Houston artist Tierney Malone didn’t know much about the Harlem Renaissance when he arrived in the Third Ward in the early 1980s to study art under John Biggers at Texas Southern University.

But in art history class, he learned about it and other periods when creative people congregated and inspired one another. Malone says that he “romanticized” this notion of a truly creative community, but that it took him awhile to realize that he himself was already living in such a place.

The Third Ward was “filled with artists, musicians, writers and poets,” he says, and then adds, “I never had to leave the Third Ward to meet a writer, a dancer or a musician.”

Malone says “people are amused” when he compares the Third Ward of the 1980s and ‘90s to the fabled Harlem. But he doesn’t claim that the poets who were his neighbors were the artistic equals of Langston Hughes or that Duke Ellington-level musicians were playing at El Nedo.

Instead, Malone’s goal is more personal. He simply states his creative neighbors inspired him to become the artist and man that he is today. His DiverseWorks show, Third Ward is My Harlem, is both an homage to the old neighborhood (he moved out of the Third Ward in 2005) and a deeply personal retelling of his development. To understand how the show reflects his life story, however, you have to know how to read the symbols.

The mural that takes an entire wall of the DiverseWorks gallery is titled “My Ship” after the Kurt Weill-Ira Gershwin song. “This is my first piece that is intended to be read like a narrative, from left to right,” says Malone.

From his birth to his adulthood, that is. The mural starts with a stylized film poster Malone painted that features the name Gene Tierney. Malone’s mother gave him the actress’ last name at birth “because it sounded like an artist’s name.” Continuing to the right, “My Ship” includes visual snippets from The Godfather poster (Malone remains absorbed by Vito Corelone’s efforts to “figure out how to be a man”) and from the cover of the Sonny Rollins' album "Way Out West" “because that’s where I wound up — out west.” (He grew up in Alabama and Mississippi.)

In the center of the mural you find an imaginary LP supposedly made by Clarence Papa Coal Oil Williams, who was, in fact, a Third Ward old-timer who “talked in the titles of songs and ‘signifying monkey’ jokes.” The mural ends with the word “Gratitude,” which is both what Malone feels for his Third Ward days and is the title of an Earth, Wind and Fire album.

The high point of the exhibition is the freestanding Sankofa Theater, which Malone hopes to expand on in a later show. It’s a small, nickelodeon-style movie theater where three short Malone-made silent films play (with scores performed by local jazz musicians) and expand on the mural’s themes.

Malone hopes his show will inspire other artists to tell their own stories about the creative communities who nourished them. “People are amused when I compare Third Ward to Harlem,” he says. “But that’s because that history has not been illuminated. The more people tell their stories, the more people will be interested.”

Malone pauses to reflect. “[At times] it seemed like everybody was an artist.”