VISUAL ARTS + MUSEUMS

The Menil Collection presents an Illustrated Talk:  Philip Freelon - 'The Redesign of Emancipation Park,' Thursday, January 27, 2010, 7:00 p.m.

Emancipation Park is Houston's oldest park. The ten-acre parcel of land in Houston's Third Ward was purchased in 1872 by a group of black community leaders, all former slaves, as a site to celebrate the end of slavery proclaimed in Galveston on "Juneteenth," June 19, 1865. For twenty years, Emancipation Park was the city's only park open to African-Americans.

Philip G. Freelon (pictured) has a Bachelor of Environmental Design degree from North Carolina State and a Master of Architecture degree from MIT. The Freelon Group, founded in 1990, has received thirty-seven AIA design awards and completed major museum projects in Baltimore, San Francisco, and Charlotte, N.C.

The team of Freelon Adjaye Bond was selected to design the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. Contract magazine's 2008 Designer of the Year, Philip Freelon is a Fellow of the AIA, and won the 2009 AIA Thomas Jefferson Award for Public Architecture. A 1989 Loeb Fellow at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, he teaches at MIT's School of Architecture and Planning.