The Project Row Houses fifty-fourth Artist Round: Southern Survey Biennial will open Saturday, October 8th, 2022. This inaugural round is guest curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Artists. We will introduce the artists at 3 pm, and they will then speak about their work from the porches of their houses, which will then be open for viewing until 7 pm. Round 54 will remain on view Wednesdays through Sundays from noon to 5 pm through Sunday, February 12, 2023. One artist will be selected for The Dr. Dina Alsowayel and Tony Chase PRH Southern Survey Biennial Prize for $25,000.

PRH Curator Danielle Burns Wilson created the Southern Survey Biennial to spotlight contemporary visual artists living and working in the American South. “In a way, the Southern Survey Biennial is a call-back to our founders’ intent to create a platform for artists like themselves, who, because of their race and the places where they worked, were routinely ignored and even actively excluded from professional opportunities in the traditional seats of art world power. A great deal has changed since 1993, but artists from communities long neglected by the art world still need more opportunities to show, grow, and build their audience.”

Guest curator Valerie Cassel Oliver has been in the vanguard of bringing Black art into the museum and academy, giving it the same treatment long afforded to art rooted in the European tradition. Oliver shares that she is “honored to serve as the inaugural juror for what I hope will become a vital platform for artists working within the southern region that is now being acknowledged for its historical and contemporary significance.

Oliver explained the intentionality of inviting artists in the region to submit for consideration, saying that the seven selected “mirror the diversity and vital energy of a new South. Their work has something to teach us about survival and the stubborn persistence of being, isolation and loss, and the intention of being deliberate,” Valerie states. The Southern Survey Biennial aims to highlight artists living and working in the South and create more viable opportunities specific to the Southern region.

Inaugural prize sponsors Dr. Dina Alsowayel and Tony Chase were eager to be involved. “Project Row Houses is one of Houston’s treasures. It is also a cultural landmark in Third Ward,” they explained, saying they are “delighted to be a part of such an incredible endeavor.

Participating artists: Carlie Trosclair, Kandy G Lopez, Naomi Lemus, Rashayla Marie Brown (RMB), Rehab El Sadek, Sedrick E. Huckaby, and Victoria Ravelo.

For more information, please visit projectrowhouses.org.