Satchel Lee Turns Family, Place, and Memory Into Living Archives
Satchel Lee’s work moves between photography, video, miniature construction, and music video with unusual ease, but the through line is clear: she is interested in how history survives inside faces, rooms, and buildings. The artist, who grew up in New York City, studied film at New York University, and later earned an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, has built a practice around attention — especially to the small gestures and details that can carry more emotional weight than a tidy narrative.
That sensibility is visible in her MFA thesis, What a Gift (2024), which stages a Black bourgeois family unit inside a brown, carefully composed living room. Lee plays the mother, while the father, grandmother, and daughter are also performed roles, and the accompanying video reveals the scene as a constructed family tableau rather than a straightforward portrait. The work draws on William Greaves’s Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968), a touchstone for Lee, and uses a voiceover exchange to complicate the images with tenderness, hesitation, and melancholy.
Lee’s first solo exhibition, Where We Find Ourselves (2025), at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, extended those concerns into the city’s Freedmen’s Town, one of the communities established by formerly enslaved Black people after Juneteenth 1865. For the exhibition, Lee built miniature models of surviving Freedmen’s Town buildings, photographed them, and enlarged the images to monumental scale. She also made a documentary that included interviews with four current residents, among them a teacher who described the neighborhood as “holy grounds” and urged students to speak with their grandmothers and great-grandmothers.
The exhibition framed history as something lived rather than sealed away. Lee’s interest in memory, mythmaking, and inheritance gives her work a particular force: buildings may deteriorate, but they remain present as carriers of experience, testimony, and loss. In that sense, her practice asks a larger question that extends beyond Houston — what does it mean to treat the past not as a fixed record, but as something still being assembled by the people who inhabit it?
