The Little Blue House: Lou Nell Sims | A Retrospective + Fundraiser

Join us at the Little Blue House for a special evening celebrating Lou Nell Sims | A Retrospective, curated by . This event will be both the closing reception for the exhibit — your last chance to view her incredible artwork — and a fundraiser to support the Little Blue House, a vital community space in the Tenth Street Historic District.

Enjoy an evening of art, community, and connection while helping sustain the programs and gatherings that keep the Little Blue House vibrant.

• Drinks and light bites will be served.
• Art from the exhibit will be available for purchase (all proceeds go directly to the artist)
• Live music by Percussion Things featuring Len Barnett & Co.

Celebrate the artistry of Lou Nell Sims and help ensure the Little Blue House continues to be a hub for art, history, and neighborhood organizing.

Lou Nell Sims was raised in the Tenth Street Historic Neighborhood. As a multimedia artist, she has spent over four decades crafting a portfolio of work that explores the intersection of spirituality and abstraction. Using a wide range of art mediums, her work is a practice of reshaping forms of worship in her image. This exhibition, curated by Hakeem Adewumi, offers a tender portrait of the family and community that shaped every stroke and mold created in this retrospective.

About Hakeem Adewumi

Hakeem Adewumi is a portrait photographer based in Dallas, Texas. His work explores themes of identity with particular interest in race and sexuality. His years spent at the University of Texas at Austin studying African & African Diaspora Studies and subsequent journey to Johannesburg, South Africa as part of a Fulbright Fellowship were both crucial to the development of his artistic perspective and overall practice. Hakeem’s work has appeared in group exhibitions at galleries and institutions across New York, London, Austin, and Dallas. In 2017, he presented his first solo exhibition, Hidden in Plain Sight, at George Washington Carver Museum in Austin, Texas. His most recent solo exhibition, Bastard of the Diaspora, shown in 2022 at the Houston Museum of African American Culture, was a series of life-size self-portraits, a timely and relevant exploration of Black and queer identity in ever-evolving socio-political and art landscapes. In 2023, he completed a residency at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts and will produce commissioned artwork for the museum opening Summer 2024.

About the Little Blue House

The Little Blue House at 1208 E 10th St. is a renovated historic structure completed by bcWORKSHOP in Dallas’s Tenth Street Historic District. Tenth Street is one of the nation’s oldest intact Freedmen’s Towns, and a key piece of Dallas’s history. Over the decades, the neighborhood has had to fight against highway construction, demolition of homes, and for appropriate levels of public investment and care including paved roads and sidewalks. Despite all of this the neighborhood remains, and has a vision for the future – and the Little Blue House is a key part of that future.

This house is now used by residents as a place of organizing, planning and hosting arts events rooted in the Black Texas experience.

About

buildingcommunityWORKSHOP is a Texas-based nonprofit community design center seeking to improve the livability and viability of communities through the practice of thoughtful design and making. We enrich the lives of citizens by bringing design thinking to areas of our cities where resources are most scarce. To do so, [bc] recognizes that it must first understand the social, economic, and environmental issues facing a community before beginning work.

Host or Publisher bcWORKSHOP