Rick Lowe

Rick Lowe’s Project Row Houses (PRH), founded two decades ago, has created a blueprint for using urban renewal practices within an artistic context to enrich lives. Located in Houston’s Northern Third Ward, one of the city’s oldest African-American neighborhoods, PRH is founded on the principle that art and the community it creates can be the foundation for revitalizing depressed inner-city neighborhoods (an idea that derives in part from Joseph Beuys’s concept of “social sculpture”). At its founding, PRH consisted of 22 houses on a block-and-a-half; today it occupies six blocks that are home to 40 properties, including exhibition and residency spaces for artists, office spaces, a community gallery, a park, low-income residential and commercial spaces, and houses in which young mothers can live for a year and receive support as they work to finish school and get their bearings. These are all accompanied by programs that encompass arts, neighborhood revitalization, education, preservation, and community service.

Why we love Rick:

• Located in Houston’s Northern Third Ward, one of the city’s oldest African-American neighborhoods, PRH is founded on the principle that art and the community it creates can be the foundation for revitalizing depressed inner-city neighborhoods (an idea that derives in part from Joseph Beuys’ concept of “social sculpture”).

• At its founding two decades ago, PRH comprised of 22 houses on a block-and-a-half; today it occupies six blocks that are home to 40 properties, including exhibition and residency spaces for artists, office spaces, a community gallery, a park, low-income residential and commercial spaces, and houses in which young mothers can live for a year and receive support as they work to finish school and get their bearings.

• Project Row Houses provides programs that encompass arts, neighborhood revitalization, education, preservation, and community service.