Critical race theory exhibit packs powerful punch at Project Row Houses
An exhibition called “The Curious Case of Critical Race … Theory” doesn’t sound like a place to find balance and understanding, does it?
That’s the surprise of Round 53 at Project Row Houses, which presents seven of the most elegant installations I can recall at the venerable Third Ward institution. Curated by Danielle Burns Wilson, a veteran Houston arts professional who joined the Project Row Houses staff last year, the whole exhibition feels carefully considered and thoughtful.
It’s as if all the participating artists summoned Martin Luther King Jr.’s idea that “the ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”
The Education House display provides a simple crash course in the origins and purpose of critical race theory, a scholarly concept that’s been wildly distorted and weaponized to limit what students learn about racism in school. The six artist spaces aim powerfully for the heart as well as the mind, making a compelling case for empathy toward bodies of color and Black lived experience.
The focus of Leah Gipson’s space is a piano where a family might gather to sing, flanked by altars full of memorabilia. David-Jeremiah’s vividly colored installation is a cartoon dream of confused-looking sculptures — black stick bodies with watermelon heads and widemouthed expressions borrowed from “The Scream.” Tammie Rubin considers her family’s Mississippi roots with crisply painted ceramics made from common, cone-shaped objects that read as pointed hoods; she’s also painted her house’s walls black and hung up grids of small red, white and blue flags.
Bradley Ward’s librarylike space honors Black cultural icons and institutions. The members of the ROUX collective (Rabea Ballin, Ann Johnson, Delita Martin and Lovie Olivia) each fill a room in the largest house, immersing visitors in a dynamic environment of exquisite painting, printmaking, design and sculpture that celebrates Black womanhood.
“Shelter in Place,” the installation by Adam W. McKinney and collaborators from his organization DNAWORKS, uniquely employs an actual body as its primary medium. McKinney, who lives in Fort Worth, is a dancer-choreographer with a layered personal identity: He’s Black, Jewish and gay, and all of those things inform his art.
His pristine, daylight-filled installation looks poetically spare at first glance. It’s anchored by a series of large-ish, black-and-white environmental portraits that depict the same man in five settings. This is McKinney in early-20th-century garb, posing as an historical figure whose story was largely forgotten until McKinney unearthed it a few years ago.
Fred Rouse was killed in a racial terror lynching in Fort Worth that began on Dec. 6, 1921, as he left work. Crossing a white, union picket line at the Swift & Co. meatpacking plant near what is now the Stockyards area, he was shoved and stabbed before he shot two white men in defense (not fatally); then he was bludgeoned with a streetcar guardrail and left for dead. The police took Rouse to a hospital, but five days later a mob kidnapped him, hanged him on a hackberry known as the “death tree” and riddled his body with bullets.
McKinney posed for photographer Will Wilson at each of the sites where the lynching unfolded and the cemetery where Rouse is buried. The images at Project Row Houses are printed on paper — to better “embed” them in the house’s DNA, McKinney says — but Wilson created them on metal as tintypes, to conflate the past and present. He also videotaped McKinney dancing at each site to add a 21st-century-style surprise: When visitors upload Wilson’s Talking TinType app and point their smartphones at the prints, the figure of Rouse comes to life.
McKinney, a potent mover in his mid-40s, performed earlier in his career with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Béjart Ballet Lausanne, Alonzo King LINES Ballet and other leading companies. (He now teaches at Texas Christian University.)
His dance evokes a body being pummeled by unseen forces, bowed but not broken. Watching him move, I came to think of him as a human smudge stick, dancing to purge not just his story or Rouse’s but everyone’s.
“Movement as a physical act is automatically a subversion of the ways in which our bodies have been stifled,” McKinney says. He used his body as a canvas partly because he couldn’t find pictures of Rouse. (He even adopts a stern expression common to portraits of Rouse’s era.) “I was not channeling Mr. Fred Rouse,” he explains, “but I was connecting to some of the emotions I think he might have been feeling in those locations.”
Spaces hold trauma, too, McKinney notes. While his dance vocabulary doesn’t change from one location to the next, its tone does. “I did a lot of listening, a lot of internal awareness work,” he says. He moves slower and more mournfully at the cemetery, hoping to conjure more than one man’s history: “It’s about sharing the story as part of the fabric that is Texas Black history … to ensure that we don’t forget.”
McKinney isn’t out to rekindle or sensationalize trauma. “These are dances to bring awareness and dances to bring healing,” he says.
His installation’s title implies an emergency situation but also references Sukkot, a joyful, seven-day Jewish holiday that honors the journey of Israelites who escaped slavery in Egypt — a story McKinney has known since he was a child. Sculptural-looking tree branches positioned evocatively around the space provide a link: They could be vestiges of trees from which tortured bodies hung or the latticed roofs of sukkahs, open-air huts the Israelites built in the desert, where they were also surrounded by protective “clouds of glory” that kept them hydrated, cleaned and fed.
McKinney appears as his contemporary self in a tightly framed video dance he calls “Glorious Clouds” that’s projected as a vertical sliver on one wall, as if it were a ray of sunlight filtering into a sukkah. Here, his intense, spiraling moves explore the “unending circularity” of his own experience. A plaintive soundtrack of yearning — Najeeb Sabour’s music for cello and voice — permeates the room.
McKinney speaks with a calm, measured cadence in a precise Midwestern accent, enunciating each word as if it’s glass. He calls “Shelter in Place” a work of “memorial activism.” That sounds like a newish phrase, but he’s the son of artists who married in 1965. “My mother is an Ashkenazi white Jewish woman, and my father was a Black and Native man; so the notion of social justice was embedded in my being from the beginning,” he says.
McKinney and choreographer-director Daniel Banks cofounded DNAWORKS more than a decade ago to produce art-centric healing projects around the world. Lately, they’ve made Rouse’s story more than a theoretical exercise. DNAWORKS has partnered with eight other groups to buy two of the “Sheltering in Place” sites. They plan to turn a decrepit former KKK hall into the Fred Rouse Center for Arts and Community Healing and build a park at the empty lot that once held the “death tree,” where they’ve already erected a memorial plaque.
“There’s a Jewish value called Pikuach nefesh, based on the idea that if you save one soul it’s as if you save an entire universe,” McKinney says. “The way I’m thinking about that is, if you remember one soul, it’s as if you remember and entire universe.” His work to remember Fred Rouse has also brought Rouse’s descendants forward, including some who didn’t know how their grandfather died.
“Art in and of itself is powerful,” McKinney says. “And as artists we get to trust its power to make the connections it needs to make in the world.”