Amarie Cemone Gipson, curator, archivist and new scholar at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH), has found a brick-and-mortar space for her growing library of books on black artists and movements.
Gipson launched The HTX Reading Room as a sleek online resource featuring over 300 titles on the last day of February, Black History Month. At the same time, CAMH was becoming more involved in a large-scale initiative to support Freedmen’s Town – a neighborhood in the city’s Fourth Ward that was built by former slaves – with documentation, infrastructure funding and arts programming. that centers the existing community.
Freedmen’s Town was built by and for approximately 1,000 former slaves who laid their brick roads by hand in the mid-1860s. The artists-in-residence imagine the community as it might have been if the city of Houston had protected the area and allowed it to thrive. The district includes seven UNESCO heritage sites Slave Peoples Routes Project.
The Reading Room, a library filled with books by and about black artists, with a Southern focus, collected by a Houston native, is now set to open nearby. “If you want to understand American history, you have to understand the South,” says Gipson.
A previous physical manifestation of The Reading Room by curator and archivist Amarie Cemone Gipson Courtesy of Amarie Cemone Gipson
The 900-square-foot Reading Room space will open to the public next week in the former post office of Barbara Jordan, named after the Houston-born civil rights activist and the first black woman in the South elected to the Congress. The modernist complex, now a retail, dining, events and coworking hub, is known simply as The Job. Residents of Freedmen’s Town will enjoy transportation to special film screenings and priority access to programming at The Reading Room space at Post. The first event will take place on June 8.
As Principal Investigator, Gipson will be at the heart of Rebirth in Action: Telling the Story of Freedom, a partnership between CAMH, Houston Freedmen’s Town Conservancy, the City of Houston, and artist Theaster Gates, whose social practice work on Chicago’s South Side offers a guide for this endeavor. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation gave $1.25 million to Rebirth in Action and named researchers under the grant; the initiative has also received support from the National Endowment for the Arts through its Our Town program. Gipson works closely with Charonda Johnson, Vice President of Freedmen’s Town Association.
This physical iteration of The Reading Room provides a crucial space for independent learning as Texas lawmakers pass bills to ban certain books from public school classrooms. Gipson hopes the library will attract like-minded archivists to the Freedmen’s Town community who have their own stories to tell. She will also have access to materials at the nearby African American History Research Center, in the building that housed the Gregory School, the first school for black students in Houston.
“Freedmen’s Town has a very, very rich history and has suffered from an incredible type of erasure,” Gipson says. “Using creativity and arts education to inspire people or make them aware of their story is the best thing you can do.”
A screening of a documentary on Jean-Michel Basquiat at a previous iteration of The Reading Room by curator and archivist Amarie Cemone Gipson Courtesy of Amarie Cemone Gipson
While traveling the art world for a decade, Gipson felt the absence of something like The Reading Room. She was part of the curatorial team at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2019 while preparing for Dozie Kanu’s first solo exhibition. The exhibition, Function, examined the intersections of art and design in relation to the artist’s upbringing in Houston, where he was raised by Nigerian immigrant parents. Gipson recognized a tapered ledge at the base of one of Kanu’s sculptures as the kind of custom cars known as “slabs” in Houston. A faded purple seat reminded him of the Lean drink and the area’s rap verses referencing the soda and cough syrup cocktail. As the only southerner on the curatorial team, Gipson has articulated these important references and touchstones in the exhibit materials. She was also instrumental in the casting, staging, and archiving of the first performance to enter the Studio Museum’s permanent collection, a piece by a Houston-born performance artist. fall knight.
Mich Stevenson, artist and project manager at CAMH, and the museum’s deputy director, Seba Raquel Suber, see Gipson’s role as central to the kind of intergenerational repair they hope to facilitate in Freedmen’s Town.
“We are thrilled to welcome social changemakers like Amarie Gipson to this project,” Suber said. “Partnerships of this nature and community collaborations are new territory for CAMH, but they are essential for museums to remain culturally relevant, impactful, and position artists as a catalyst for social change.”
