In honor of “nearly” reaching what it describes as the halfway point in constructing the new East End light-rail line, Metro is releasing this rendering showing what it’ll look like when riders reach the track’s end. It’s a view of the station at the Magnolia Park Transit Center on Harrisburg at 70th St., the line’s easternmost reach. For the most part, the basic structure of each station will be identical steel constructions with glass canopies — much as they are on the existing Main St. line.
Hey, wasn’t that mural on the side of the former Mary’s bar recreated with great effort just last year? As of last night, it’s been covered over — except for a bit of blue painting tape that’s allowing the red border underneath to reappear. What happened?
Wait — haven’t we already seen “initial concept drawings” for the Independent Arts Collaborative building planned for the corner of Main and Holman in Midtown? Well, yeah, but those initial concept drawings were prepared by Morris Architects as part of a study just to sell folks on the idea. Since then, the IAC bought the former city parking lot at 3400 Main St. and Morris lost out on the actual commission to a mix-in combo of San Antonio’s Lake Flato Architects (best known in town, strangely enough, for 2 inner-loop grocery stores they’ve designed for H-E-B) and Houston’s own Studio Red (fresh from its work on the renovation of an old Downtown warehouse into the new Houston Permitting Center). So we’ve got a whole new batch of initial concept drawings to look through, this time from the building’s actual architects.
Shunning the typical secrecy surrounding not-ready-yet designs, the new arts organization has decided to show them off on its Facebook page — even before floor plans are ready — with a simple “let us know what you think.” What a concept!
The Sicardi Gallery’s impending move to its new Brave Architecture building currently under construction at the corner of West Alabama and Mulberry in Montrose (above) should send a few ripples through the local gallery landscape, art blogger Robert Boyd notes. Headed for the current Sicardi Gallery space at 2246 Richmond (across the street from Blue Fish House and the Hobbit Cafe), according to Boyd’s sources, will be Thom Andriola’s New Gallery:
The local architecture firm responsible for designing the city’s new permitting center on Washington Ave (which is currently doing well in the voting for one of this year’s Swamplot Awards) and the San Antonio firm behind the recent Buffalo Speedway and Montrose H-E-B Markets will team up to design the 85,000-sq.-ft. Midtown building for the new Independent Arts Collaborative at 3400 Main St. between Holman and Francis St., the organization announced today. Earlier, Studio Red and Lake Flato Architects had been listed separately as finalists for the commission on the organization’s website.
The building — shown above in a concept drawing produced by Morris Architects, one of the finalists that did not get the job — will contain shared exhibit and performance space for several local arts groups, as well as rehearsal and workshop areas, classrooms, and offices. Houston’s city council agreed to sell the site — which served as a surface parking lot for the city’s previous permit office — to the brand-new arts organization last summer. Among the organizations listed as probable tenants of the new building: Fotofest, Diverseworks, the Houston Arts Alliance, Musiqa, Catastrophic Theater, the River Oaks Chamber Orchestra, and Main St. Theater.
Rendering: Houston-Galveston Area Council
KILGORE TROUT 2.0 “Some people have understandably asked how I can give up the platform for art writing that the Houston Chronicle provides in favor of resuming my escorting career while launching this strange new blog. Here’s the thing: the original Devon’s Diary — originally titled Devon the Escort’s Diary — which ran from 2001 to 2004, was actually a much bigger platform for art writing than the Chronicle’s chron.com and 29-95.com sites have ever been. On both sites, art traffic was anemic at best during my time at the paper. My art posts on Devon’s Diary, by contrast, were mixed in with posts related to escorting, sex and other parts of my life. As such, they were viewed by many more people than have ever read anything I’ve had to say as a Chronicle employee, contractor or freelancer (I’ve been all three). The unfortunate irony is that my art writing has gotten better since the early Devon days, only to make the impact of a tree that falls in the woods but doesn’t make a sound. . . . In its own way, Devon’s Diary created a generalized public sphere online, albeit one heavily titled toward a gay readership (though hardly exclusively). People came for the sex and got exposed to art while they stuck around.” — former Chronicle art critic Douglas Britt, now Devon Britt-Darby, on the road in Miami Beach.
Dual’s pumpkin-head wheatpaster installation at the corner of Montrose and Westheimer, as of Halloween night. And then:
How did an artist out of L.A. convince the owners of Houston’s West Oaks Mall to turn the vacant building of former mall anchor JCPenney into a 100,000-sq.-ft. department-store-sized arts complex? Well, it helps that the building — at the northern crotch of the West Houston mall — has been sitting vacant for 8 years and has received no major retail anchor interest in the 2 years Pacific Retail Capital Partners has owned the property. It also helps that the artist, Sharsten Plenge, is a Pacific Retail employee — and that her father is the firm’s managing principal. But Plenge tells Swamplot the company is behind her novel rehab concept, which is currently her main focus at work.
