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Where We Find Ourselves | Closing Reception
January 8 @ 4:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Join us for a special Happy Hour Closing Reception celebrating Where We Find Ourselves by Satchel Lee, Thursday, January 8, 2026, from 4–7 PM at the Freedmen’s Town Visitor Center (1204 Victor St., Houston).
Enjoy an evening of music, food, and reflection as we toast the closing of this powerful exhibition exploring memory, place, and Black perception through the lens of Houston’s historic Freedmen’s Town.
Presented in collaboration with the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH), Where We Find Ourselves transforms a restored Freedmen’s Town row house into an immersive meditation on legacy, resilience, and belonging.
Come celebrate this landmark exhibition and connect with the community keeping Freedmen’s Town’s story alive.
About
Where We Find Ourselves is a multi-disciplinary investigation into memory, place, and Black perception across generations, centering the historic neighborhood of Freedmen’s Town in Houston. Through photography, film, architectural modeling, and installation, artist Satchel Lee brings a forensic intimacy to the project, placing the South, and specifically Freedmen’s Town, under a microscope. Lee reveals the physical remnants of a once self-sustaining Black community founded by formerly enslaved people and the brilliance embedded in its spatial and spiritual architecture.
The exhibition navigates the tension between monument and ruin, presence and erasure. By constructing miniature models of historically significant structures and re-photographing them at large scale, Lee shifts perception, shrinking the past to examine it closely, then magnifying it to command reverence. These gestures act as reclamation, re-centering Black stories and spaces that urban renewal and gentrification have obscured. The models operate as vessels for multigenerational memory and questions of ownership, belonging, and cultural survival.
Through documentary films, longtime residents Bobby Johnson, Pastor Samuel Smith, and Dr. Sally Wickers share lived experiences of the neighborhood. Their testimonies counter the visual archive, grounding the work in Black reality.
Installed in a restored Freedmen’s Town row house, the exhibition culminates in an immersive space reflecting domestic familiarity and sacred ritual, inviting visitors to perceive the neighborhood’s history and present anew.
Organizers
Where We Find Ourselves is co-organized by Houston Freedmen’s Town Conservancy (HFTC) and Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH) as part of the Rebirth in Action project. The exhibition is curated by Mich Stevenson, Project Manager—Partnerships.
About Satchel Lee
Satchel Lee (b.1994, New York, NY) is a visual artist and filmmaker whose work explores memory, legacy, and Black interior life through photography film and installation. She reinterprets personal and collective histories through the architecture of memory, using built spaces to reveal deeper layers of identity and heritage. Lee had an MFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Having exhibited her work both domestically and internationally and collaborated with Washington Post Magazine, Vogue Italia, and The New York Times. Where We Find Ourselves marks the artist’s first solo exhibition.