Where We Find Ourselves is a multi-disciplinary investigation into memory, place, and Black perception across generations, centering the historic neighborhood of Freedmen’s Town in Houston. Through photography, film, architectural modeling, and installation, artist Satchel Lee brings a forensic intimacy to the project, placing the South, and specifically Freedmen’s Town, under a kind of microscope. In doing so, Lee reveals the physical remnants of a once self-sustaining Black community founded by formerly enslaved people and the enduring brilliance embedded in its spatial and spiritual architecture.

The exhibition navigates the tension between monument and ruin, between presence and erasure. By capturing and photographing miniature models of historical significant Freedmen's Town sites at large scale, Lee shifts perception, shrinking the past to examine it closely, then magnifying it to command reverence. These gestures are not simply aesthetic; they serve as acts of reclamation, of re-centering Black stories and spaces that urban renewal and gentrification have long sought to obscure. The models operate as vessels for multigenerational memory, each one a stand-in for larger questions about ownership, belonging, and cultural survival.

Through lyrical documentary films, experimental narrative is embedded in the exhibition, longtime residents including Bobby Johnson, Pastor Samuel Smith, and Dr. Sally Wickers share their lived experiences of the neighborhood. Their testimonies serve as oral counterpoints to the visual archive, grounding the work in lived Black reality and anchoring it across temporal spans. Through their stories, Lee underscores how migration, lineage, and place intersect, and how the act of observing and recording becomes a form of care.

Installed within a restored row house in Freedmen’s Town, the exhibition culminates in an immersive space that mirrors both domestic familiarity and sacred ritual. It invites visitors to perceive Freedmen’s Town’s history and present anew.