Space for Us: Afrofuturism and the Poetic Imagination
2025-03-20 - 2025-08-02 | Freedmen’s Town Visitor Center, 1204 Victor St, Houston, Texas, 77019, United States
The Freedmen’s Town Visitor Center is proud to present Space for Us: Afrofuturism and the Poetic Imagination which showcases the captivating works of Aris Kian Brown as part of her community outreach project as Houston’s 2023-2025 Poet Laureate. This exhibition challenges the boundaries between art and organizing, protest and poetics, imagination and demand.
This event is free and open to the public.
About Aris Kian Brown
Aris Kian is currently the Houston Poet Laureate 2023-2025 and ranked #2 in the 2023 Womxn of the World Poetry Slam. Previously an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellow, she received her MFA from the University of Houston. She was ranked #10 in the 2020 Women of the World Poetry Slam and #4 in the nation at the 2019 ACUI College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational with UH team Coogslam. She is a current member of Smoke Slam alongside LeChell “The Shootah”, R.J. Wright, Blacqwildflowr, and Sherrika Mitchell, coached by Ebony Stewart, which ranked #1 at the 2024 Southern Fried Poetry Slam.
She is one of 25 recipients of the 2023 BIPOC Artist and Network Fund Awards and the 2022 recipient of the Inprint Marion Barthelme Prize in Creative Writing for Students with Service to the Houston Literary Community. She is a 2019 Pushcart nominee, a 2020 Best of the Net finalist, a 2021 Crystal Wilkinson Creative Writing Prize finalist and a 2022 New Voices Contest finalist with Frontier Poetry. She was co-granted a 2023-2024 Creative Catalyst award from the AAPI Civic Engagement Fund with collaborator Sonny Mehta, with Riyaaz Qawwali.

Parking is available at the Gregory School Library African-American History Research Center located at 1300 Victor Street, Houston, Texas, 77019.

Celebrate Freedmen's Town: UH Graphic Design Exhibition
2025-04-01 - 2025-08-01
Celebrate Freedmen’s Town is a collaborative exhibit with the cultural archives of Houston Freedmen’s Town Conservancy that features selected posters by the junior Graphic Design students at the University of Houston Katherine McGovern School of Art.
Through the visual language of design, students envisioned topographical data, cultural institutions, and signifiers of history that answer questions about a way forward through the dense legacy of preservation that formerly enslaved African Americans began in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
To view Celebrate Freedmen’s Town, visit the Freedmen’s Town Visitor Center during opening hours.
Thank you to the University of Houston Graphic Design junior block class for working with us on such a special project!
