HOW ITALIAN ARTISTS GET STUCK IN GALVESTON 
Art writer Debra Barrera gets the inside scoop on some of the banana-peel art put up by Italian artist Davide Savorani for this past weekend’s exhibition at the Galveston Artist Residency compound at the corner of 25th St. and Ships Mechanic Row: “Savorani explains The Can’t Get Away Club as part of the nature of living in a place like Galveston; the calm sea breeze, the cheap booze, and endless reasons to never return to a big city can keep people stuck. Each year promises are made, ‘Maybe next year I will move to Houston . . . Maybe I will finally start that popcorn ball franchise.’ From Firenze, a small town in the north of Italy himself, Savorani is familiar with this syndrome and decided to immerse himself in Galveston: ‘I came here with nothing and I wanted to try to understand the city. Something I experienced was this idea of a place where you really face yourself.'” And face others who are celebrating, apparently, Barrera continues: “What I admired most about both Savorani and [his assistant, Michelangelo] Miccolis was their ability to immerse themselves in a completely foreign place and use materials that were part of their daily lives. In the studio, when I asked about a strand of plastic beads hanging on the wall, Miccolis remarked, ‘Yes! We were at some parade and they were just throwing them! We kept grabbing at the air! This is what the city gave us; why not make art out of it?’†[Glasstire] Self-portrait at cottages between 28th and Winnie: Michelangelo Miccolis
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Houston has a knack for knocking things down, and painter and Glassell School instructor Ken Mazzu has been showing up at a good number of those demo sites during the past 10 years, snapping the photos he then works from to render the bent rebar and crumbled concrete on canvas. The somewhat abstract painting shown here comes from the wreckage of the Kenneth Franzheim-designed Prudential Building that used to stand on Holcombe Blvd. in the Med Center until it fell a little more than a year ago.
Oh, and are there more:
THE ART GUYS TO START UNRAVELING 
This is the route the Art Guys say they will be taking tomorrow morning when they stage the 5th of the yearlong series of monthly celebratory stunts they’re calling “12 Events:” Titling this one “A Length of String,” Jack Massing and Michael Galbreth will unwind a spool of thread they’ve had sitting around since 1983 while walking along White Oak Bayou between W. Tidwell and T.C. Jester, just north of the Loop, and then they’ll turn around . . . and wind it back up. Last month, you’ll remember, they donned tuxedos and conducted the sounds of the Ship Channel from the Santa Anna Capture Site in Pasadena. [Art Guys; previously on Swamplot] Map: Art Guys
That there’s some pretty bad Feng Shui going down in this commercial for Honda, which was filmed in Vancouver and shown on teevee and the web beginning last October. The man behind the wheel of the CR-V sure is driving some bad chi into the gullet of the far-from-the-prairie home at the end of the T-intersection, to the encouraging narration of Garrison Keillor. But isn’t the house kinda asking for it anyway, what with all that glimmering vortex-popping and all?
And gee, doesn’t the hole stabbing through the house look a heck of a lot like . . . that temporary sculpture that stood on Montrose Blvd. in Houston a few years back? Portal to another dimension? Naah — from here it looks more like a shortcut to Grant St.
Chalk this one up to wishful thinking: Over the weekend, the Fifth Ward CRC, led by a pair of interns from Rice University, hung a basket of chalk and this chalkboard on the exterior wall of a vacant corner grocery (with an awning seemingly inspired by Charlie Brown’s T-shirt) at 4101 Lyons. One of the interns, Heidi Kahle — who’s minoring at Rice in “Poverty, Justice, and Human Capabilities,” a brief bio states — says that the idea’s for Fifth Ward residents to compile a wish list for their community by completing the sentence and filling in the blank: “I wish the Fifth Ward . . . .” As of yesterday, the project’s blog adds, all the blanks had been filled in, with such wishes as “Prosperity” and “Nonviolence” and “Overflow Blessings.”
ART GUYS WORKING WITH SHIP CHANNEL IN NEXT ‘EVENT’ 
At the site shown here in Pasadena near the old Paper Mill and Washburn Tunnel, where General Antonio López de Santa Anna is said to have been captured during that historically succinct Battle of San Jacinto, the Art Guys are planning their next performance: They’ve announced they’ll crack out their batons and “conduct the sounds of the Houston Ship Channel.” (Not sure what that could look like? Go see it for yourself.) Jack Massing and Michael Galbreth, the helmsmen of “12 Events,” a yearlong series of monthly head-scratchers that commemorate their 30 years of Houston mischief, have so far in 2013 shrugged off their divorce from the Menil, signed their names for 8 hours at the Julia Ideson Library on National Handwriting Day, and walked all 29.6 miles of Little York Rd., the longest in Houston. Next up, once they’ve conducted the Ship Channel waters? The Art Guys unwind a spool of thread, and then — wait for it — wind it back up again. [The Art Guys; Culturemap; previously on Swamplot] Photo: JimmyEv via Waymarking
Regretting what he calls “too much shitty visual culture” in Montrose, artist Cody Ledvina has spent the past few months approaching businesses with ideas for murals as a way of changing that culture, wall by wall. (You might remember Ledvina’s redone Mary’s mural before the leather bar was closed to make way for Blacksmith.) The most recent mural is this elongated weiner dog stretching out on the side of EJ’s Bar at 2517 Ralph St. The photo’s taken from Kueter St. beside Buffalo Exchange and that fenced-in vacant lot on Westheimer near Dunlavy. Also shown here is part of a mural — that’s a skyline silhouette, there — on the side of Urban Leasing & Realty’s building at 1901 Vermont St.
