How’s this for a twisting story line? An architect commissions a famous artist to create a site-specific drawing in a house he has built for himself. The artist, who never touches his own works, creates exacting instructions that installation artists follow to create the 30-ft.-tall artwork in the living room of the home. The artist dies. A few years later, the architect dies, offering his home and the majority of his extensive art collection to a local but world-famous museum of which he was a trustee. The museum decides to sell the home and add much of the art to its collection, but there’s a problem with the wall drawing. It can’t be moved, and the museum is stymied by a restriction: It is not allowed to sell any artwork that has been bequeathed to it.
Here’s where the plot — and the drywall mud — thickens: the museum, unable to remove the artwork from the home without destroying it, comes up with an alternative plan. It will plaster over the drawing, rendering it unrecoverable.
Years later, the purchaser of the home is telling this story to a houseguest — who in a fit of curiosity grabs a dull knife and starts chipping away at the wall. The white coating flakes off. To his and his host’s surprise, a tableau of blue, red, and yellow appears: a fragment of the original drawing underneath.
What is this? The first 20 minutes of a new Wes Anderson movie, an episode of Columbo, or the setup for a Siri Hustvedt novel? No, its just the state of play at 1202 Milford St. in the Museum District. The artist is Sol LeWitt. The museum is the Menil Collection. The home is the former residence of Houston architect Bill Stern. And the plotline is still in progress:
A new 
What a swampy lot of a year this has been for Houston, eh? Swamplot is taking off early today just to help get the thing over with. Here’s to a better 2018 for all of us, whatever your elevation or watershed. Check back with us on Tuesday, for more tales of what’s notable around town. Photo of Buffalo Bayou Park on a wintry day not too long ago: 
Five estates’ worth of formerly wild game, as well as some other frontier-themed trinkets, are now sitting in the TexMAX Auctions warehouse at 9367 Winkler Dr., 3 miles northeast of Hobby Airport, ahead of an auction taking place there on January 20. Craig Hlavaty reports that in addition to the brown bear, black bear, and grizzly bear full body mounts, the 700-animal herd includes: “
