Southwest Houston Environmental Justice Tours
2021-24: Crafting Sustainable Community
This project explores the intersection of environmental and relational sustainability through gift giving. Over 6 months in 2021, Kuo made crafts out of the plastic wrappers, old fabrics and other upcycled materials that accumulated in her home over the height of the pandemic and gave them as gifts to friends and family. Her aim was to keep herself grounded with a hands-on creative practice while tending to the relationships around her. She also hoped to encourage community care as a mode of self care and to show the generative possibilities of simple acts of generosity.
2024-25: Southwest Houston Environmental Justice Tours
In collaboration with the Mosaic Learning Center, Naomi is launching a project in Southwest Houston to explore the intersection of race, class, and environmental justice through spiritual and creative practices. The initiative includes a series of prayer tours at local sites related to environmental justice, led by community members skilled in spiritual and creative intercessory practices. The project will culminate in a community resource day featuring illustrated tour pamphlets, presentations, and creative activities that foster sustainability, hospitality, and community building.
Naomi is a mixed media and social practice artist based in Houston, TX. Her work integrates drawings, textiles, oral histories, and direct exchanges of resources in efforts to help diverse communities strengthen connections of care with the environment and with each other. Her current projects explore the overlaps between climate activism, urban ecology, Asian American experiences, and solidarity economies.
A joint project of the Ministry in the City HUB and Walls-Ortiz Gallery at City Seminary, the Creative Community Care Virtual Residency brought together socially-engaged Christian creatives from New York City, Indianapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles, Charlotte, and Corsicana (Tx) for peer mentor support, learning, and sharing. In 2021, residents developed local projects in their respective cities, exploring creative practices of care in the context of community. Projects engaged the concerns and questions of the pandemic period (mutual aid, care re-imagined for social distance, etc.) at the intersection of the arts, learning, faith, and the city. In 2022, the resident pairs offered public online workshops. Starting in 2024, Creative Community Care, a traveling group exhibition of the artwork will be on display with related programming in cities across North America. In 2024, the exhibition has been on view in Santa Ana, CA (March 1-5), Houston, TX (August 7-23), and will be in St. Paul, MN (November 1 - December 15). In 2025, it will go to Indianapolis, IN (March - April), Charlotte, NC (May-June), and possibly Boston, MA (November). For 2026, we anticipate a stop in Toronto, ON (Canada) before a final show in New York City.
The Collaborative Seed Grant initiative of the Ministry in the City HUB invites artists, pastors, youth workers, churches, and/or faith-based organizations to partner together on a seed or start-up project that integrates the arts or a creative practice with ministry and community. Our inaugural cohort of CS grantees include artists from Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, and New York, partnering with local churches and community organizations.
God, I pray that we can grow in love and knowledge of the other and help fight each other’s’ battles to the benefit of the “least” of us.