EVENTS

An Afternoon with Fred Rouse III

August 23, 2025 from 2pm – 3pm

Talley Dunn Gallery

Join us for a talk by community activist Fred Rouse III, the co-founder of The Fred Rouse Foundation, President of the Tarrant County Coalition for Peace and Justice, and serves on the board of Transform 1012.

Fred Rouse III, whose story is explored in Sedrick Huckaby’s exhibition Higher Ground, will discuss his pivotal work with The Fred Rouse Center for Arts and Community Healing, which honors the life and memory of Mr. Fred Rouse, a Black non-union butcher and father who was publicly lynched by a in Fort Worth, Texas in 1921. The Center, in an act of reparative justice, returns resources to the communities that were targeted for violence and economic marginalization in North Texas.

Sedrick Huckaby and Fred Rouse III met through their research on Mr. Fred Rouse. With no known images of Mr. Rouse, Huckaby created Contemplating Fred Rouse, a video projection capturing the artist’s repetitive charcoal drawings of male figures being drawn, erased, and redrawn, progressing from older men to the artist’s own teenage son. Through this compassionate and mournful gesture, Huckaby attempts to imagine not only what Mr. Fred Rouse might have looked like, but who he could have been.

As community research was done on Fred Rouse and his family, Mr. Rouse’s grandson was located in Fort Worth, Texas. With no knowledge of his grandfather’s fate, Fred Rouse III learned of his grandfather’s tragic death. With the descendants of Mr. Rouse discovered, Huckaby created a second film, Portrait of Fred Rouse, based upon portraits of Mr. Rouse’s son, grandson, and great grandson. The audio features Fred Rouse III singing Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come.”