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.
COMMENT OF THE DAY: WHERE TO PICK UP 20 TONS OF ABE 
“Hey, now you can buy your own David Adickes Presidential sculpture! Its listed on ebay.com. Check out ebay listing #180818753008.” [ck, commenting on So We Put Our Heads Together and Decided To Take Presidents Day Off]
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?
Here’s a scheme for the Independent Arts Collaborative building in Midtown that won’t get built. It’s one of at least 2 concepts developed for the block bounded by Main, Travis, Francis, and Holman streets by Morris Architects — the same firm that had earlier put together the first round of “initial concept drawings” for the IAC center, helping the fledgling arts organization sell the concept to city officials and local arts groups. What’s the big idea here? An inverted yurt. Filled with people and art. A garden and light on top. Like so:
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.
COMMENT OF THE DAY: THE RENTS ARE TOO DAMN HIGH “Finally some progressive thinking from a Houston property owner. Houston is filled with vacant junk space left over from failed retail projects priced at ridiculous, speculative prices. The kind of development necessary to pay the outrageous rent asked by property managers and owners for dilapidated spaces just isn’t supported by the market here. There are only so many Applebees etc. that can be crammed into a given area. I’ve never figured out why keeping a space vacant is better than reducing the rent and making it accessable to artists, creatives, and small business owners. If things go well for them the neighborhood becomes more viable and lively, crime goes down, rent goes up and it’s on to the next neighborhood. It’s a win for everyone.” [JE, commenting on New Arts Complex Planned for Abandoned JCPenney at West Oaks Mall]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: FEEDING THE WEST OAKS MALL JCPENNEY ARTS BEHEMOTH 
“At 100,000 square feet, it is more than twice as big as all the alternative/artist-run spaces currently in existence in Houston combined. If it can actually be filled with stuff and events in a compelling, convincing way, it moves the center of gravity for Houston art to the west purely by virtue of its size. The more I think about it, the challenge will be figuring out ways to effectively use that space. Usually the issue for an art exhibit is a lack of space — a show at, say, Labotanica can feel uncomfortably cramped. For a curator or artist, this space presents the precise opposite problem. A good model in this regard might be Mass MOCA, the enormous museum in North Adams, MA. Filling the cavernous old factory buildings required big, bold artworks. Are there Houston artists who could step up to this challenge? I’d say yes — for example, Sharon Engelstein’s inflatables.” [Robert Boyd, commenting on New Arts Complex Planned for Abandoned JCPenney at West Oaks Mall] Photo: Sharsten Plenge
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
