The Pan Review of Books: Painting the Town Orange by Pete Gershon

Robert Boyd



In the 1970s, mailman Jeff McKissack took a modest property in Southeast Houston and transformed it into a monument to the orange. He finished it in 1979. I recall as an undergraduate at Rice University during the 80s going over there to see rock shows--McKissack had build a small stage and bleachers. The seats were old tractor seats.


Jeff McKissack and the Orange Show (photo by Geoff Winningham)

His working class neighborhood had no deed restrictions and Houston famously has no zoning, so there was nothing to stop McKissack from building his dream. While the Orange Show is the best-known example of "visionary architecture" in town, Houston, it turns out, is full of this kind of build environment, this sort of outsider architecture. (I realize that "outsider" is a problematic term, but I can't think of a better way to describe people like McKissack.) It's high time someone wrote a book about them, which is what Pete Gershon has done with Painting the Town Orange: The Stories behind Houston's Visionary Art Environments. The Orange Show, the Beer Can House, the Flower Man's House and even Notsuoh are described, as well as many that weren't saved and exist only in photographs and memories.

But if Painting the Town Orange were merely a guide book, it would be of only modest interest. (Likewise, if it were a book of criticism about these places, I'd be intrigued but I'd still likely find it less useful than Gershon's book.) What Gershon has done is thoroughly researched each artist's life, particularly McKissack, John Milcovisch, the creator of the Beer Can House, and Cleveland Turner, who was the Flower Man. Now why people create structures like this is to some extent unknowable, but Gershon shows how their biographies at least lead them to a certain point where doing something like this--something both very public and highly eccentric--seems like an option.

And beyond that, Gershon thoroughly reports how the structures were saved--how each one was discovered by people who considered it worth the considerable effort required to acquire the works (usually after the death of the artist), restore them if necessary, and preserve them. These stories end up being more complicated than one would expect. For the people who did this, there was no particular roadmap, no handbook on how to save outsider architecture. Personalities like sporting goods heiress Marilyn Oshman, who was instrumental in saving the Orange Show and artist/activist Rick Lowe, who did the same for Cleveland Turner's house, are a big part of the story that Gershon tells.


Cleveland Turner and his house, circa 1990 (photo by Larry Harris)

(This kind of story--about how the work of outsider artists is recognized and, if necessary, preserved-is always fascinating to me. Henry Darger's work was saved because his landlord, Nathan Lerner, happened to be a photographer with a very open mind and an artist's eye. Vivian Maier's photos were purchased by John Maloof in a storage locker sale, and it was just luck that he was the kind of person who realized the gold he unearthed. Charles Dellschau's art was abandoned as trash, ended up in a second hand store, and purchased by the right people.)

As if to emphasize the sometimes miraculous circumstances that lead to a place like the Orange Show being preserved, Gerson includes a chapter entitled "The Lost Environments." He writes about Pigdom, the "shrine to swine", and Bob Harper's Third World. What often happens with this kind of place is when the artist dies, the heirs don't have the resources to preserve the structures and aren't connected to a local art community that could help. The places become dilapidated and dangerous, and often the city red tags them. The bare minimum of what a visionary environment requires to survive is to be widely recognized within the local art community as art. And even that may not be enough.

Gershon moves away from "outsider" environments to discuss Notsuoh,  which is a functioning bar/performance space run by Jim Pirtle, and Zocalo/TemplO, an environment that was built by Nestor Topchy. Dan Phillips and the Phoenix Commotion, a company that builds highly eccentric art houses out of materials headed for landfills, are also discussed. Pirtle and Topchy both come out of the Houston art world and Phillips was a dance instructor at Sam Houston State University--none of them are really "outsiders"--but Gershon identifies the impulse to build an expressive environment as a common feature between them and McKissack and Turner.

There are environments such as this all over the world. Houston's are neither the biggest nor, in my opinion, the most beautiful. (I'd probably vote for the Watts Towers.) But they are tightly woven into the fabric of Houston, and the stories of how they came to be made and how they ended up saved are fascinating.

David David Smalley's Miniature Museum

Pete Gershon

[When Pete Gershon wrote Painting the Town Orange: The Stories Behind Houston's Visionary Art Environments (which we reviewed last week), one chapter dealing with four Houston artists had to be excised for space reasons. Gershon has graciously given us permission to publish the chapter as four separate blog posts on The Great God Pan Is Dead. This is the second post. You can read the first post here.]

Dateline Houston, January 1941. Cornelius Pickett, former executive vice president of the Lumberman’s Association of Texas is inaugurated as mayor. The 36th Infantry Division of the Texas Army National Guard is activated and leaves Houston to train in Fort Benning, GA for battle overseas. And in the attic of his Craftsman bungalow in the charming Hyde Park area west of downtown, a man named David David Smalley opens what he calls his “Miniature Museum” to entertain the neighborhood kids.


