Message Murals Help Define New Harris County Women’s Jail Empowerment Center
What started out as a conversation between Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez and Houston Museum of African American Culture (HMAAC) CEO John Guess, Jr about art classes in the Harris County Jail quickly expanded to the use murals, specifically HMAAC’s message murals in the new Women’s Empowerment Center. Rarely do you see a jail use art prominently to help define its mission.
But that’s exactly what the Harris County Sheriff’s Office (HCSO) and HMAAC have partnered to do with the installation of A Better Tomorrow message mural in the Women’s Empowerment Center visitation room with the message “We find hope in each other. Together, the plans we make today are the way to a better tomorrow.”
Using strong and vibrant colors with lots of energy, artists Zsavon Butler and Danielle Finnerman use symbolic representation in A Better Tomorrow to turn the visitation room into a potentially transformative experience every time inmates and visitors interact. Symbols like umbrellas that suggest protection, sunflowers that suggest growth and butterflies that suggest the ability to reinvent oneself combine to show hope and possibilities.
“From our experience with message murals,” said CEO John Guess, Jr, “we wanted to create a mural where inmates and their visitors will be reminded that this new Women’s Empowerment Center represents the possibility of providing better futures; and we want that feeling to start at visitation.”
HMAAC has a long history of message murals. The Museum sponsored murals throughout Houston’s low-income and neighborhoods of color include We Love Fifth Ward on the historic Louis White Grocery Store, These Lives Matter on the 86 year old Johnson Funeral Home, in Sunnyside Be At Your Best on the Wells Professional Building, and The World Needs What You Have to Give inside Wheatley High School. In each of these, HMAAC transforms Houston’s commemorative landscape by supporting public projects that more completely and accurately represent the diversity and complexity of American stories.
According to HMAAC CEO John Guess, Jr., “What makes this Women’s Center mural so meaningful is that our artists and the Museum get to permanently incorporate a message of hope to members of this community of incarcerated individuals, as we do with other communities in Houston, that need to feel that hope can exist.”
The HCSO’S embrace of this art installation is rarely seen in penal institutions, Hopefully, it will serve as an example for other jails.
ABOUT ZSAVON BUTLER AND DANIELLE FINNERMAN
A Better Tomorrow is based on artist Zsavon Butler’s Rolling Hills. A self-described “abstract-figurative,” Butler’s work incorporates varying methods, mediums and collage. She had an extremely successful solo exhibit at HMAAC in 2022, and her work has been displayed in the Texas Southern University Museum of Art and The Museum of Fine Arts Glassell School and in the Citywide African American Artist Exhibition and at the University of Houston Clear Lake.
Former Artbinsters art store owner and HMAAC Project Consultant Danielle Finnerman brought an experienced muralist to the project. Of her many murals, she is probably best known for The Birth of Venus and La Primavera in Sorrentos Restaurant and for her Piet Mondrian inspired mural at Bauhaus nightclub in Houston and for her King Street warehouse mural in San Francisco.
ABOUT THE HOUSTON MUSEUM OF AFRICAN AMERICAN CULTURE
The mission of HMAAC is to collect, conserve, explore, interpret, and exhibit the material and intellectual culture of Africans and African Americans in Houston, the state of Texas, the southwest and the African Diaspora for current and future generations. In fulfilling its mission, HMAAC seeks to invite and engage visitors of every race and background and to inspire children of all ages through discovery-driven learning. HMAAC is to be a museum for all people. While our focus is the African American experience, our story informs and includes not only people of color, but people of all colors. As a result, the stories and exhibitions that HMAAC will bring to Texas are about the indisputable fact that while our experience is a unique one, it has been impacted by and has impacted numerous races, genders and ethnicities. The museum continues to be a space where a multicultural conversation on race geared toward a common future takes place.
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