Meet the 2026 midtownHOU Arts Micro Grants Cycle 2 Awardees
Midtown Houston is continuing its investment in Houston’s creative community through the 2026 midtownHOU Arts Micro Grants Program, and we’re excited to announce the Cycle 2 awardees.
This cycle’s theme, Art that Connects, supports temporary public art, performances, and community-centered activations that bring people together in Midtown through storytelling, shared experiences, and cultural exchange. The selected projects reflect the energy, creativity, and community spirit that continue to shape Midtown as a vibrant Cultural Arts and Entertainment District.
From participatory music and dance to public installations, literary salons, and hands-on making events, these projects invite people to slow down, gather, reflect, and experience Midtown in new ways.
Cycle 2 Individual Artist Awardees:
This cycle, individual artist awardees each received $2,500 to support projects that connect people through public art, performance, and shared creative experiences. Together, these artists represent a wide range of disciplines and ideas, but they share a common goal: creating meaningful moments of connection in Midtown.
Tominique Roots – I Have A Story To Tell: Courtyard Sessions at the MATCH
Tominique Roots’ project reimagines the Midtown Arts & Theater Center Houston (MATCH) courtyard as an open-air gathering space inspired by the warmth of a neighborhood front porch. Through acoustic performances, a bilingual Request & Reflection station, and prompts that invite people to share what home and community sound like to them, the project turns a
pass-through space into a place for pause, music, and conversation. With roots, folk, soul,
hip-hop, funk, blues, and community storytelling woven together, I Have A Story To Tell reflects Midtown’s role as a district where many different lives and experiences meet in one shared place.
Additional event details will be shared soon.
Ashley Arnaé Simmons – Wellness Through Art: Connected Voices
Ashley Arnaé Simmons’ project centers healing, belonging, and self-expression through a community wellness experience built around guided prompts and mixed-media artmaking. Participants will respond to themes of connection and reflection through individual artworks that will later come together in a public exhibition in Midtown. The project also includes a collaborative community-created piece that will continue to live on in a local Midtown institution, extending the impact beyond the exhibition itself. Connected Voices is rooted in the idea that when personal stories are placed side by side, they become part of a larger shared story of community.
Additional event details will be shared soon.
Kam Franklin – All Voices Welcome
Kam Franklin’s All Voices Welcome is a free public community sing-along designed for people of all ages, backgrounds, and musical abilities. Guided by Franklin as music director and facilitator, the event will invite attendees to gather in song through a welcoming
call-and-response format supported by a pianist and guest vocalists. With familiar songs that span generations alongside original music, the project is built around participation rather than performance. At its core, All Voices Welcome creates a low-barrier, joyful space where communal singing becomes a tool for connection, inclusion, and shared expression in Midtown.
Additional event details will be shared soon.
Tim Hagans – Symphony for City Dwellers and the Birds of Dawn and Dusk
Tim Hagans’ project brings music, field recordings, and community voices together in a new multidisciplinary performance centered on Houston’s bird communities and the changing urban environment they inhabit. Created in collaboration with composer and trumpeter Anthony Almendárez, the work blends acoustic performance with an electronic soundscape of birdsong and residents’ reflections on the birds around them. The project explores both the beauty of these everyday encounters and the vulnerability of bird habitats in a city increasingly shaped by extreme weather. Through this new composition, Hagans creates space for audiences to consider Midtown not only as a place for people, but as part of a broader living ecosystem.
Additional event details will be shared soon.
Mariela G. Domínguez aka XZZX – Temporal
Mariela G. Domínguez aka XZZX’s project, Temporal, looks at how public art can help people see familiar Midtown spaces with fresh eyes. Her project centers on temporarily transforming the signage of a historic neighborhood business through vivid color, sculptural additions, and her distinctive multicolored putty technique. Inspired by iconic Midtown corners and longtime neighborhood businesses, the project aims to celebrate Midtown’s layered cultural identity while drawing renewed attention to spaces that hold memory, history, and everyday neighborhood life. Through this intervention, Temporal becomes both a tribute and a visual invitation to rediscover Midtown’s streetscape.
Additional event details will be shared soon.
Camilo Gonzalez – Silent Library, Secret Sound
Camilo Gonzalez’s Silent Library, Secret Sound is a research-driven video art installation that transforms public space into a communal screening environment through stop-motion animation made from vintage vinyl covers, books, and ephemera. Presented as a continuous evening outdoor projection, the work explores the visual language of library music while drawing attention to Midtown’s historic music venues, record shops, and storefront culture. Timed to coincide with the Houston Mid Main Summer Series, the installation turns the neighborhood into a place for shared discovery—where moving image, music history, and public gathering come together in the open air.