David David Smalley's bungalow with the Miniature Museum in the attic

Smalley worked as a mapmaker for the Southern Pacific Railroad, married and raised two children, and taught Sunday school. In his free time, he collected things. Little things, mostly. Really, he collected just about anything you could name. In his miniature museum, which filled every inch of his dusty attic space, the visitor stepped into a wonderland of doodads, thingamajigs and whatchamacallits, more than 1500 in all. There were mastodon teeth, World War I bullets, jars filled with the monogrammed stubs of Smalley’s map-drafting pencils, and souvenir pennies from the 1934 World’s Fair in Chicago. There was a cucumber seed found on the Capitol grounds, an early X-ray tube, a Mexican chocolate mixer, and an old corset stay (“probably traveled many a mile,” read its display card; each object was assiduously labeled with one). The museum didn’t just contain the things he collected; it also displayed things he made. He carved delicate flower designs into Lucite blocks cut from the windshield of a World War II bomber, made model train engines from toilet paper tubes, and whittled dozens of model airplanes from balsa wood, which he painted army gray and hung from the ceiling. There was a train set, an eight-foot-tall telescope (its 12-inch glass lens ground by Smalley’s own hand), and a metal robot that would wink, wiggle its ears, and dance to the delight of Smalley’s pint-sized patrons. He built that, too.


Lucite blocks cut from a WWII bomber's windshield

The guest book bears the signatures of the 690 visitors who stopped by in between the museum’s opening on January 1st, 1941 and Smalley’s death on October 31st, 1963, right around the time that Jeff McKissack was toiling away on his plant nursery, that Cleveland Turner was hopping off the bus on his way to California, that John Milkovisch was beginning to stash bundles of flattened beer cans in his attic. That averages out to about 35 visitors a year. But drawing a crowd was never the point, nor was making money. As the sign at the front door read, “Please bear in mind this is a private museum and we cannot expect too much from the exhibits.” Still, it’s tough to imagine that those 690 guests didn’t get much more than they bargained for.


"We cannot expect too much of the exhibits"

David David Smalley was born in Indiana in 1889, named after his grandfather and uncle, both Davids. His grandson Frank Davis suspected he was drawn to Texas by his sense of adventure. D.D. married the daughter of the sheriff of Hempstead, which until a decade prior to his arrival was still known as “Six-Shooter Junction.” They settled on Tulane Street in the Houston Heights in 1912, and Smalley found work in the classified department of the Chronicle. It might have been a good fit for the gentle, shy Smalley, but he’d soon find more exciting work when he was hired to survey the Texan frontier as a draftsman and mapmaker for the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1918.

“He liked this place because he could drive 30 minutes outside of Houston and find a damn dinosaur,” Davis told the Houston Press’s John Nova Lomax in 2002. “Free! He went through piles and piles of gravel there on the river bottom and found it.” He also found arrowheads (one of which was still embedded in a human kneecap) and pulled Civil War cannonballs from the mud at the bottom of the Brazos River. Smalley never went to college. Davis told Lomax: “There wasn’t anything in college that was half as exciting as what he was doing in his everyday life.”

A contemporary newspaper account states that Smalley contracted influenza, which weakened his spinal column. Frank Davis contended that family lore had his grandfather falling off of a hayloft and onto a wagon wheel. Whatever the case, beginning in 1924, Smalley spent over a year in a body cast at the Southern Pacific Hospital on White Oak Bayou. He was free to use his hands and his limitless imagination, however, and whiled away the hours making beaded purses and model airplanes. One day, he asked a nurse to bring him a knife, some wood scraps, wire, glue, and a 16-ounce flask. From these materials, he constructed a tiny rural scene inside the bottle, with a farmer playing the banjo and his wife chopping wood on the front porch of a fully furnished farmhouse surrounded by barnyard animals. He entitled it “My Old Kentucky Home.” Smalley would go on to make more of these bottle scenes during his convalescence and the proceeds from their sale was enough to buy a radio transmitter for his ward with a set of earphones for every patient.

He became a lifelong ham radio aficionado. “Radio is a pair of legs for you,” he told an early newspaper reporter during his hospitalization. “You can get all over the country with it.” His daughter Laura got around with it, too, and courted her future husband, a Pennsylvanian, using the radio set he kept in his backyard workshop. He built his robot out there and figured how to run lethal amounts of electricity through his own body without harm. He rigged his shack with a foot-operated sound system that teased visitors with eerie creaks, groans, and thumps while Smalley maintained a poker face. He completed correspondence course after correspondence course, studying astronomy, geology, paleontology. He hosted a local radio show where he performed as a one-man-band and challenged his listeners to call in and stump him with a tune he couldn’t play. When he entered his first attempts at painting in a contest at Houston’s City Auditorium, his work took first, second, and third place. With a family to raise, a full time job, and Sunday school classes to teach, it’s hard to imagine how he had time for it all, but then again, as he once told his grandson Frank, “when you’re busy doing something, it makes its own time.” The local papers published articles about Smalley, proclaiming him the “King of Hobbies.”


Popular Mechanics in the Miniature Museum

When the Smalleys moved from the Heights to a bungalow at 1406 Welch Street around 1940, D.D.’s collection was relegated to the attic at his wife’s behest. He lovingly arranged his rocks, his bones, his pesos, his gas masks, his costumed flea, and his splinter from Old Ironsides on cramped shelves that lined every wall, and beneath the model train set in the center of the room he stashed his near-complete runs of such magazines as Popular Mechanics and Life, along with countless cigar boxes containing even more treasures (clock parts, spools, European postcards), as well as a quarter of a million postage stamps. He wasn’t interested in the rare or valuable ones. Instead, he enlisted the help of his grandchildren and their friends in steaming ordinary stamps from correspondence that arrived at the Southern Pacific office. They then sorted them by color and denomination, and with white silk thread Smalley tied them in neat bundles one hundred thick. Then he wrote “100” on the back of each packet with a sharp pencil.

