Art | Swamplot | Page 14

A few months after Ike, this tricked-out FEMA trailer rolls into Houston as . . . art?? Paul Villinski’s reworked 30-ft. Gulfstream “Cavalier” trailer, which took the artist 7 months to mod, will be parked outside the Rice University Art Gallery starting later this month.

Re-born as the Emergency Response Studio, the trailerâ€™s formaldehyde-ridden original materials are replaced by entirely â€œgreenâ€ technology and building materials, including recycled denim insulation, bamboo cabinetry, compact fluorescent lighting, reclaimed wood, and natural linoleum floor tiles made from linseed oil. It is powered by eight mammoth batteries that store energy generated by an array of solar panels and a â€œmicroâ€ wind turbine atop a 40-foot high mast. Not only practical, Emergency Response Studio is a visually engaging structure with an expansive work area featuring a wall section that lowers to become a deck. A ten-foot, elliptical geodesic skylight allows extra headroom and natural lighting in the work area. Though designed as an artistâ€™s studio and residence, Emergency Response Studio is an ingenious prototype for self-sufficient, solar-powered mobile housing.

Party on the back deck!

77005, Alternative Energy, Art, Attractions, Green Design, Home Design, Manufactured Homes, Rice-University, Solar Power, Temporary Housing, Utilities

12/23/08 1:22pm

How Carolyn Farb Takes a Bath

Home Decor, Home Design, Houston Architects

Designing texas – Farb tour [YouTube, via Keep Houston Rich]

Art, Home Decor, Home Design, Houston Architects, John Staub

12/23/08 9:58am

The Savaging of Allen Parkway

Montrose, North Montrose

5 Comments

The cars, the people: The big city can be an intimidating place. How about these guys take on the Galleria next?

Post Apocalyptic Cavemen In Houston [YouTube]

77019, Art, Montrose, North Montrose, Performances

12/18/08 4:17pm

Southampton House of 48,762 Cubic Zirconias

Home Decor, Interiors, Quicklink, Southampton

13 Comments

SOUTHAMPTON HOUSE OF 48,762 CUBIC ZIRCONIAS Give him another 18 months to finish it, Dr. Anthony Walter tells reporter Kate Murphy, and he’ll open the Grand Hall in his Southampton home to the public for tours. A few church groups have already seen it: â€œâ€˜People are just astounded.’ Indeed, itâ€™s hard not to gape at a gilt and mirrored hall so boisterously baroque that you half expect Marie Antoinette to appear and offer you cake. Lighted by sparkling chandeliers, the hall is 100 feet by 25 feet, with a soaring 22-foot-high coffered ceiling in gilt and lacquer. The walls are embellished with gilt cherubs, roses, feathers, foliage and birds. Enormous and richly hued paintings in elaborate jeweled frames depict romantic, mythological and biblical scenes. . . . Dr. Walter said he tried to interest curators at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in his project, perhaps to make it a satellite decorative arts museum, but ‘they could care less.’ One of the museumâ€™s curators, Emily Neff, said she had visited his home but wasnâ€™t able to spend much time there and thus had no comment. He said their reaction was understandable, given that the museumâ€™s collection includes abstract art, which he disdains. ‘I am a huge threat because what I have done renders everything they have junk,’ he said beneath the glinting chandeliers in his great hall. ‘I hope that doesnâ€™t sound arrogant but the reaction of people who come in here tells me the power of it.’â€ [New York Times; slide show]

77005, Art, DIY, Home Decor, Interiors, Southampton

12/03/08 4:11pm

Museum of the Weird Update: Going Out of Business Sale, Name Change

Attractions, Home Decor, Homebuying, Houston Heights, Interiors, Openings and Closings, Real Estate Marketing

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Note: Story updated below.

The mystery buyer of the house at 834 W. 24th St. has revealed herself! Quilter, artist, and Art Car builder Kim Ritter, who says she was “raised mid-century modern,” expects to close on the Museum of the Weird on December 15th. Museum curator Dolan Smith is planning his own art sale on the property two days earlier; Ritter says that the sale will run from 2 to 8 pm, and that the prices will be far less than what you’d expect to pay for, say, a sculpture made of hair:

Come by and get a bargain, stuff starting at 5 and 10 dollars!

Ritter tells Swamplot she’s purchased some of Smith’s work herself, including a piece entitled “Man of Ten Thousand Nails,” which she intends to keep on the property.

Does this mean the museum will be preserved?

77008, Art, Attractions, Home Decor, Homebuying, Houston Heights, Interiors, Museums, Openings and Closings, Real Estate Marketing

12/02/08 6:31pm

Does Your Home Belong in a Museum?

Demolitions, Real Estate Marketing

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Showing at the Contemporary Arts Museum next May: a main-gallery exhibit featuring portions of a Houston home dissected and reconstructed by Houston’s favorite teardown artists. DD Demo, aka Dan Havel and Dean Ruck, has a collection of demolition artworks to its credit, but the pair’s most famous sculpted wreck was the 2005 funnel-shaped bungalow disassembly on Montrose shown here, which became popular enough for the Inversion Coffee Shop now on the site to be named after it.

Havel and Ruck’s CAM work, though, needs a willing victim: another home they can pick apart. The leftovers, Havel says, “could be visited as an off site space during the run of the show.”

Havel asks Swamplot:

Are there any developers/architects you or your members may know that may have a lead on a house? Preferably, it should be an older house, wood bungalow type with ship lap wall construction. We would like to secure a teardown soon that would be scheduled for teardown in June. This project would have high visibility in the press and would give owner/developer/architect press and exposure if they want it.

Couldn’t they just stalk a condemned house and do something like this on the sly?

