Student Spotlight: Marc Armeña '24 | 2023 Contemporary Arts Museum Houston Fellow

Student Spotlight: Marc Armeña '24
2023-2024 Contemporary Arts Museum Houston Fellow

As this year’s Contemporary Arts Museum Houston Fellow, Marc will be provided the opportunity to work as an intern at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston in partnership with Houston Freedmen's Town Conservancy (HFTC), an organization created to preserve Freedmen's Town—a neighborhood established in 1865 by formerly enslaved people. Marc will gain experience both within the Museum and its partner organization, while helping to establish creative opportunities informed by Houston Freedmen's Town's legacy and community stakeholders.

Learn more about Marc’s research interests and goals below:

"As a rising senior majoring in Art History specializing in Architectural History along with a major in Mechanical Engineering, I have dedicated my time at Rice to various efforts in arts advocacy and research initiatives that have interrogated the linkages between art and architectural practices, environmental injustices, and racialized histories. Working as a future architect and scholar, my goal is to utilize a critical attentiveness to the politics of memory and examine the veiled narratives of dispossession, exploitation, and environmental degradation tied to the lands we inhabit — to render transparent the destructive impulses of modernity and set a clear path for resistance, innovation, and an ethic of care among marginalized groups. Here is where the museum as an institution, as a logic of hegemonic power, can be inverted and find itself aiding the practices of protest and activism by locating creativity in people who may otherwise be excluded from the canon. The opportunity to work with the CAMH and to find myself in a place with a marked mandate for present and future thinking presents the chance to further anchor my goals to the city I have called home for the past three years — and work to underscore, honor, and animate the stories of Freedmen’s Town that calls attention to issues we face in the present moment."