Stricken with cancer, Smalley spent the end of his life amassing and repairing a collection of more than 900 clocks; he carefully set them so that each kept a slightly different time. Ostensibly he wanted to spare his family the deafening sound of 900 clocks chiming at once. The end result, however, was a conversation-stopping five-minute cacophony of overlapping chimes. In between there was a constant, anxious ticking.

Ten years after his death, Smalley’s family first contemplated selling the house. But what to do with the thousands of items still stashed in the attic? Rather than breaking down the display, Frank and his sister Vicki decided to open it back up to the public, at least for a little while. “I often run into people interested in all sorts of things who claim they were started out by my grandfather,” Davis told William Martin (yes, the same William Martin who interviewed Jeff McKissack), in an article about the museum’s re-opening published in Texas Monthly in 1974. “He used this place to get people interested in things. Very little of the stuff in here has any value by itself. It only has value as a collection, as the record of the life and mind of a very interesting man. To give the pieces to different members of the family, or to museums, or just to throw it away, would destroy that record. We hated to see that happen.”

To help with the project, Davis enlisted his friend Helen Winkler, an art historian and administrator who in the late ‘60s had studied under Dominique De Menil during her term as director of the art department at the University of St. Thomas. She’d soon move to New York City to help establish the Dia Art Foundation, a multi-disciplinary contemporary arts organization that commissioned massive site-specific environmental works by James Turrell, Michael Heizer, and Walter de Maria. But in 1972, she was simply looking for a set of speakers. Davis, a reformed hot-rodder and a folk musician who was also recording the psychedelic rock of the Red Krayola and the 13th Floor Elevators as an engineer at producer Walt Andrus’ studios, had them.

“The living room of his house, which was his grandfather’s house, was filled with eight by four foot Mylar speakers, just incredible sound,” says Winkler as we sit poring over photos and documentation about the Museum at a long table in her immaculate West End residence. It’s something of its own miniature museum, or perhaps a miniature gallery, with an eight-foot Dan Flavin fluorescent light sculpture in the foyer, a huge collection of art books, as well as panels of monochrome optical glass and a long row detailed kachina dolls made by her late husband, the artist Robert Fosdick. “Frank asked if I wanted to see his grandfather’s museum, and he took me upstairs. It was filled with so much stuff you couldn’t get around, but that was okay, because you could spend hours just sitting in one spot and looking. I was totally fascinated. It was the most magical place I’d ever been.”


Miniature Museum interior

Davis and Winkler struck a deal with the rest of the Smalley family. What if they installed a back entrance that led directly to the attic? That way, the family could rent out the property and the museum could remain undisturbed. “They said yes,” says Winkler, “so we took everything out of the museum, and we cleaned everything, painted the interior, and brought everything back in and installed it.” Winkler helped to raise about $800 to finance the endeavor, and she and Davis spent weeks dusting, repairing and arranging. The kitchen exhaust fan connected directly to the attic and it had blown in so much dust during the intervening years that in a maneuver that surely would have tickled Smalley, they decided to preserve some of it in a jar and add it to the display. From 1973 to 1978, the museum was open from noon to six on Saturdays and Sundays. Winkler and Davis were sometimes on hand as docents; Winkler would occasionally bring by a visiting artist like Flavin or DeMaria. Minimalist sculptor Sol LeWitt was so impressed he later mailed her a bird’s nest to be added to the collection. The museum drew more visitors in the first few months after its reopening than it had in Smalley’s lifetime, but when thieves broke in and absconded with some antique rifles, valuable metal ores and pieces of the model train set, the family shut its doors. “It wasn’t a museum after that,” Davis told Lomax. “It was a crime scene.”



Still, the particularly curious could arrange to view the museum by appointment until Davis and his sisters sold the house in 1994. Susanne Theis obtained an emergency grant from the Cultural Arts Council of Houston and Orange Show volunteers donated more than one hundred hours of labor cleaning, cataloguing and packing the collection in the attic’s stifling heat throughout the month of August. Davis was filmed giving a walk-through tour and photographer John Lee Simons documented every inch of shelf-space so the items’ arrangement could be properly reconstructed in the future. Theis declared it a “wunderkammer,” a German word meaning “wonder cabinet” that was often applied to the curio collections of royalty and aristocrats in the centuries before the rise of the modern museum. But wonder or not, for the next eight years, Smalley’s treasure trove sat dormant in a barn on Smalley’s granddaughter’s farm near San Marcos.

Karl Kilian had known Helen Winkler since their school days in the art history department at the University of St. Thomas. While she’d gone on to establish Dia, he’d opened the Brazos Bookstore in March 1974 to sell hand picked texts and to bring writers and readers together for book signings and lectures. In 1999, friends of the shop started a non-profit organization called Brazos Projects to host related events in an adjacent gallery space, including exhibitions of furniture made by sculptor Donald Judd and architect Frank Gehry, and a rare showing of painter Cy Twombly’s photographs of famous art pals like John Cage, Franz Kline and Robert Rauschenberg.

