"Coffee//Koolaid" Artist Viktor Givens Plumbs Cultural Data to Recreate Black Customs and History

Viktor Givens, a multimodal performance artist, brings his creative arts initiative project “Coffee// Kool Aid & the Tabernacle of (Re)Memory” to the Community Artists’ Collective March 5 through April 23.

The exhibition opens at noon on Saturday, March 5, with a reading reception at The Collective, 4101 San Jacinto, Suite 116.

In the ensuing weeks, Givens will conduct semi-public workshops and interventions that explore

conceptual and material themes around notions of domestic archive, preservation, genealogy, ecology, reparations, and ritual theater. Interventions studied involve collage, photo fiction, intergenerational dialogue, experiential readings, textile arts, and canning.

Givens and his Southern Android Productions organization is a research-based creative arts initiative designed to collect and reinterpret cultural data relating to the migration histories, memories, and material archives of African American urban settlers and their ancestral rural settlements.

His material archive consists mainly of for- gotten and discarded domestic detritus found during excavations of vacant African American residential estates. Givens then takes these fragmented objects, narratives, and interior poetry and reimagines both form and function to suit an array of aesthetic and spiritual needs. Through accumulating these rich cultural artifacts, Givens seeks to create spaces that inspire the activation of cultural and spiritual (re)memory about Africa and its Diaspora.

For more information about the exhibit, contact The Collective at 713-523-1616 or visit www. thecollective.org.

The Community Artists’ Collective programs are supported in part by grants from the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance, the Texas Commission on the Arts, and through collaborations with community organizations. The Collective’s mission is to provide the educational and cultural link among African American artists and all communities, inspiring unlimited creativity.