As part of the series, visitors can experience Camilo’s installation alongside a broader lineup of neighborhood programming. On Saturday, June 20, from 3 p.m. to 10 p.m., Texas Makers & Motion brings together a vibrant community maker market featuring local artisans, handmade goods, and hands-on experiences with a Texas twist. Inside Mid Main Art Gallery, visitors can explore Moon Papas Art-curated works along with Camilo Gonzalez’s film installation in the Windows on Main, while enjoying live Texas country music by Tyson Webb, C&W DJ sets by Cornbreadd and Killin’ Time, and an all-ages stop-motion flip-book animation workshop.
Then on Saturday, June 27, from 3 p.m. to 10 p.m., the series wraps with the Art Car Showcase & Midtown Cultural Arts Mixer, a celebration of Houston’s iconic Art Car culture along Winbern Street. The evening will feature Moon Papas Art, Camilo Gonzalez’s film installation at Mid Main Art Gallery and Windows on Main, a chance to meet Art Car artists and explore their transformed vehicles, a recycled art workshop, live music by The Monicas, DJ sets from Blue Heron Yacht Club and DJ Grrrl Parts, and an opportunity to meet Midtown’s first-ever Artist in Residence, DUAL.
Keeley Dunnam – Overcoming & Becoming
Keeley Dunnam’s Overcoming & Becoming is a community-centered dance performance built from stories of adversity, resilience, and personal transformation. Created in collaboration with Sarah Hill, the project invites community members to submit reflections on the challenges they are overcoming and who they are becoming in the process. Those voices will shape a live performance that blends spoken-word soundscapes with movement, along with artist talks, community dialogue, and a growing digital storytelling archive inspired by audience contributions. The result is a project that treats performance not as a finished product, but as an evolving act of collective reflection and care.
Additional event details will be shared soon.
JR Roykovich + Venessa Monokian – Play ▶
For Play ▶, artists JR Roykovich and Venessa Monokian will transform Throughline into an evolving incubator centered on play as a creative method, a form of care, and a shared social language. Over the course of the exhibition, the space will shift and grow through installations, participatory gestures, and community “play-dates” that invite people into experimentation, conversation, and collaborative making. Programming concepts include lens-based media exploration, dialogue around creativity and burnout among educators, and interactive stations that encourage public participation throughout the run of the show. By treating curiosity and experimentation as essential tools for community connection, Play ▶ turns the gallery into a living, collective creative space.
Additional event details will be shared soon.
Cycle 2 Arts Organization Awardees:
This cycle, arts organization awardees each received $5,000 to support larger-scale community programs that expand access to the arts and invite public participation across generations. These organizations are helping create more entry points into Midtown’s cultural life through hands-on learning, literary exchange, and shared creative experience.
Houston Center for Contemporary Craft – Hands-on Houston
The Houston Center for Contemporary Craft will use its Cycle 2 award to support Hands-on Houston, HCCC’s flagship free, public, artist-led program for Houstonians of all ages. Held each month starting in August 2026 on HCCC’s Midtown campus, the program invites children, families, and adults to interact with artists, explore contemporary craft techniques, and create artwork they can take home.
As part of this year’s supported programming, participants can expect experiences such as building and decorating wooden toy cars, making handmade felt pennants inspired by championship soccer matches coming to Houston, and creating collage- or comic-based storytelling projects in partnership with Zine Fest Houston. With 200–250 participants each month, Hands-on Houston continues to make contemporary craft more accessible, visible, and welcoming in Midtown.
sisters of the yam Writing Society – To See and Be Seen: A Public Literary Salon
sisters of the yam Writing Society brings a literary and participatory approach to Cycle 2 through To See and Be Seen, a public literary salon and communal writing project centered on visibility, grief, care, and collective reflection. The project begins with a generative writing workshop and continues through weekly public write-ins, creating space for participants to develop original poetry, essays, letters, and other written work in community. It will culminate in a public literary salon in Midtown featuring live readings, interactive writing prompts, visual art collaborations, facilitated dialogue, and reflection stations that invite the broader community into the experience. Rather than treating storytelling as something private or distant, To See and Be Seen positions literary art as a tool for public witnessing, accountability, and care.
Additional event details will be shared soon.
What’s Coming to Midtown:
Cycle 2 reflects the many ways art can create connection in public space. Some projects invite people to sing together. Others ask them to write, reflect, make, move, or simply pause and pay closer attention to the stories unfolding around them. Together, these awardees will help shape a season of creative experiences that feel distinctly Midtown: open, welcoming, layered, and rooted in community.
We look forward to sharing more as these projects take shape across the district. To learn more about upcoming artist opportunities in Midtown, visit our Artist Opportunities Board.