Most of these exhibits were mounted for just a month or two. But in 2002, Brazos Projects hosted a revival of Smalley’s museum that ran for a full nine months. Nobody could fully appreciate the magnitude of the collection unless they visited three or four times, Kilian reasoned. “I liked the totality of it,” he says. “The scale, the intent, the quality. I was just relentlessly charmed by the candor of it. Between Frank and Helen and the work that Smalley made, there’s no bullshit. There’s just you and the pieces, and they’re not trying to impress you or win you over or anything, they’re just there in their there-ness. It’s such a clean encounter.”

At Winkler’s urging, Rice University architecture professor Danny Samuels led a team of nine students who constructed a steel Unistrut frame replicating the proportions of the Welch street attic, from the spacing of the shelves to the pitch of the roof. From the frames’ arch dangled bare lightbulbs just like the ones that lit the original collection. Winkler and Davis were on hand every weekend to guide visitors through the display. In fact, a workshop was installed in the rear so that Frank would have a place to keep up with the constant maintenance that the fragile items required. Just as in Smalley’s lifetime, kids were encouraged to handle the materials, and with their help, Davis revived the practice of postage stamp-stacking, using the many boxes of unsorted stamps left behind from the museum’s earlier incarnations. When a child had bundled one hundred stamps. Frank would take a pencil stub from his grandfather’s jar and mark them accordingly.

“Kids just adored Frank,” says Kilian emphatically. “Every Sunday kids came. There were six-year-olds teaching their three-year-old brothers and sisters to count with the stamps. And everybody wanted Frank’s approval. ‘Can I help, Frank? Let me do it, Frank! Can I bring it to you, Frank?’ It was really incredible to see.”

And then, when the exhibit ended, the collection went back into its boxes. This time the repacking was more organized, and Smalley’s treasures now reside in a commercial storage space in downtown Houston rather than Vicki Fruit’s stuffy barn. “I think everyone would love it if it could be displayed permanently someplace,” says Helen Winkler. “The Orange Show always wanted it, but they didn’t have a space. And then the idea of maintaining it makes it a kind of elusive magic. I keep hoping that someone with an interest in folk art of a strength such as this would get it and want to put it back together.”

Flipping through a small album of snapshots, Winkler is clearly drawn back into the place’s magic. “This is the jar with his pencil stubs,” she says, “I think they all had his initials on them. These are the mastadon teeth; he had a whole mastadon. These are dinosaur turds. This is a skull, he had a lot of skulls.” What does it all say about D.D. Smalley? “Obsessive compulsive,” says Winkler without hesitation. “But with a good heart. Never could stay still. He probably would have been hospitalized today.”

Update: Commenter Max pointed out this video, which we felt we just had to include:

Grace Bashara Greene

Pete Gershon

[When Pete Gershon wrote Painting the Town Orange: The Stories Behind Houston's Visionary Art Environments (which we reviewed last week), one chapter dealing with four Houston artists had to be excised for space reasons. Gershon has graciously given us permission to publish the chapter as four separate blog posts on The Great God Pan Is Dead. This is the first.]

Collections of things: not of baseball cards or coins or Faberge eggs, but of the cast-off, used-up detritus of society. It’s a recurring theme in the environments in this book, whether they be the architectural leftovers used to build the Orange Show, John Milkovisch’s beer cans, the junk given new life by Cleveland Turner and Bob Harper, or the ladies’ shoes that fill Notsuoh. The obsessive gathering and presentation of stuff can be a valid artistic statement in and of itself.

I’d spent a couple of hours with architect Cameron Armstrong discussing Houston’s site-specific works over burgers and beers. The morning after, he sent me an e-mail. “Since last night, the idea of discarded objects, ‘thrown-away’ but then recovered and repurposed as (part of) art work has kept coming to mind,” he wrote. “Until our conversation, I had not yet thought how thoroughly our attitude towards culturally obsolescent objects reflects disdain and even revulsion at the past, the out-of-date, the non-presentday. As a form of pollution perhaps, or beyond that even a moral defilement of the present moment (merely by their persistence). It's as if Houston's forward-lookingness experiences the past (especially its objects) as an ideological kind of dirt and an existential threat.”

“In that light,” he continues, “selectively collecting castoffs as material of/for art -- which is what all of the artists in question have been doing -- would seem quite literally a recuperation of (potentially deep) meaning. Here's a thought: working as a junk artist in Minneapolis perhaps means only just using junk; in Houston it might instead have monumental implications.”


Grace Bashara Greene's house

Perhaps nobody accumulated more objects than Grace Bashara Greene. For more than forty years she lived in a handsome, historic brick home in Houston’s Montrose neighborhood. On the outside, it looked like any other of the well-tended, early-century houses constructed up and down Avondale Street when oil money began to flow into the city. Behind the drawn drapes, however, it was another matter entirely. Clogging the dark, smoky interior was a dizzying conglomeration of stuff: narrow paths led through mountains of handkerchiefs, model cars, hats, feathers, Buddhist figurines, vintage advertising signs, books, records, toys, bits of barbed wire and stained glass and broken mirrors gathered in boxes, a subway clock, the horn from a Victrola, a barber’s pole, and the piece de resistance: The Button Lady, a dressmaker’s mannequin Grace covered with thousands of spools, brooches, sparkling appliqués, and buttons of every shape, color and size. Where the head would be was a blinking light bulb.