THE HOUSEWRAP RED CARPET TREATMENT 
“Tina McPherson, whose day job is as the supervisor of the William R. Jenkins Art and Architecture Library at U.H., . . . conducted interviews of arriving guests (pretty much anyone who came through) similar to those red-carpet interviews one might see on awards shows or celebrity-oriented shows. I’ve always thought it was weird how the backdrop to these interviews would be wallpaper printed with copies of corporate and/or product logos. iPageant parodied this tendency by putting up Tyvek, the super-strong water-proof paper that home builders use to cover the wooden balloon framing of modern houses. Tyvek has its logo printed in a regular pattern, making Tyvek paper perfect for a red-carpet backdrop. McPherson treated everyone who came in as if they were a celebrity, whose answers to her repetitious questions were actually worth hearing. This went out live on the closed-circuit feed.” — Robert Boyd, describing artist Dennis Harper‘s homey one-night performance last month at The Joanna, across the street from the Menil Collection’s Byzantine Fresco Chapel. [The Great God Pan Is Dead] Photo: The Joanna
Hey, wasn’t there one of those first annual art fairs at the George R. Brown just last month? Art retailer and barkeep Bill Davenport teases out the differences between that one and the smaller Texas Contemporary Art Fair that took place over this past weekend:
Making its debut last night at the Sabine Promenade downtown: The Buffalo Bayou Invasive Plant Eradication Unit, equipped with gardening tools, microscopes and plant presses, and a taco-truck style ordering counter where you can report or learn about the latest local vegetation battles. The food-truck-style mobile exhibit and lab is the work of New York artist Mark Dion, commissioned by the Houston Arts Alliance and the Buffalo Bayou Partnership. Next stops: the Holly Hall Retirement Community Plant and Bulb Mart at 2000 Holly Hall St. (on Friday) and the Native Plant Symposium at the Omni Hotel at Eldridge Parkway and the Katy Freeway (Saturday). Look for the converted Ford van with the skull and crossed pitchfork and shovel.
Photo: Meredith Deliso
COMMENT OF THE DAY: UH . . . HELLO? “I would love to know more about the giant brick hand that greets you as you drive east of Lyons. Does anyone know what its origin is?” [RWBoyd, commenting on Hello from the Fifth]
After taking in this weekend’s open house at the thriving shipping-container art colony ensconced in Stephen and Thedra Cullar-Ledford’s Independence Art Studios at 419 Janisch Rd. between Shepherd and Yale (above), fine-arts hound Robert Boyd pokes around a few more streets in Independence Heights — and finds a lot more art lurking in the neighborhood’s big lots. Boyd writes: “I think we can say that this is a little hidden art neighborhood. And if it follows the pattern of other art neighborhoods like Montrose and Rice Military, in 25 years or so, it will be full of expensive townhomes.”
Photos: Robert Boyd. Sculpture: Jonathan Clark
Glasstire correspondent Beth Secor tries to get a handle on the first-ever Houston Fine Art Fair, held over the weekend at the George R. Brown Convention Center: “One of the oddest places I visited on Friday was LewAllen Galleries of New Mexico, where strangely enough, its booth was manned by a chair, which seemed to be selling other kinds of chairs to what I assume was a clientele consisting solely of tables. I was too intimidated to clear up what may have been a complete misunderstanding of the situation, having once been severely berated by an Eames Chaise Lounge, after accidentally referring to its Ottoman as a Suleiman Turk.”
More than 10,000 visitors and sales in the millions (one gallery sold 2 pieces for a total of $1.7 million, according to one report) mean the event will return next year.
Photos: Bill Davenport and Kelly Klaasmeyer (soup)
Or Thomas Kinkade parody toilet paper, to be more precise. After her “Parody of Light” exhibition earlier this year at Diverseworks, Houston artist Patricia Hernandez has taken the next step: selling her signature Thomas Kinkade-plus-freaky-clown prints and clownish collectibles online. Featured item: “The most expensive toilet paper you’ll ever buy,” featuring repeated prints of a Thomas Kinkade original landscape, retouched by the master artist herself to include a squatting clown — presumably going about its business (see detail in also-available color print version, above). Price: just $15 per roll.
