Clean Up Woman: Honoring The House of The Womb Saturday Service

The Saturday Services open the doors of Gold Was Made Fa’ Her as a sanctuary for Black women to commune and unpack the stories and experiences that shape their identities. These services explore the intersection of art and spirituality, honor expressions of sisterhood, and venerate community engagement, while holding space for vulnerability and collective healing.

The first Saturday Service, entitled Clean Up Woman: Honoring The House of The Womb, will take place on October 23 from 1 – 3 PM, commencing with a Hood Gospel.

Featured image: Bria Lauren, “Ganny” Jewel McFarlin, Yellowstone, Texas (2020), 120mm (archival inkjet print), 20 x 24”. Image courtesy of the artist.

A visual poem dedicated to Black hood women in the South, Gold Was Made Fa’ Her encompasses the artist’s ongoing body of work in photography and community building. The project celebrates women of the South Side, Houston, to center and amplify their voices and the voices of Black women across generations who have been impacted by structural inequity, generational narratives, and respectability politics.

Forthcoming: Essay by Danielle Mason.

Gold Was Made Fa’ Her is organized by the artist and Rebecca Matalon, Curator, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.

This exhibition is made possible with the support from The Idea Fund and funded in part by The City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance.

Bria Lauren (b. 1993) is a Texas native, born and raised in Third Ward, Houston. The south is a sacred and integral part of her work as a visual storyteller, healer, and queer Black woman utilizing ancestral healing as a tool to navigate intersectionality as an act of resistance. Analog photography is a catalyst for Lauren to translate her own unspoken vulnerability, visually and to hold space for marginalized voices to be seen, honored, cared for, and respected. The heartbeat and intention of Lauren’s work intersects race, gender, vulnerability, motherhood, and Black feminism. She travels through time using 35mm, medium format, and motion picture film to bridge social and political gaps within her community – to communicate the true essence of one’s identity and truth without censorship.

Rebecca Matalon is Curator at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH), where she recently organized Wild Life: Elizabeth Murray & Jessi Reaves (2021) and Garrett Bradley: American Rhapsody (2019), the first solo museum presentation of the work of artist and filmmaker Garrett Bradley. Matalon is currently working on the Houston presentation of Cauleen Smith: We Already Have What We Need (2021), organized by MASS MoCA, as well as an upcoming exhibition of work by Los Angeles-based artist Mariah Garnett. Previously, Matalon was Assistant Curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), where she organized exhibitions including Tongues Untied (2015), Mickalene Thomas: Do I Look Like a Lady? (2016), Welcome to the Dollhouse (2018), and Décor: Barbara Bloom, Andrea Fraser, Louise Lawler (2018). In 2018, she co-organized Zoe Leonard: Survey, a major mid-career retrospective of the work of Zoe Leonard, which debuted at The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York before traveling to The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. Matalon was a Co-Founder, and from 2015-2018, Curator at JOAN, a not-for-profit exhibition space in Los Angeles that is dedicated to presenting the work of emerging and under-represented artists. She serves on the board of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), and is on the Organizing Committee of Texas Talks Art, a multi-institutional initiative that launched in January 2021.