‘A way to build on our ancestral legacy’: artists reclaim a major center of Black culture
Houston’s Fourth Ward is home to a historic district known as Freedmen’s Town, a major destination for formerly enslaved individuals following the end of the civil war in 1865. Throughout the decades the town would grow into a major center of Black culture in the United States, although by the 1970s it had begun to fall into decline. Forces of gentrification were threatening the historic homes, churches and Blackowned businesses that had made the community vital.
Since then, the residents of Freedmen’s Town have fought back to preserve their history and their culture. This work extends into the arts world, and visitors to the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston now have an opportunity to learn about the beauty of one of Houston’s hidden gems, while supporting the continuing autonomy of this community. Titled This Way: A Houston Group Show, this a new art exhibition is a salvo in the larger campaign by the residents of Freedmen’s Town to maintain the character that has made their settlement a crucial piece of Black culture in the US.
“We’re using art as a catalyst for awareness, change, possibility in Freedmen’s Town,” said Mich Stevenson, who curated this exhibit along with Charonda Johnson, an artist and fifth-generation resident of Freedmen’s Town. “This is the first freed settlement of Black people in city of Houston. It has beautiful, incredible historic sites. We wanted to spread awareness of this community’s historic impact on the city of Houston – to highlight a hidden treasure that is not a paragraph in a social studies book but very much alive and real.”
One thing that Stevenson and Johnson make visible in This Way are the many ways in which the culture of Freedmen’s Town is threatened with erasure. The artist Gem Hale’s contribution to the show, a stirring photo series titled The Protest Before the Protest, celebrates the Brick Street protest, a spontaneous manifestation against gentrification that occurred in Freedmen’s Town on 14 November 2015. Community action was sparked that day when a town resident saw that the city of Houston was trying to remove the bricks that form Freedmen’s Town’s streets – one of the community’s prized possessions. “These bricks are over 100 years old, and they outlast any other modern bricks that are made today,” said Stevenson.
As Stevenson recounted, on 14 November his co-curator Johnson was out for a walk when she saw city workers tearing up the streets. “Charonda’s mentor, Miss Lue Williams, always told her, if you see people coming to get these bricks, that’s a red alert emergency.” Johnson was quickly able to round up a group of community members to protest what was happening. Seeing the growing protest, the workers soon departed, and the news eventually reached the then mayor of Houston, Annise Parker, who was about to start a press conference. “We have this moment that was probably as epic as any,” said Stevenson. “And what’s important to know is that out of this came an injunction against further removal of the historical streets. And it brought together new activists like Charonda.”
Hale represents this major community moment in This Way in a series of photos in which he documents the home of the Rev Ned Pullum, whose brickyard produced upwards of 25,000 bricks a day to line the streets of Freedmen’s Town. These photos of Pullum’s brickyard are joined by others that Hale took of a re-enactment of the protest. In one, two young men grasping bricks fill the front of the image, heads turned away from the camera to stare through the window of a vehicle at a city worker, wearing a hard hat and seeming to dissociate as he stares forward through the windshield of his car. The moment is taut, at once filled with drama and potential. “There’s something really special for Black people to stand in the midst of something that belonged to Black people a long time ago and still does,” said Stevenson.
Johnson’s own piece in the exhibition, De Ro Loc, was inspired by the carnival of the same name that ran in Freedmen’s Town from 1909 to 1920. “It emerged as a response to Houston’s version of Mardi Gras, since Blacks could not participate,” she said. De Ro Loc is inspired by ads for the carnival, and Johnson hopes that it captures the energy of the Black community creating a huge celebration for itself. Made of found materials, the artwork includes cotton to honor the workers who would have attended the carnival, as well as a working ferris wheel, because Johnson wanted it to be interactive. “This is my first art piece in Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and I’m so excited about that,” she said.
Johnson’s De Ro Loc is far from the only tactile experience in the show, as many artists have sought to bring Freedmen’s Town to life by recreating things like furniture, a favorite local hangout called The Ebony Bar and a cozy personal space. Gumbo Stool and Gumbo Chair were the co-creations of
the former NFL player Michael Bennett and the architect Imhotep Blot, who died before his pieces could be brought to fruition. The chairs form an intimate space where museumgoers can get a sense of the community spirit that infuses Freedmen’s Town; across from the installation is a pedestal, atop which is shown a film made by Blot’s sister, Amaechina, documenting his creative process, as well as three of Blot’s paintings reflecting on Black spirituality. “This exhibition was also a way to build on our ancestral legacy and connection to friends and loved ones,” said Stevenson.
For Stevenson and Johnson, the crucial thing was to bring in artists who would understand the mission and really be able to capture the vitality of Freedmen’s Town. “Getting people who would serve the community was job one,” said Stevenson. “The community has to see itself in the museum. These artists were going into the community and allowing themselves to be impacted by these stories.”
This Way is proof positive that art can play an important role in building up our communities, creating vehicles for creation, reflection and healing. It is an important step in the ongoing journey of Freedmen’s Town toward vibrancy and autonomy. “When artists care about things, they make other people care about things,” said Stevenson. “This Way is a drop that we hope ripples into beautiful waves, not just nationally but internationally. I’ve seen what happens to communities when artists come together and do really powerful things to heal communities.”
This Way: A Houston Group Show is on show at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston until 17 March
feels almost too trite to acknowledge, shares a name with Super Mario’s ingame antagonist – started becoming the face of Nintendo piracy.
In the late 00s he made contact with Team Xecuter, a group that produces dongles used to bypass antipiracy measures on Nintendo Switch and other consoles, letting them illegally download, modify and play games. While he says he was only paid a few hundred dollars a month to update their websites, Bowser says the people he worked with weren’t very social and he helped “testers” troubleshoot devices.