When the Orange Show’s Eye Opener Tour came to call in the mid-‘90s, Grace’s home was described in the brochure as “a memory box, filled to the brink with her creations. Carefully cut and pasted fabrics, trays and spiraling shelves -- this is the fabric of her life. Grace's work is a tribute to the enduring memories and experiences of her life as a woman who is both a mother and an artist."

“Honey, I had a fifteen room house filled with antiques,” she told writer Randall Patterson, who interviewed her for the Houston Press in 1997. “It’s not a matter of clinging to the past, it’s a matter of not throwing anything away.” Indeed, she seemed to be congenitally unable to let go: not of the objects that came into her life, and most of all, not of anything that reminded her of her only daughter, Elizabeth. She kept not only Lizzy’s baby shoes and the invitation and bouquet from her wedding, but also all of her baby clothes, her schoolwork, pins and certificates from the clubs she joined as a girl, the pompons from her cheerleading days and her corsages from dances otherwise long forgotten.

At the time that Patterson took up Grace’s story, Lizzy was living in the posh River Oaks subdivision with her husband, an investment banker named Tom Hargrove. They had just liquidated her mother’s vast and cluttered estate and moved her into their sunny backyard guesthouse, where she whiled away her days smoking cigarettes in an antique bed with her decrepit poodle beside her. “Kind of reminds me of me,” she told Patterson as she gazed at her dog, “old and broken down.” Soon after, Grace was keeping the poodle alive on a respirator. Grace died in August 2004, and now, in 2012, Lizzy lives just around the corner from my house, in a converted corner grocery store decorated with Tibetan prayer flags, wind chimes, deer antlers, garden statuary and a profusion of flowering plants. The sidewalk is strewn with birdseed; geese honk at passersby from inside the fence.


Grace Bashara Greene


Howard, Grace and Lizzy

Grace was born on January 28, 1928 to Sam and Rose Bashara, Lebanese immigrants who never learned to speak English. Sam was a successful, self-made oilman and Grace had everything she needed but the approval of her parents, who favored her sister. Throughout her childhood, she was teased for her darker complexion by her schoolmates, but did well as she went on to Lamar High School and the University of Houston. She married Howard Greene, the son of poor Arkansas farmers, and Lizzy arrived soon after in 1945. Grace’s parents thought she chose poorly, and the hard-drinking Howard proved them right when he walked out on his wife and daughter. When Lizzy was three, she relates obliquely in an e-mail, “my mother had a nervous breakdown. They gave her the truth serum. That was the going drug then. She faced and admitted her fears … I came in the room and didn’t know her.” For several years, Grace and Lizzy lived with Grace’s parents in a bigger house her father had built in River Oaks at the corner of Inwood and Kirby. But when Grace’s mother threw away her prized Mickey Mouse watch, she snapped, and moved with Lizzy to her childhood home at 414 Avondale, which her father still owned. “It was like Mrs. Greene had been sprung from prison,” says Molly Oldfield, Lizzy’s best friend growing up (and the surrogate Lizzy designated when I first approached her for an interview). “It was also the time when she became financially on her own. I don’t know how she made it.”

Grace worked for herself, setting up a business selling insurance to truckers during school hours, and establishing her role as an outsized presence in her daughter’s life. She was the den mother for Lizzy’s Brownie troop and the room mother for her class from kindergarten through twelfth grade. She signed Lizzie up for swimming lessons, dance lessons, piano lessons, modeling lessons, did her homework and her art projects for her, and opened their home to Lizzy’s friends. “Mrs. Greene gave us the opportunity to express our creative badness because she was the same way,” remembers Oldfield. “We weren't really bad, just ‘bad,’ and it's a wonder we didn't get arrested for our pranks. All we knew was that none of us had mothers like Mrs. Greene and we couldn't get out of our houses fast enough to be set free.”

Grace might wake up Lizzy and her friends during a slumber party to take them out to see some go-go dancers, or smuggle them into a drive-in movie in the trunk of her car. “Mrs. Greene got a new car every year because within 12 months her car would be beat up, dented and tired,” says Oldfield. “One time we were in the parking lot of the old River Oaks drug store across from Lamar High School. She had a light blue Oldsmobile convertible, brand new, top of the line. She backed into a big steel post, hard, and it was just an ‘oh, well.’ She never gave it another thought!”

At the same time, Grace started experimenting with her own creative tendencies, using a card table in her bedroom as a workspace. “She made montages of people and things she cut out of magazines and glued on top of each other with paper doilies, glitter and other stuff,” says Oldfield. “At the time, I couldn't see the art of it. I'd never seen anything like it. She didn't get it from her family. She didn't get it from our parents who loaned us to her. She didn't get it from us. She didn't get it from anyone or see it anywhere. I don't know where it came from. She was extraordinary.”

