Satchel Lee’s First Solo Show Sheds Light on a Hidden Houston Neighborhood

On September 5, artist Satchel Lee, the daughter of iconic filmmaker and New York City resident Spike Lee, is getting her first solo show. Born and raised in Manhattan, Lee describes herself as “such a Yankee,” but her new exhibition, Where We Find Ourselves, held at the Freedmen’s Town Visitors Center in Houston, has the 30-year-old stepping away from her geographic roots and exploring the history of a community she wasn’t even aware of a year ago.

Where We Find Ourselves tells the story of Freedmen’s Town, a small neighborhood in Houston, which became a refuge for recently freed slaves following the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. Initially, the city handed over what they thought was worthless land. But by the time the town was built up and thriving, Houston officials had stepped back in, placing a highway through the neighborhood and allowing it to fall into disrepair. The Freedmen’s Town we see today is a fraction of the size of its 19th-century self, but current residents remain hard at work to preserve its legacy. Through photography, film, architectural modeling, and installation, Lee tells the story of this community, investigating both the past and present to help shape Freedmen’s Town’s future.

Lee first learned of Freedmen’s Town in 2024, when she visited Houston for Theaster Gates and Eliza Myrie’s Black Artists Retreat. Despite being “very much a New Yorker,” Lee still connected to the town’s history. “It felt like a part of my story, a part of my legacy as an African-American,” she says. So when she was offered the opportunity to create a show about the town, she heartily accepted.

While Lee is likely most known for her portraiture work, she diverges from her usual subjects for Where We Find Ourselves. The exhibition showcases a series of small-scale models, which Lee created with the help of a fabricator. The process was therapeutic. “Decreasing the size of these places helped me wrap my mind around what happened in Freedmen’s Town,” she notes. Conversely, photographing the models and blowing them up for display renders them rightfully monumental.

Each model represents the current state of a historically relevant location in Freedmen’s Town. There’s the first church ever established in the neighborhood and an empty lot, formerly the site of a house owned by Jack Yates, a minister and founding member of the location. A house, depicted in “She Has Land And It Still Stands,” shows the home of Isabelle Sims, the first woman in the community to own property. The structure remains, as the name of the work suggests, but it’s falling apart, with tarps tossed on the roof as an easy fix.

But within Lee’s photography, the models aren’t placed on the streets of Freedmen’s Town. Instead, they float in a black void. “Have you seen Sinners?” she asks. The Ryan Coogler film starring two Michael B. Jordans is “the most exciting thing” Lee has seen all year. She dives into the description of one scene in particular: Miles Canton’s Sam Moore plays a blues song for the guests of the juke joint, and time folds in on itself. Suddenly, the past, present, and future of music collide as African tribal dancers share space with ’90s rappers and modern ballerinas in 1932 Mississippi.

“That’s what is happening in Freedmen’s Town,” Lee explains. “You have all of this time stacked on top of each other. These places are in a space between the past and the future. They were there in 1865, they’re there now. There are plans to restore some of them, but right now, they’re kind of waiting.”

In addition to the photographs, Lee created a documentary for the exhibition, for which she spoke to four members of the Freedmen’s Town community. “I thought it was important to hear from people who actually live there,” Lee says. She is very aware of her outsider status and wanted to ensure the town’s natives were represented in her work. Like the models, Lee’s documentary subjects also represent various Freedmen’s Town experiences. There’s Charonda Johnson, who Lee calls “the unofficial mayor,” leading initiatives to preserve the town’s history. Pastor Samuel Smith has been a member of the community since 1964, when he received a message from God to go preach in the town, while Dr. Sally Withers is an educator and historian working to rebuild Mount Carmel Church, which was demolished in 2008. Bobby Johnson, 29, represents a newer generation in Freedmen’s Town, though despite growing up in the area, she was not even aware of its history.

“There’s a direct effort to rename the neighborhood Fourth Ward, or Midtown—to separate people from their history and also make it appealing for new people with more money that want to come into this space,” Lee says.

But people like Johnson, Withers, and Lee are fighting against this erasure. Lee hopes Where We Find Ourselves generates conversations around Freedmen’s Town’s history, not just among natives, but visitors as well. “I want this to be a space where people both from Houston and not from Houston can come and just sit and contemplate,” she says. “Freedmen’s Town feels like sacred space, and it’s important people treat it as such.”