- 29 W. Rivercrest Dr. [HAR]
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Tag: Murals
Last Wednesday, a new paintjob completely erased the blue and gold artwork on Reeve’s Antiques’ Taft-St. side. The whitewashing, Reeves owner Matt Reeves tells Swamplot, has created a blank canvas upon which a rotating series of new murals will appear over the next few months before a final, more permanent work takes their place.
He didn’t comment on the flying fish now levitating above it all:
And Aerial Fish
Chevron made some strikingly real 3D changes to the fake 3D facade of the old Houston Press building last week, bringing it closer to total collapse. The photos above — shot over the weekend from the YMCA catty corner to the scene — show Suzanne E. Sellers’ 1994 trompe-l’œil additions to the building’s east face no longer fooling anyone, though a few sections of her work on that side and off Leeland St. remain intact.
Nothing’s crumbled yet on the unpainted, Pease-St. side:
Illusions Shattered
The biggest eye-level change to the former Social Junkie restaurant building is the one shown over the Acura in the photo at top. And while it’s definitely less of a statement than its predecessor — a nod to the Texas Real Estate & Co. office across the parking lot — what exactly it means is more of a mystery. Renovators are still putting the finishing touches on the structure — blackwashed earlier this year — so the lettering could just be a sign of things to come.
Or maybe it’s there to stay, like the 2 Shell Shack signs and adjacent menu teasers that went up not long ago beneath the butterfly roof:
Art Goes Here
COMMENT OF THE DAY: A BLANK CANVAS ON TRAVIS AND COMMERCE 
“In the meantime, can someone please put a mural on that god-awful concrete wall on the parking garage behind it? It really ruins taking shots of downtown from that angle now.” [Triton, commenting on Injury Lawyers Give Up Waterlogged Abraham Watkins Building’s Ground Floor for Good, Parking Garage Filler Now Slated To Replace Them] Illustration: Lulu
Longtime Gulfton activist Tammy Rodriguez’s likeness is now fully rendered in the mural above, as well as that of Pastor Alejandro Montes, to her right. The pair makes up one third of the population now flanking the Salvation Army store’s west side along Ashcroft Dr. off Bissonnet, a block east of Hillcroft Ave. Chicago-based artist Rahmaan Statik (who got some design inspiration from students at Braeburn Elementary School) plans to have the work complete for an unveiling ceremony this Saturday.
It’s one in a set of 3 murals that public art organization UP Art Studio has planned for each side of the thrift store building — except for the south face, pictured above — as part of a project dubbed “Growing a Brighter Tomorrow in Gulfton.”
Work on the east side began with this preparatory whitewashing:
Bissonnet and Ashcroft
Aerosol artist Enrique Figueroa Jr. — also known as Gonzo247 — is about 3 months into his work on a new version of the Rebirth of Our Nationality mural that once faced Canal St. between Norwood and Linwood streets in the East End. Leo Tanguma’s original 1973 work faded over time and was whitewashed last summer. He’s now providing Figueroa with some remote assistance on the redo.
A Fresh Coat
Leo Tanguma‘s 240-ft.-long, 70-character 1973 mural slowly peeling from the southern facade of the former Continental Can Company warehouse in the East End (pictured above in 2013) was whitewashed over the summer. Mario Enrique Figueroa Jr. — better known to Houstonians as Gonzo247 — is now hard at work on the Chicano-art landmark’s replacement: creating with a small crew a mural of the same name, size, location, characters, and intention. These recent photos show the progress so far:
Gonzo, Not Forgotten
COMMENT OF THE DAY: THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PUBLIC ART AND LANDSCAPE DECORATION 
“It is poorly written, but I think I get the point of the Glasstire post. Public art should really be art that is given its own space and not be little more than an attempt to pretty up the existing urban landscape. When you have artists putting decorations on electric boxes, bridges, or other things that are normally not even noticed as part of our urban landscape, you diminish the art and the artist into a municipal decorating service. Public art should be set aside from the urban landscape instead of being relegated to dressing it up.
I generally agree. I do like the paintings on the electric boxes, but these kind of projects seem to be a way of paying lip service to public art.” [Old School, commenting on Tip-Off for Apartments by the Toyota Center; Details of the Coming Canino Farmer’s Market Redo] Photo of mini mural by Anat Ronen at Airline Dr. and Hardwicke: UP Art Studio
The former Heights Finance Station post office at the corner of Heights Blvd. and 11th St. — its parking lot and front door face Yale St. — is coming down in a hail of lovingly painted bricks today. The post office was closed at the end of 2015 and subsequently purchased by developer MFT Interests. The single-story building was later festooned with an assortment of romance– and ZIP-code-themed murals.
MFT is calling the new development it has planned for the 1050 Yale St. site Heights Central Station. It’ll consist of two 2-story painted-brick buildings fronting 11th St.:
Heights Central Station
It appears demolition contractors — or the site’s new owners — saw fit to remove the mural of Destiny’s Child from the House of Deréon Media Center building in Midtown before beginning to break it down last week. The time-lapse video above shows an excavator tearing apart the 2-story structure at 2204 Crawford St. piece by piece on Friday. But the southern façade of the building, which faces Hadley St., looks a little different than it did just a week earlier. Where once hung giant images of Kelly Rowland, Beyoncé Knowles, and Michelle Williams, a plain white panel appears — the mural evidently having either been removed or painted over before demolition began.
Strangely, this is not the first sign of deference the demo contractors on site have shown the Bootylicious trio, before the building touted for many years as “The Home of Destiny’s Child” was given the boot. Last week an excavator appeared in front of the mural — only to sneak away a few days later:
Didn’t Think They Could Handle This
- 150 Gessner Rd. 14EÂ [HAR]
A siteplan and the latest renderings of Melbourne-based Caydon Property Group’s residential highrise, planned in place of the now-erased mental health building and lowrise mural canvas at 2850 Fannin St., show a bit more clearly how the 27-story structure might look amid its more squat Midtown neighbors (not counting that other highrise planned a few blocks down Main St.). The aerial view of the site shown here (tilted so that Main St. is horizontal, with Downtown off to the left) shows the building’s footprint in yellow, alongside the light-rail line and Midtown Park to the west.
One of the new drawings of the project also depicts what appears to be a closeup of the Drew St.-facing side of the building, with a good deal more than just the typical rendering entourage: the block across the street is shown with another multistory development in place of what’s currently a parking lot by the Art Supply on Main lowrise, and a section of the street itself is shown fully pedestrianized.
Neither of these changes make an appearance in any of the other zoomed-out renderings, however:
Drawing Out Drew St.
- 27506 Shores Ct. [HAR]
Need even more evidence of Houston’s street-art surge? Or just want to compare pigment choice between school- or developer-commissioned and more opportunistic murals? Cameraphone photographer Marcos Antonio has been documenting decorated walls around town since last summer, updating his website with new posts frequently even since spreading word of it on Reddit yesterday.
His catalog is not as extensive (nor as detailed) as the one on Where + Wear + Well, but the site does include a map tie-in, and includes a few sites further from the Inner Loop, such as the wall near the corner of Kingspoint Rd. and Tanner Park Ct. above.
- Kingspoint Rd. [Bayou City Murals]
Photo: Marcos Antonio
A Mural Tour