Having invested everything she had in her daughter, Grace fell into depression after Lizzy left home in 1967 to attend college at North Texas State University in Denton. Lizzy married, graduated, and continued to model, but having tasted freedom, she kept a distance from her mother even after she returned to Houston. Alone in the house on Avondale, Grace filled the gap carting trinkets home from antique stores and yard sales until they reached the ceiling, and she busied herself making elaborate collages out of the items her daughter had left behind. She showered her daughter with gifts that carried both emotional and physical weight. She crafted a shawl for Lizzie that an art critic would later describe as “pristine and ethereal in its delicacy, belying the weight of hundreds of pieces of antique lace and tiny trinkets hand-sewn together.” It was so heavy Lizzy couldn’t wear it. She made a scrapbook that chronicled her daughter’s modeling career in minute detail, but it was so thick Lizzy couldn’t lift it.


the shawl by Grace Bashara Greene

In turn, Lizzy gave her mother a parakeet in an attempt to bring some life to her dark, congested space. Grace stuffed the bird’s cage with toys and food until there was no room for it to fly. It thrashed around in a panic and died; she cremated the remains in the yard and kept the ashes by her bed in a metal tin. Lizzy routinely had meals delivered to her mother’s house. Grace stockpiled them in the freezer.


detail of the shawl

But what Lizzy found suffocating, others found fascinating. In 1993, Houston’s Art League presented the cumbersome shawl and the button-encrusted dress form alongside sculptures local artist Carter Ernst wrought from old tires. When Ernst’s friend Susanne Theis arrived at the opening, she was surprised to find Lizzy there. They’d known each other for years, yet Lizzy had never mentioned her mother’s work to Susanne. For the next few years, Grace’s house would be a regular stop on the Orange Show’s Eyeopener tours.


inside Grace Bashara Greene's house

Filmmaker Laurie MacDonald visited in 1996 while compiling her documentary film about key Eyeopener tour participants. Amidst the chaotic home décor, Grace futzed with handfuls of largely indistinguishable bric-a-brac in shadow boxes and showed off the Button Lady. “I think all my pieces are masterpieces,” she remarked with a twinkle in her eye, laboring to breathe as she inspected the mannequin, a cigarette dangling from her lips. “When you’re good, you’re good, kiddo.”

When Grace fell and broke her hip later that year, she spent time in the hospital, where doctors felt they detected the early signs of Alzheimer’s. By then her family money and savings had long since run out; she was living on social security checks and food stamps. Realizing her mother would no longer be able to care for herself, Lizzy reluctantly moved her into her backyard apartment. She made it clear to Grace that an invitation was required to enter the main house, and despite his dutiful efforts to support and care for his difficult mother-in-law, Lizzy’s husband Tom bore the brunt of the tension between the two women. “Oh, you son of a bitch,” she snarled when he reduced her poodle’s food supply to two cans a day from twelve, as the Press reporter Randall Patterson looked on in discomfort. Grace brought a few things with her to River Oaks, but Tom and Lizzy had the rest of the contents of 414 Avondale sold off (the auctioneer resorted to a shovel to make his way though it all in what was surely the largest estate sale ever held in the Montrose neighborhood). The house itself was sold, too. It’s still there, subdivided now as a rental property, the Bashara name still set into the sidewalk in blue and white tile.

“I know my work’s good,” Grace said, staring down the lens of Laurie McDonald’s camera with a smirk, as if to challenge all skeptics in perpetuity. “I’m not apologizing if that sounds conceited. If no one wants to recognize me, that’s fine, I don’t care.”


Grace Bashara Greene, The Button Lady and interior views of her house

That recognition finally came, however. In 2002, Lizzy’s unwieldy shawl and even the Button Lady found their way to the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, where they are now displayed alongside the work of outsider artists Ted and Zona Gordon and Judith Ann Scott in an exhibit entitled “OCD: Obsessive-Compulsive Delight.” Introductory wall text by the museum’s director, Rebecca Hoffberger reads: “In its more benign manifestations, OCD can serve as a key ingredient in the process of generating prolific, intensely focused, and often meticulously detailed creative production of all sort. Hyper-conscious teachers, researchers, theorists, chefs, medical staff, writers, performers, sports stars, and visionary artists frequently display elements of OCD behavior that actually aid in bringing about extraordinary, beneficial results and performances.”

It’s a salient point. “I want my surgeon to be washing his hands, checking the chart all the time,” Hoffberger tells me. “You know the ballplayers who have to scratch their balls, rub their nose every time they step up to the plate? It’s those rituals that we more often forgive in sports figures, but there’s ritualized behavior to some degree in most of us, whether it’s a certain pair of shoes, or a certain perfume. Most people who aren’t visionary artists have a bit of that.” Grace traveled to Baltimore with Lizzy and Tom for the pieces’ installation. “I was glad she was able to be celebrated,” Lizzy told me when we eventually spoke, fondly recalling the scramble of photographers and even makeup artists from the Body Shop. “I was just glad her work would be protected. If a pin dropped, they all ran to pick it up. Surreal, really. Only a museum can protect the fragility of broken-hearted art.”

“There’s a term, horror vacui,” says Hoffberger. “The fear of the void. I think that applies here.” She cites the famous hoarders Homer and Langley Collyer—who stuffed their New York City apartment with 14 pianos, the chassis of an old Model T, and even human organs pickled in jars—as examples of such obsession taken to the unhealthiest extreme, but then points to the Australian Bowerbird, whose colorfully decorated mating dens, she says, “would make Andy Goldsworthy jealous. That kind of behavior, to be surrounded by things, and all the better if it’s one’s own creation, there’s something in that. I think Grace was not just compulsive in her collecting. She had a very rich visual vocabulary of beauty. She was very driven to express herself, and how lucky we are for that.”

Lizzy brought breakfast out to the guesthouse one morning in August of 2004. “I laid the breakfast tray down and knew she was dead,” she writes in a late-night e-mail. She called the Bradshaw Carter funeral home, which arrived with chocolates and expensive candles. “In two days they created an art slide show with photographs, champagne and a piano player. They dressed her in geisha silks for the wake; I rubbed oil on her hands and feet. Tommy was horrified, but it felt right, like the pieces of your life you try and assemble. I never realized until now all she sacrificed for me, a horror, really. She was tough. She was who she was. I miss her daily.”

