Lucille’s owner, Chef Chris Williams, and the nonprofit Street Art for Mankind are running an active fundraising campaign to complete a mural honoring the legacy of famed Houston artist John Biggers, with a public unveiling planned for this fall.
The mural, designed for a parking structure at The Forme, a luxury residential tower in the Museum District, anchors a new partnership between Williams’ Lucille’s Hospitality Group and the property. The collaboration also includes The Branch, a wellness-focused venture expected to open on the property later this summer, but Williams said the mural is what drew him to the project.
“I wanted those babies to see themselves in whatever went up on that wall,” Williams said, referring to the roughly 8,000 children who pass by The Forme daily from the nearby Children’s Museum of Houston. “The mural was my way of making sure the massive new development felt like it belonged to the whole neighborhood, both sides of Third Ward and the surrounding Museum District.”
Williams said the idea took shape as he watched the tower rise across the street from Lucille’s, the Southern restaurant he opened in 2012 as a tribute to his great-grandmother, Lucille B. Smith. Rather than mark the partnership with a standard grand opening, Williams and The Forme instead launched it on July 4 with Liberty and Lux, a fundraiser benefiting the mural. That event has passed, but the fundraising campaign remains active through September.
Thibault Decker, co-founder of Street Art for Mankind, which has curated 58 murals across downtown Houston since its founding, said the collaboration with Williams grew out of an earlier meeting at a Lucille’s event.
The mural will be painted in a style inspired by Biggers, the longtime chair of Texas Southern University’s art department, and Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, whose work influenced Biggers’ own. His murals across the city are considered foundational to its public art movement.
“He’s a great creative, and it’s a real pleasure to work with a man like him,” Decker said. “With my team, basically, we worked on a theme, taking his ideas and trying to express physically what he had in mind.”
The piece will depict people from different eras of Houston and U.S. history looking toward the horizon, a design meant to represent unity and generational progress tied to the country’s 250th anniversary. The organization said funding for one of the two sections of the mural is secured, and the fundraiser is now focused on completing the second.
“The artist commissioned to paint the mural is based in Houston and has previously recreated several of Biggers’ own works,” Decker said. “It’s a mural that honors the enduring belief that while the union can always be perfected, each generation has kind of helped strengthen, and together we’re making progress.”
The campaign is structured so community members can contribute directly, with donor signatures scaled onto the finished mural. Williams said the goal was to give ordinary residents a visible stake in the project. Donations start at $1,000 and can be made through Lucille’s 1913, the nonprofit Williams founded during the pandemic that has since provided hundreds of thousands of meals to Houstonians in need, and which now serves as the local conduit for funds going to Street Art for Mankind.
“I wanted those babies to see themselves in whatever went up on that wall. The mural was my way of making sure the massive new development felt like it belonged to the whole neighborhood, both sides of Third Ward and the surrounding Museum District.”
Chef Chris Williams, owner of Lucille’s Houston.
The mural is expected to be unveiled this fall, with a public celebration planned in partnership with the Children’s Museum of Houston.