“I started becoming a middleman in between the people doing the development work, and the people actually owning the mod chips, playing the games,” he says. “I would get feedback from the testers, and then I would send it to the developers … I can handle people, and that’s why I ended up getting more involved.”
In September 2020, he was arrested in a sting so unusual that the US Department of Justice released a press release boasting about the indictment, in which acting assistant attorney general Brian C Rabbitt called Bowser and his co-defendants “leaders of a notorious international criminal group that reaped illegal profits for years by pirating video game technology of US companies”.
“The day that it happened, I was sleeping in my bed, it was four in the morning, I’d been drinking all night,” Bowser says. “And suddenly I wake up and see three people surrounding my bed with rifles aimed at my head … they dragged me out of the place, put me in the back of a pickup truck and drove me to the Interpol office.”
Bowser was arrested at the height of the pandemic, which complicated everything. He was imprisoned in a series of jails, and each transfer had Covid safety precautions that required him to spend time in isolation. Despite this, Bowser still caught the coronavirus and spent two weeks so sick that, he says, a priest would come over once a day to read him a prayer.
Bowser was charged with fraud over his connection to Team Xecuter. While in custody, he was also hit with a civil suit from Nintendo. Between the civil and criminal cases, he was ordered to pay $14.5m.
In transcripts from the court, Nintendo’s lawyer Ajay Singh outlined the company’s case against piracy. “It’s the purchase of video games that sustains Nintendo, and it is the games that make the people smile … It’s for that reason that we do all we can to prevent games on Nintendo systems from being stolen,” he told the judge.
Pirates are usually fined in court, but Bowser’s case was meant to draw attention. “The sentence was like a message to other people that [are] still out there, that if they get caught … [they’ll] serve hard time,” he says. As he tells it, Bowser didn’t make or develop the products that sent him to prison; he “just” updated the websites that told people what they could buy, and kept them informed about what was coming next.
Bowser maintains that he could have fought the allegations, and that other members of the hacking group remain at large. But fighting against 13 charges would have cost time and money. It was easier, he claims, to plead guilty and only deal with a couple of the charges. As a part of that agreement, Bowser now has to send Nintendo 20-30% of any money left over after he pays for necessities such as rent.
“I’ll pay them what I can, which won’t be very much money, that’s for sure,” he says. Despite his predicament, Bowser counts his blessings. “It could be a lot worse,” he says. Bowser has now managed to secure housing, and he thinks that after rent, he has a couple of hundred dollars leftover for food and other necessities. He assumes he’ll be turning to food support services.
While the months after his release have been bumpy and uncertain, he has still experienced worse. It’s better than the time he spent homeless in his early 20s, he says. “I have experienced many things over the years, bad situations and good.” He carried an optimistic outlook even while imprisoned; at one point he was paid to counsel other prisoners on suicide watch. “A lot of other people were going crazy, banging their cell doors, screaming, yelling, harming themselves,” he says. Bowser was paid a dollar an hour to help them, and his four-hour shifts allowed him to start chipping away at his pending bill. “When I was in jail, I was paying Nintendo $25 a month,” he recalls.
While inside, Bowser couldn’t always get the medical attention he needed, he claims, and even when he did, the realities of prison still exacerbated his health issues – he has elephantiasis in his left leg. At times, due to Covid, Bowser could only leave his cell a few times a week and only for about 10 minutes. The rest of the time, he spent sitting.
“For a while I couldn’t even get a shoe on my left foot, so I was walking around barefoot,” he recalls.
At least there was a wheelchair to help him get around. Nowadays, Bowser only has a cane – but his leg hasn’t let-up. Bowser goes to physical therapy three times a week, but it’s expensive. He is estranged from his family. Instead, it’s his friends who are helping him buy food and clothes. He pays for medical care from a GoFundMe page dedicated to helping him restart his life, which received a few dozen donations. He is hoping that he can get disability payments soon. Since he got out, he’s often gone without access to a refrigerator or a stove due to trouble paying his electricity bills.
In the meantime, and after months of inconsistent access to the internet, Bowser is looking for jobs. On his website, he lists all the services he can provide and while he has found a few coding gigs, he’s been having a hard time securing anything long-term. Any prospective employer who does a background check will of course see his legal history with Nintendo, but that may not work against him. A cybersecurity company might welcome his tech expertise, regardless of how he got it. For now, he is getting back into his first love, retro hardware, tinkering away with old-school Texas Instruments calculators. Legally, he’s not allowed to mess around with modern gaming hardware.
If there is one thing he is sure about, it’s his talent. Before everything went down the drain, Bowser had started several businesses that were successful enough to have employees. “I should be the executive in charge of the company, not someone working as a junior,” he says. In that regard, he doesn’t just share his surname with Mario’s reptilian foe; he also, improbably, shares it with Nintendo of America’s current president, Doug Bowser. Gary is certain that the executive can be found somewhere in his family tree, perhaps in a distant branch.
“I must be the first Bowser that’s ever been arrested,” he says, with a resigned laugh.
tural richness, making the scene particularly captivating.”
Temandrota, another Malagasy artist, says practising art in Madagascar “requires bravery”, and “the main challenge is believing in art [when] society doesn’t”.
Madame Zo’s art is about these changing – and challenging – times, he adds. “We’ve seen the arrival of secondhand clothes from abroad – a mark of globalisation – which contrast with the ancient practice of weaving.
“As the artist is never far from his or her society, Madame Zo is a reflection of the changing world – of globalisation in her weaving.”