PROJECT FREEWAY: REFLECTING ON COMMUNITY

by Quang Vu

What we are seeing is that the artists, who reside in Alief, are finding unique approaches to create creative communities.

As we visit and gather insightful experiences, we continue to challenge our own perceptions. With every visit, we are learning more and more about the community of Alief and its residents. This past week, we intimately explored the northside of Alief,  meeting more individuals from the community with creative practices.

Our visits have revealed the ways that the artists who we’ve met respond to the idea of community. As we shared milk tea, conversations, and sentiments with Angela So, a published author and creative writer raised in Alief, we recognized that she — like the other artists we’ve met — respond to the idea of what a creative community could look like from very specific experiences they’ve had in their formative years.

Growing up in Alief, Angela shared how she recognized the lack of support for creative writing. After moving back to Houston, she addressed how she is seeking to uncover a creative literature community specific to her Asian American heritage while at the same time seeks to build on the cultural representation of new voices and narratives.

Similarly, when we went to another Kim’s Tea House in Chinatown to meet with Koomah, an intersex gender fluid multidisciplinary grassroots artist and LGBTQ+ advocate working and living in near Alief, they defined community for themselves through interactions specific to them and their practice.

A founder of several organizations, Koomah reiterated the importance of archiving histories not typically captured and creating space for individuals to exist as they are. Using a small garage apartment in the backyard of a house they were renting in Sharpstown, Koomah hosted a range of performative art and experimental acts expressing the different identities of gender variants in a space they called “Microspace”. Unseen, esoteric, and eclectic, “Microspace” was Koomah’s response to the needs of their LGBTQ+ community.

Quang Vu is currently a senior at the University of Houston’s Katherine G. Mcgovern College of the Arts pursuing a Bachelors of Fine Arts with a concentration in painting and a triple minor in art history, business administration, and excellence in sales. Quang is strongly devoted to fine arts and business and actively seeks to marry the two in ways that contribute to the people and the institutions that keep the Houston art community thriving. Additionally, Quang is a mixed-media painter who makes work that explores queer politics and his personal identity. He grew up in Alief.