» Local man launches #ArtForJustice Virtual Museum.
Standing in line along with thousands of others Monday to pay his respects during the public viewing for George Floyd, Sugar Land resident Karim Farishta was juggling calls for a project that had hatched with lightning speed after Floyd’s killing.
Farishta, who recently earned a master’s degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and will begin a new job next week with the Washington, D.C.-based Democracy Alliance, organized an online, open-call art show last week aimed at parents and their children. He envisioned families making art together while they talked through questions such as, “What does love look like?” and “What does our world need more of ?”
He wanted to show solidarity and find ways to help the Black Lives Matter movement “like everyone else,” he said. In particular, he wanted to encourage young people to share their perspectives, since the future is theirs to live.
Fort Bend County Judge KP George was among those who helped him spread the word, and by late last week Farishta was sifting through so many submitted artworks he realized he needed a platform to share them. The response filled his heart with hope and optimism, he said. “I have been so floored by the kindness and gratitude that’s been shared.”
On Monday, Farishta and a couple of friends launched the #ArtForJustice Virtual Museum (invi.us/virtual-museums/). Museums and galleries around the world have launched countless virtual tours in the age of the COVID-19 pandemic. This gallery is a 360-degree rendering conceived by Afreen Ali and Tien Nguyen of Sugar Land, who co-founded their architectural visualization company Invi in March. (Ali and Nguyen, both graduates of the University of Houston’s College of Architecture, have day jobs with the firm Smith & Co. but found time on their hands during the pandemic, along with customers in need of virtual renderings.)
The Virtual Museum looks enticingly like a space visitors would want to experience in person, if it were ever built.
Dramatic, stark and symbolic, the building features a square exterior of brown and black slats, surrounded by grasses, with a reflection pool at the entrance and Houston’s skyline in the distance. A monument to Floyd in the shape of a shardlike, raised fist rises in the middle of the building’s central courtyard — a raw evocation in the vein of Barnett Newman’s “Broken Obelisk.”
Through a doorway in the slats, visitors find an L-shaped gallery with a rough stone wall at the entry (representing tough times and trouble) and a long shaft of light pouring through a skylight that runs the length of the ceiling, with single trees planted at the bend and the exit (suggesting growth and change).
“The whole idea was to commemorate George Floyd and Black Lives Matter,” Ali said. “Every element was designed with them in mind.” The design also suggests changing the cycles of history, she said — that’s why it’s entered by walking through a cut in the square, the slats of which represent organized lines of protesters. The rock wall is about chaos; the light about illuminating truths. “Darkness evokes feelings of distress, danger and defenselessness,” she added, “Yet the brightest light is found in the darkest places. … We want the light to be your direction.”
Dexter McCoy, another of the organizers, called the gallery “an unconventional venue to fit the unconventional ways that we must go about seeking change and fighting for the future our world so desperately needs.”
To date, Farishta has received more than 160 artworks from 19 U.S. states and five countries (Colombia, Bangladesh, France, India and Wales). Most are by teenagers or people in their 20s, he said. Some were about finding peace, but fury and defiance have a place for expression, too.
INVI’s two-room gallery is not nearly big enough to hold them all, at least yet. “We’re still wrapping our arms around it,” Ali said. “But we plan to grow the museum.”
Seeing the huge turnout of mourners at the memorial for Floyd on Monday made Farishta proud, too. “It was awe inspiring,” he said. “This is why I love Houston.”