Dolan Smith's Museum of the Weird

Pete Gershon

[When Pete Gershon wrote Painting the Town Orange: The Stories Behind Houston's Visionary Art Environments (which we reviewed last week), one chapter dealing with four Houston artists had to be excised for space reasons. Gershon has graciously given us permission to publish the chapter as four separate blog posts on The Great God Pan Is Dead. This is the third post. Please check out the first post about Grace Bashara Green and the second about David David Smalley]

Everything seems pretty normal at Dolan Smith’s house on lower Harvard Street. The cheerful home renovation contractor greets me at the door along with two happy dogs and his wife, Leslie, the creative director in the marketing department at the local university. Dolan is fifty years old but looks fifteen years younger; he seems like the kind of fellow you’d enjoy introducing to your parents.

Dolan and Leslie live in one of the historic, tastefully redone bungalows in the Heights that all the savvy young urban professionals are vying for these days, with hardwood floors, granite countertops and French doors. There are a few edgy works of art adorning the walls, but everything looks picture perfect and clean as a whistle. It’s not quite what I was expecting on my first visit to the man who for eight years turned his previous home into a shrine to the truly bizarre and named it the Museum of the Weird. He offers me a Coke, shows me their well-kept backyard and then invites me into the outbuilding that houses his studio. It’s also where he keeps what remains of the Museum.


Hernia, skull, chupacabra

On all sides of a steep, narrow staircase hang framed artworks, both Dolan’s own paintings and modified thrift store finds, as well as numerous wooden plaques bearing cryptic, handwritten messages, and several small shelves of creepy oddments: jars containing desiccated rats and a wooden skull carved by an inmate at Huntsville State Prison in the 1930s. “This is my hernia,” he tells me, handing me a small jar full of liquid and a shriveled knot of flesh. After a beat, he continues. “Actually, it’s really just a snail. But I had this strangulated hernia, and I wondered, how can I make an art piece about it?” He takes down a couple of other jars from the shelf. The lumpy growth inside one marked “dog cancer” is real, he insists. The shriveled carcass inside another labeled “baby chupacabra,” however, “is probably just a squirrel or something.”

Dolan's studio

At the top of the stairs is Dolan’s studio, bright and mostly empty save for a few large paintings and two chairs where we sit and look through Tupperware containers that hold the snapshots and scrapbooks that tell the tale of his erstwhile Museum. “I was a hoarder,” he explains with a hint of Texas twang in his voice, “and before I put the museum together it was just a big, disorganized pile of crap. I always told myself, ‘oh, you know, I need all this stuff in case I want to use it for my sculptures.’ I could rationalize it that way. Then later I realized, yeah, both my parents did this. It’s some kind of a hereditary thing. I have to work hard to keep things from taking over my space, and because I’m an artist, I’ve tried to turn it into a positive.” Dolan was born in 1962 in Forth Worth, where his father John taught English at Texas Christian University . But it was his mother Lee, an artist, who inspired him to take up painting and sculpture. In 1985 he received his Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from the University of Texas in Austin, and earned his MFA at the University of North Texas in Denton four years later. Along the way, he took a summer job at a Christian Scientist nursing home and asylum as a way to get to New York City and tour its art museums. He won a couple of awards for his paintings, and joined some arts associations. In 1990 he mounted his first solo exhibition, “Triplets in Uniform – The Circus Show,” at the Annex Street Gallery while living in Seattle.

He grew tired of renting apartments, he says, and property in Seattle was too expensive to buy. Having come from Texas, he knew something about Houston’s art scene, and at the tail end of the oil bust years he’d heard that land in Space City was still dirt-cheap. He settled on a dilapidated 1939 bungalow at 834 West 24th Street, and bought it for less than $20,000 in October of 1993. “It was a falling down piece of crap,” he says, sifting through one of the boxes. “I probably have pictures here somewhere.” The previous owner, and elderly African-American woman named Mrs. Whitehead, was a fellow hoarder and Dolan marveled as he went through her discarded albums of old photographs.

He gutted and rebuilt the place himself, and started his own construction company – he’d always been good with his hands, and it went right along with his interest in sculpture. It was more practical, too. “I was doing these paintings, and they were so personal and horrific, well maybe not that horrific… it just wasn’t very commercial.”

Whether or not his paintings are horrific is up to the viewer to judge. Across from us is a huge canvas that shows a smiling woman in a red dress on horseback, supporting a smaller grinning figure riding along in a little basket. It’s a touch surreal, maybe, rendered in something of a Frieda Kahlo style, but hardly horrific. To our left is The Confirmation of Marie, painted in 1997. It’s another large canvas, painted in shades of grey. In a semi-realistic scene that reminds me of a Magritte dreamscape, a severe-looking woman in a low-cut nightgown hovers over a second lady sleeping nude on a sofa, poised to slice off one of her nipples with sewing shears. Another painting, shown in an old photo of the Museum, shows a mustachioed man whose penis protrudes through his fly to urinate on the head of a groveling monkey-boy.



