Folding Stories
Red Thread Collective
(Sneha Bhavsar, Rakhee Jain Desai, Ami Mehta)
COMPLETION DATE
August 2022
LOCATION
Alief Neighborhood Center
11903 Bellaire Blvd.
Houston, Texas 77072
District F
CLIENT
City of Houston
SPONSORING DEPARTMENTS
Houston Public Library, Houston Parks and Recreation Department, Houston Health Department
PROJECT BUDGET
$262,633.00
Image Credit: All images courtesy of the Houston Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs; Photographer: Alex Barber; Video Production: Zainob+Matthew Create
Project Description
Folding Stories is inspired by Alief’s rich history of strong female pioneers, community leaders embracing change, and immigrant families full of aspiration and resilience. At the core of this piece's creative vision was to empower the people of Alief to express their own experiences of living in their neighborhood. Inspired by the community’s namesake female postmaster in 1897, Alief Magee, the artists designed the floating forms to resemble old, folded letters and collected written letters from public schools, long-time residents, library patrons, civil servants, and neighborhood leaders. The sculpture fabric facets are patterned with handwritten excerpts from these letters, ensuring that the artwork resonates with words of wisdom and hope directly from the Alief community.
In addition to highlighting the community’s narratives, other fabric panels were patterned with hand-painted, modern interpretations of traditional motifs from cultures around the world. Through a collaboration with Connect Community, the facets were hand-embroidered by refugee and immigrant women training as sewists living in and around the Alief area. These panels represent Alief’s incredible journey to becoming one of the most ethnically diverse neighborhoods in the country.
These multi-faceted sculptures create a welcoming and inclusive place to gather and reflect, providing Alief residents with a true sense of belonging, ownership, and pride in their exceptional community.
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HAA oversaw the artist selection, design, fabrication, and installation process for this artwork. Working diligently with sponsoring city departments, Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs, and the selected artists, HAA created and publicized the opportunity, coordinated the panel process, managed artist communications, and monitored on-site installation. Recommendation reports were submitted at the conclusion of Artist Selection and Design phases, and a robust closeout report was provided upon project completion detailing project summary and ongoing maintenance requirements.
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The Alief Neighborhood Center combines three City of Houston departments under one roof creating a civic center at the heart of a redeveloped 38-acre active urban sports park. A new paradigm for providing City services, the 70,000 sf 3-story building is the first-of-its-kind, designed to leverage synergies between the Houston Health Department, Houston Parks and Recreation Department, and Houston Public Library for the benefit of local residents, with special focus on community engagement, identity, and overall wellbeing. The combined departments commissioned two permanent interior art works and one permanent exterior work for the new facility.
Video Production by Zinob+Matthew Create
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This project was funded through Houston’s Civic Art Ordinance, which requires 1.75% of the budget for eligible City-funded construction projects to be spent on integrating artwork and artists' ideas in public spaces and conserving the City of Houston’s Civic Art Collection. The Houston Arts Alliance administers the civic art program for the City of Houston Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs.
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ARTS REPRESENTATIVES
Xandra Eden, Executive Director, Diverseworks
Divya Murthy, Artist
COMMUNITY REPRESENTATIVE
Gordon Greenleaf, Artist, Alief Community Member
SPONSORING DEPARTMENT REPRESENTATIVES
Lisa Johnson, Division Manager of Parks Projects, General Service Department
John Middleton, Assistant Director of Spaces and Communications, Houston Public Library
Valerie Bergeron, Assistant Director, Chief Administrative Officer, Houston Health Department
Artists Bios
Sneha Bhavsar is a Houston based visual artist working through multiple disciplines to highlight our human connections - across history, cultures, and continents. Her paintings, installations and handicrafts employ folk art motifs as well as traditional tools and techniques to explore cultural heritage, rituals, and folklore. Sneha is greatly inspired by the connection between art and community. Her artwork integrates materials contributed by community members, creating an instant connection between an individual and the cultural heritage represented in her work. Ultimately, her work offers an opportunity to contemplate our shared human experience which extends beyond our immediate environment.
Rakhee Jain Desai (b. Mississauga, Canada) is a multidisciplinary artist working in textile/fiber, painting, sculpture, and installation. Rakhee's South Asian identity informs both her subject matter and techniques with a particular focus on immigrant identity, belonging and place. Rakhee has exhibited in the USA, Singapore and Portugal. She was selected as a featured artist for the Imago Mundi Benetton Foundation - representing Singapore’s contemporary art in the 21st Century & Beyond. She was the first cohort recipient of the Tempo2D program by the City of Austin Art in Public Places. The Batik mural named ‘A Place To Call Home’ is now on permanent view at the Austin Bergstrom International Airport. Rakhee is also a recent alum of The Contemporary Austin’s Crit Group program.
Ami Mehta is a South Asian American multidisciplinary artist working primarily in inks, charcoal, aluminum, wood, and textiles. Having grown up abroad, Ami’s bodies of work stem from an early fascination with how the archetypal aesthetic identities of different cultures evolve from the distinctive qualities of their surrounding natural landscapes. Her exploration of this connection between specific environments and resultant visual cultures takes the form of both figurative and abstract two- and three-dimensional works and draws from a vivid global palette of layered colors, patterns, symbols, texts, and narratives.