Bria Lauren: Rhonda’s Baby

June 19 - September 26 2026
Opening: Friday, June 19th, 6pm-9pm
ON VIEW: Tuesdays-Thursdays, 3pm-6pm
Fridays, 12pm-7pm
Saturdays, 11am-4pm

Bria Lauren (b. 1993) is a transdisciplinary visual artist, community architect, and Third Ward, Houston native. Her practice bridges portraiture, storytelling, creative writing, and arts activism, centering Black women while building infrastructures of radical care and liberation around their livelihoods and futures.

Bria engages community building as a political and cultural practice of resistance. As a curatorial visionary, she centers ancestral memory, Black mother-daughter relationships, and the dimensions of Black women’s relationships with one another alongside community preservation, working across multimedia installation and community programming to honor the interior lives of Black femmehood without censorship.

In 2022, Bria founded Gold Was Made Fa’ Her (GWMFH), a 501(c)(3) arts and healing movement for Black women and communities across the Black South. It grew from a question she carried after her 2021 solo exhibition Gold Was Made Fa’ Her at Lawndale Art Center, a body of work dedicated to her mother and Black hood women on the Southside of Houston: What do Black women need more than being seen?

Rhonda’s Baby

A visual prayer dedicated to Black daughters, loving and healing from Black mamas that don’t know how to love them back.

“When our maternal portals transfer pain, may we remember the water was our mother, first. Her womb is the home of forgiveness, grace, spiritual redemption, everlasting love, rest, protection armored with gold, and the capacity to alchemize what is quiet as it's kept. It is here where it is safe to trust the mother of all mothers to nurture our cries, uncensor our inner children's truths, and heal what our mamas couldn't.” — Bria Lauren

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Manifested collectively by the artist in conversation with curators Laura Earle, Ashley DeHoyos Sauder, and Jessi Bowman.

FLATS programming is sponsored by Fresh Arts and is funded in part by the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance