W. Jamaal Wright’s Valorizing the Void: Place and Public Art in Houston’s Third Ward will examine the public art performance of Houston-based black artists as a way to understand the alternative spatial values and endogenous forms of development present within the historically black community of Third Ward, which is rapidly gentrifying.
W. Jamaal Wright is a Ford Fellow and an assistant professor of Geography at the University of Florida. His research interests include the study of urban and black geographies throughout the black diaspora. His writing has appeared in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Black Scholar, City & Society, and Sugarcane Magazine. He co-curated Round 52: Gulf Coast Anthropocene (2021), an exhibition by Project Row Houses of public art interrogating the impact of climate change. He is currently co-editing Consumer Political Economy and African America (University of Georgia Press, forthcoming) by the late seminal black geographer Bobby M. Wilson.