THE MULLET MANAGES TO PAY RENT 
The graffiti training ground known as The Mullet spent much of this week pleading on Facebook for donations to help cover $2,000 in rent and avoid a lock out of the repainted warehouse at 10902 Kingspoint Rd. between Fuqua and Almeda Genoa Rd., reports the Houston Chronicle‘s Francisca Ortega, but it appears that the spraypainting will be able to go on a little while longer: “After making the plea they received about $800 from about 10 different donors. A benefactor then agreed to cover the rest. . . . With the next 30 days of rent covered, [co-curator Justin] Hinojosa said they are looking forward to next month and raising money to help cover the final facility structural improvements.” [Houston Chronicle] Photo: Candace Garcia
WHAT IT MEANS TO WALK WITH THE ART GUYS 
Following them in his van as they hiked all 26 miles of Little York, photographer Otis Ike seems to have had time to come to terms with the piece the Art Guys are calling “The Longest Street in Houston:” “Having to explain the project in its most basic form allowed me, early on, to see Little York Road as an intricate social passage in which the Art Guys and myself were temporary and secondary to the basic necessities of the road’s users,” he writes today on Glasstire: “Yet there was something spectacular that started to emerge . . . . The Art Guys had become a moving target for me to frame the city and comment on the way that we manipulate, pave and . . . program the earth in the name of selling shit to people in cars.” [Glasstire; previously on Swamplot] Photo of the Art Guys on Highway 290: Otis Ike
And the celebratory stunt that the Art Guys pulled this month was walking the entire length of Little York Rd. Moving on, apparently, from their uprooting in early January at the Menil Collection, the shadowy figures Michael Galbreth and Jack Massing completed “The Longest Street in Houston” last Tuesday, walking the 29.6 miles of Little York from Mesa Road to where the concrete ends at Jasmine Crest Lane in Settlers Village.
This is some of what they saw:
The owners of the former Billy Blues club have donated Bob Wade’s “Smokesax” to the Orange Show. The 70-ft. Bunyanesque horn that’s composed of found objects — including a VW Bug — will be transported today from the property at 6025 Richmond where it’s been standing for 20 years across town to a warehouse at the Orange Show’s headquarters on Munger St., just south of UH and a block west of I-45. The cost of the move that’s expected to take all day? $40,000. The Orange Show says the horn’s new home hasn’t been chosen yet.
- Celebrating the artist in everyone! [The Orange Show]
- Nonprofit to preserve Houston’s iconic blue saxophone [Houston Business Journal]
- 70-foot saxophone “Smokesax” is on the move [Houston Chronicle]
Photo: Flickr user readontheroad [license]
HALF THE $25.8M NEEDED FOR MIDTOWN ARTS CENTER RAISED 
Looks like the money for that proposed theater and gallery complex on Main St. keeps rolling in, reports the Houston Chronicle: “Fundraising up to now,” reports Flori Meeks, “has yielded about $12.3 million.” But the little meter on the website for the Midtown Arts and Theater Center Houston — or The MATCH for short — says that the troupe-friendly group already has $13.2 million; that’s 51 percent of the $25.8 million needed to get started on the Lake Flato- and Studio Red-designed building (shown here) on the existing surface parking lot that’s bound by Main, Travis, Francis, and Holman. And what’s it going to be when that other $12.6 million’s in pocket? “While designs have yet to be finalized,” reports Meeks, “current plans for the 59,000-square-foot building call for a large 350-seat theater, three black-box theater spaces with flexible seating configurations, two rehearsal spaces that can also be used for performances and exhibits, a large gallery area, more than 6,000 feet of office space, a central public breezeway that can be used for performances and exhibits and a coffee and wine bar.” [Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot] Rendering: The MATCH
DRIVING IN HOUSTON? SO DéCLASSé 
Artists Carrie Schneider and Alex Tu — that’s Tu in the homemade Hazmat at right — recently walked the first leg of their revamp of Art Guy Michael Galbreth’s “The Human Tour,” a 40-mile hike through Houston in the shape of a body that he devised as a UH student in 1987; OffCite’s Edward S. Garza meets Schneider and Tu in a Midtown restaurant and looks to a higher source to understand what the artists “hope to accomplish,” he writes: “The televisions in Natachee’s are tuned to an episode of The Brady Bunch. Peter Brady is twirling a baton and doing a little jig in the living room. I think of how the Brady family would fit in well in Houston. They would certainly live outside the 610 Loop or, more likely, outside Beltway 8. Mr. and Mrs. Brady would seek somewhere ‘nice’ — that is, suburban, homogenous, and car-centric — to raise their children, and they would relish the array of choices: Pearland, Sugar Land, The Woodlands, Friendswood, Kingwood, Tomball, Spring, Clear Lake, Cypress, Katy. Anyone who has lived in this city for a considerable time will say it: in Houston, to be middle class is to spend a lot of time in a vehicle.” [OffCite; previously on Swamplot] Photo: OffCite
Look at the baby! Wednesday night Reginald Adams led a team of volunteers in painting this archetypal smooch in place of the ever-changing mural on the side of the former Democratic campaign headquarters at the corner of West Alabama and Travis in Midtown.
- New image replaces defaced Obama mural [Houston Chronicle]
- Previously on Swamplot: The Continuing Houston History of President Obama, in 6 Photos
Photo: Candace Garcia
Invasion of the Art Snatchers: Carrie Schneider and Alex Tu, pictured above (though not in their everyday wear), are planning to reproduce the Art Guy Michael Galbreth’s “The Human Tour,” reports Houston Press‘s Meredith Deliso. As a UH student in 1987, Galbreth came up with the crosstown tour: a 40-mile, anatomically correct urban hike in the shape of a human figure.
