Maya Imani Watson finds the attention amusing.
Strangers hold her umbrella. Bus drivers shout compliments. Drivers honk and people snap photos of her creation: a colorful mural that disguises an otherwise unsightly metal box in a busy Third Ward intersection.
The 46-year-old artist spent days painting the mural at the corner of McGowen and Emancipation, a street she knew as Dowling growing up in the neighborhood. As a kid, her father warned her to stay away from the thoroughfare. Now she’s using it as a canvas.
“It was a little rough,” she said. “But it’s changing. The dynamics are changing.”
Gentrification for years has been creeping through Third Ward, along with other neighborhoods close to Downtown, changing the infrastructure and demographics of historically black and Hispanic communities.
Watson says her neighbors are more diverse then ever — a welcome change, in her eyes — but her mural reflects how she remembers the area. It pays homage to influential figures in the community and her family.
Her work was commissioned as part of the Mini Murals Houston project, a beautification effort that transforms traffic signal control cabinets into art. More than 250 murals already dot the city’s concrete landscape, but in a changing community such as Third Ward, artists say they are not just beautifying.
“If you move into a gentrifying neighborhood and you’re different in some way from the people — maybe you’re a different ethnicity or you have a different income — (the art) is a way to build a bridge to the other residents and acknowledge that their lives are important,” said William Fulton, director of Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research.
‘Richer meaning’
The concept of mini-murals has taken root for decades in other cities.
UP Art Studio in 2015 brought the idea to Houston to enhance the landscape and boost civic pride “where there would otherwise be blight,” according to the project’s website.
The studio came to an agreement with the city’s public works department to allow artists to paint the cabinets. Sponsors foot the bill and host meetings for input on designs that reflect the community, director Elia Quiles said.
Mayor Sylvester Turner’s Complete Communities Initiative sponsored the Third Ward murals, dishing out around $2,500 for each piece. Watson, Israel McCloud and Marc Newsome were chosen as the best artists for the job through a number of neighborhood meetings.
All three grew up in Third Ward, and their work helps deepen the meaning of the area for newer residents, Fulton said. It creates a sense of “cultural understanding,” he said.
“Part of (gentrification) is fear among the older residents that they’re going to get displaced by rising property taxes, but part of it is a sense that the characteristics and cultural identity of a community important to them is going to be lost,” Fulton said.
“If new people move in … and don’t seem to care about anything in that neighborhood, that’s not going to feel very good. At the same time, your life can have much richer meaning if you understand more about what came before it.”
Neighborhood legends
Watson spent roughly 40 combined hours painting two mini-murals in the neighborhood.
On the mural at McGowen, one side depicts Watson’s parents at their wedding. Another side shows John Biggers, a legendary teacher and American artist who in 1949 established the art department at Texas Southern University. A third panel illustrates the Rev. William Lawson and his late wife, Audrey, of Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church.
Both Biggers and Lawson are integral to Watson’s experience in the neighborhood.
Watson met Biggers when she was about 18. She caught him right before he set out for a walk along Brays Bayou, and he encouraged her to make art that reflected her community.
“He was really into the idea that if you studied your history and your culture that it would empower young people, and certainly it had,” she said.
As for the Lawsons, the couple in 1962 started Wheeler Avenue Baptist in their home. The church has since grown to serve more than 12,000 members, and Watson and her daughter regularly attend services.
Lawson retired from Wheeler in 2004 as one of the most influential ministers in the city. In a recent phone interview, he said that Third Ward residents helped define Houston and that black churches gave them a spiritual home.
Public figures such as Deloyd Parker, a community activist and executive director of the Third Ward’s S.H.A.P.E center, come to his mind.
“When you think of the impact of Martin Luther King Jr. in a place like Alabama … I think that happened partly because of places like Ebenezer Baptist Church,” he said, referring to the Atlanta church where King was originally ordained as a minister. “I think very much the same thing happens here.”
‘Beacon of light’
Artists McCloud and Newsome collaborated on the other Third Ward mini-murals. They’re known for injecting their art with the neighborhood’s culture and personality.
A fourth-generation sign painter, McCloud comes from a family of Third Ward artists. He and his father did the sign work for several area storefronts in the 1960s and ’70s. They contributed to the “imagery and flavor” in the neighborhood back then, he said.
McCloud has worked on several murals around the city, including one at the corner of Wheeler and Almeda dedicated to Trayvon Martin, the Florida teenager who in 2012 was fatally shot by a neighborhood watch member.
McCloud’s mini-mural at the corner of Elgin and Emancipation shows a woman with uplifted hands wearing an African head wrap. The image, he said, reflects the dignity of being a black woman. Another image symbolizes “The Tre,” a longtime nickname for the Third Ward.
“It’s like the last remnants of history,” he said of the murals. “It’s something that’s visible that can still resonate with heritage, culture and indigenous representation.”
Newsome’s past work touches directly on gentrification — an issue he deals with firsthand with rising property taxes around his home near the University of Houston. One of his most popular pieces, “I Love 3W,” presents the neighborhood’s real-estate scramble as a Monopoly game.
Through the mini-murals project, Newsome can remind the neighborhood about legendary musicians from Third Ward, such as a saxophonist Arnett Cobb and blues guitar player Sam “Lightnin’” Hopkins.
History is one of the driving forces for his art, he said.
“I look at Third Ward as kind of the cultural epicenter of Houston,” Newsome said. “(The art) is almost like that beacon of light saying ‘Hey, we’re here.’”