as Curator and Programs Director (2017-2020) and Public Art Director and Curator (2012-2017) at Project Row Houses in Houston, Texas. Dennis focuses on African American contemporary art with an emphasis on site-specific projects and community engagement.
Richmond Art Center is a nonprofit arts organization based in Richmond, California, founded in 1936.
Leroy Johnson was a largely self-taught African American artist who used found materials to create mixed-media works. He was known for his paintings, assemblage sculptures and collages that were inspired, influenced and reflective of African American history and his experiences living in the inner city of Philadelphia.
The Cinque Gallery (1969–2004) was co-founded by artists Romare Bearden, Ernest Crichlow, and Norman Lewis as an outgrowth of the Black power movement to "provide a place where the works of unknown, and neglected artists of talent …" — primarily Black artists — "would not only be shown but nurtured and developed". "Relying on a series of volunteers, Cinque hosted solo, group, and touring exhibitions," and sponsored an artist-in-residence program, which was inaugurated with collagist Nanette Carter.
Michelle Barnes is an American artist, educator, and arts administrator based in Houston. She works with sculptural materials including fibers and papier-mâché, and is the co-founder and executive director of the Community Artists’ Collective.