Art, Demolitions, Museums, Real Estate Marketing

12/02/08 10:54am

A Real Mosaic Condo: The Secret Art of Westbury Gardens

Condos, Condos for Sale, Home Decor, Interiors, Westbury

7 Comments

What delights await you in this Westbury Gardens condo? The video choreographs the entrance sequence beautifully.

Under the romantic entry arch, through the peaceful courtyard, past the double doors, up the stairs . . . what’s next?

77035, Art, Condos, Condos for Sale, Home Decor, Interiors, Westbury, Westbury Square

12/01/08 1:22pm

Who Is Buying the Museum of the Weird?

Attractions, Hazards, Home Decor, Homes for Sale, Houston Heights, Interiors, Real Estate Marketing

4 Comments

Conspicuously absent from the MLS listing for 834 W. 24th St. in the Heights: any mention (or photos) of the Scar Room, a small chamber of sculptures and small wood panels on which house owner and artist Dolan Smith and sympathetic visitors graphically documented their physical and psychological afflictions. Sample Scar Room decor: “a submerged doll with a piece of rubber hose wrapped around its neck, representing the umbilical cord that nearly strangled Smith at birth.”

But it isn’t too hard to find exacting descriptions of the home online. The Houston Press, for example, featured this bit of color as it celebrated the home’s come-from-behind win of the paper’s “Best Shrine to the Abnormal” award back in 2002:

Donations of every imaginable variety show up weekly: horns, doll heads, a film canister of Tommy Lee Jones’s spit, balls of Saran Wrap, clumps of hair, an appendix, color photos of fallopian tubes and contemporary art of a disquieting nature. Artist/nutball Dolan Smith has turned his Heights bungalow into a mecca for all things weird. . . .

Smith is supplementing his empire of the bizarre with a two-thirds-complete pet cemetery. Last year, Tropical Storm Allison took its toll on the nascent final resting place for pets. Rising floodwaters filled the jars of 32 dead rats, inadvertently creating biological pipe bombs.

Sure, you’re thinking . . . Who’s gonna buy this place?

No problem. Realtor Weldon Rigby, himself no stranger to homes graced by an occasional mannequin, has already done himself proud. After just a month and a half on the market, the home — listed for $150,000 — went “option pending” on November 14th.

77008, Art, Attractions, Cemeteries, Hazards, Home Decor, Homes for Sale, Houston Heights, Interiors, Museums, Real Estate Marketing

11/24/08 10:25am

More Images of the Asia Society Headquarters Design

Institutional Buildings, Museum District, New Construction, Proposed Developments

Now available on the Asia Society website, amid pix of dragon dancers and Yao Ming shoveling dirt at the groundbreaking last spring: 2 more renderings of architect Yoshio Taniguchi’s design for the society’s new 38,000-sq.-ft. Texas Center in the Museum District.

The view from Southmore St. at Caroline, in 2010:

77004, Art, Institutional Buildings, Museum District, Museums, New Construction

11/03/08 12:23pm

Solving the Bare Walls Problem

Fairview, Home Decor, Homes for Sale, Interiors, Montrose, Neartown, Real Estate Marketing

11 Comments

Mobile Above Stairwell at 503 Fargo St., Houston

This dramatically hung mobile above the entry and stairwell of the house for sale at 503 Fargo St. in Montrose certainly captures your attention!

But that’s not why reader Kelley Owen alerted Swamplot to the listing. She noticed some artwork hung much lower on the wall in the Master Bedroom . . . and calls it “possibly NSFW.”

77006, Art, Fairview, Home Decor, Homes for Sale, Interiors, Montrose, Neartown, Real Estate Marketing, Staging

10/30/08 11:46am

Notsuoh Covers Its Naughty Storefront Bits

Downtown, Nightlife

4 Comments

Naked Mannequin and Dead Flowers, Notsuoh Storefront, 314 Main St., Houston A red sheet now covers the more lurid portions of the shocking window display including naked mannequins that had apparently distressed some passersby of Jim Pirtle’s Notsuoh on Main St., John Nova Lomax reports:

The work, by local artists Shawna Mouser and Jennifer Pod, is called VaginArt. One half of the piece consists of the lower torsos of two shop mannequins with flowers between their legs, along with a pizza-sized paper wall-hanging with a suggestive slit in it.

The other half, and the one far more likely to have caused a ruckus, consists of a blow-up doll backlit by a sleazy strobe light, parading before a background of medium-raunchy centerfolds with black electrical tape concealing their naughty bits.

77002, Art, Downtown, Nightlife, Window Displays

10/15/08 2:49pm

Seen on the Street: Blown Away

Construction Materials, Disaster Aftermath, Humble, Seabrook, Spring, Trees, Wildlife

Van Missing Letters, Houston

A few fun — and not-so-fun — sights around town: First, Houston visitor Mike Smith’s photo shows some of the few letters left after Ike’s attack.

More hurricane photo souvenirs below!

77338, 77373, Art, Construction Materials, Disaster Aftermath, Humble, Hurricane Ike, Seabrook, Spring, Transportation, Trees, Wildlife

09/17/08 5:37pm

Ikeâ€™s Revenge: Paul IsÂ Dead

Disaster Aftermath, First Ward

1 Comment

Beatles Sculpture by David Adickes, Minus Paul McCartney

Discovered in the aftermath of Hurricane Ike: David Adickes’s giant Beatles sculpture on Summer St. is now one member short. That’s 7,000 pounds of McCartney-ish concrete rubble under that black tarp.

Think this is some kind of hoax? Further photographic evidence of Paul’s fall . . . below:

77007, Art, David Adickes, Disaster Aftermath, First Ward, Hurricane Ike

08/28/08 2:03pm

Pictures Plus TelephoneÂ Picture