Tierney Malone’s current solo exhibition commissioned by DiverseWorks is undeniably musical: sound spills out from the gallery, filling even the reception area with mellifluous jazz notes. I paused at the exhibition’s entrance, where the space normally occupied by vinyl wall text was instead filled by a series of wooden planks nailed together, suggesting an old wooden door or life raft, hand-painted with the show’s title, Third Ward is My Harlem.

This reconfiguration of the entrance serves as a structural key to the exhibition-cum-installation, which imports and transforms cultural signposts from the Third Ward into the white cube with varying degrees of success. Drawing a parallel between the contemporary artistic community in Third Ward, Houston’s historically African-American neighborhood where he lives, and the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and ‘30s, Malone’s work borrows the celebratory idiom of vibrant collage-inspired paintings exemplified by Harlem predecessors such as Stuart Davis and Jacob Lawrence. A former sign painter, Malone often focuses on language-based signage and typographical design of well-loved jazz record covers, which become fractured and cropped under his hand.

These works reveal playful juxtapositions among different registers of art-historical and cultural production. For instance, a section of Malone’s wall painting My Ship devoted to the cover of Sonny Rollins’s iconic record Way Out West tightly focuses on the title in sans-serif typeface, recalling Ed Ruscha’s early paintings in terms of graphics and content. Just One of Those Things, a mixed-media work on paper centered on the eponymous Nat King Cole record cover, and the three collage works entitled Study for Third Ward is My Harlem, most effectively mine and re-combine the language of modernist design, mid-century pop culture and language-based Conceptualism. Here, Malone layers record cover designs, signs and street views in a visual analogue to the syncopated rhythms filling the gallery. The jazz soundtrack, composed by Malone, accompanies a video installed in a black-box outfitted like an old cinema, complete with a ticket window and plush seats. The video is composed in three non-linear “movements” that gloss the artist’s biography by weaving intertitles with zooms and pans over the paintings and collages installed elsewhere in the gallery.

How such visual information holds up through the disparate mediums of the exhibition is questionable, and this is where the installation begins to break down. Rather than create an immersive experience, the different registers of artistic production remain discrete. The collage paintings, on a scale similar to the work of 1950s affichisites Raymond Hains and Jacques Villeglé, lose their resolved quality when writ large on a wall. In the video form, they become illustrative. The intimate materiality of each work, like that of vinyl records in a collection, is lost when painted or projected in monumental scale. While ambitious, Third Ward is My Harlem repeats a well-worn lesson: even the most well-intentioned formal experimentation cannot circumscribe the energy and diversity of a neighborhood such as Houston’s Third Ward. Lucky for visitors to DiverseWorks, however, they can explore the neighborhood themselves in just a few minutes’ drive.

Wendy Vogel is a Critical Fellow in the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.