“Maybe I could have done better in New York,” he sighs, “but they just didn’t sell well here, so I started moving more towards sculpture and construction, that hands-on part of me. And once I started the museum, I started building it out, and making these environments.” It’s the first time I’ve heard an artist use this specific term to refer to his own creation. “Oh yeah,” he says, “I was really influenced by the Orange Show, and I’d spent time in Europe, seen the Palais Ideal and all these crazy environments they have over there. Those are really important for me.” Clearly here’s an artist who hasn’t labored in isolation.



Smith opened his Museum on Christmas day, 2000. Access was granted on an appointment-only basis, and word quickly spread throughout Houston’s community of artists and freaks about its constantly evolving assemblage of sculptures, paintings and found objects. Guests passed the rusty Man of 10,000 Nails (a dead ringer for a sculpture that resides in the Menil Collection’s Surrealism exhibit) to arrive at the front door with its crazy grillwork of welded pipes and scrap metal pieces. If they didn’t get cold feet, they walked beneath a die cut metal sign that warned, “enter at your own risk” and into a foyer covered floor to ceiling with crucifixes and voodoo dolls.

Smith’s living room and kitchen served as the main gallery area. Highlights included the Shelf of Delicious Advertisements, an open cupboard stocked with vintage cans of such delicacies as artichoke hearts and salmon that would occasionally burst and yield forth their fizzing contents. There was the Fantasy Frij, an old refrigerator covered in images of women in various stages of undress. There was a paper mache wasp’s nest and a large model of the human heart. And beside the sofa there was an enormous painted cardboard rendition of the Olde English 40-ounce malt liquor bottle that Smith built in 2002 to wear as a costume for his 40th birthday party. “I got so drunk that I fell down, and I was like a giant turtle flopped on its back,” he told his friend Kelly Klaasmeyer when she wrote up his story for the Houston Press in 2008.



In between were seemingly thousands of curious trinkets, from a Wheaties box (“Breakfast of Champions”) bearing the pasted-on image of a smoking, stubble-faced schlub to a wooden cross inscribed with the phrase “there is no water in hell” to a small, amorphous white figure wearing an alarmed expression. “Like, what is that?” Smith laughs, pointing to its image in an old photograph. “A cloud? Toothpaste? Someone brought that back from Taiwan and gave it to me.”

He transformed the yard out back into a twisted sculpture garden. At its center was an army tank made from wheel rims and scrap metal that shot water into a mosaic tiled, brick walled pool. Sometimes it served as a hot tub; other times, it was a pond filled with floating plants. Old tires were a recurring motif. A neat stack of tires with a tin pail for a head and a drawn face with an upturned nose was affectionately named Pig Boy. Another stack of tires was topped with an overturned sink with a forlorn expression painted on its underside. He bore a painted inscription that read, “Hit Me.” For a while there was a tire Christmas tree inside decorated with garlands and decaying, painted ornaments. But after it toppled over one day, Dolan just cleared away the mess and never bothered to repair it.



There were several tiny outbuildings on the small property, and these were used for the Museum “office” and bathrooms. The women’s bathroom had proper plumbing as well as a “Planet of the Apes” motif, while the men’s room simply had a hole cut into the floor (plus, the amenity of a makeshift shower, should the need arise). In 2003, Smith built a pet columbarium on the yard’s western wall out of lengths of pipe, beer cans, cinderblocks, bricks, and mortar. A bathtub set into the wall vertically became a devotional grotto with the addition of the sculpture of a buxom young woman, her missing head replaced by that of a ceramic frog. Beside it was an old water heater with a propane attachment. “Is this where you cremate pets?” Klaasmeyer asked during her visit. “I’m not supposed to,” Smith responded with some hesitation, “but if the dogs kill something…” Pointing out a flat metal disc atop the cylinder, he added, “That’s where you can set your coffee to keep it hot.”

The Halloween’s eve dedication of the columbarium was celebrated with a costume party that ended badly after a guest released a series of helium balloons carrying flaming stuffed animals. It was a spectacular sight until one of them snagged in a neighbors tree and set it on fire. Leslie, dressed as the blood-drenched prom queen Carrie, burst through the back door and, seeing the flames, began screaming. Dolan grabbed a fire extinguisher and had the blaze under control by the time firefighters arrived, but the police were not amused. The balloon launcher, clad only in a g-string made from teddy bears, was carted off to jail, and Smith was placed on the seven-year arson list. “Whatever that means,” he says, rolling his eyes, then, counting on his fingers, remarks, “Hey, I must be off of that list by now.”


The scar room

By far the darkest feature of the whole place, and certainly the one that garnered the most attention, was the backyard gazebo known as the “Scar Room.” It housed a collection of plaques made from scrap metal and wood upon which Smith had recorded the stories behind 86 scars, both physical and mental, a tragicomic litany of discomfort, pain and strife. They were first unveiled to the public five months before the museum’s opening, in an exhibition entitled “The Scar Show” held at a wood-paneled church-turned-independent movie house called the Aurora Picture Show. “I have many wounds and have wounded many others,” he wrote on an explanatory plaque. “I have wounds that turned into scars and some traumas that will never heal. This exhibition is an investigation into those meanings, and expedition into the land of ones own memory.”





Some of the scars are flat-out comic. Scar #68 (1999) reads: “I contracted scabies from trying on clothes at Target in 1995. My girlfriend was really mad. dolen 1999” Others peel back the layers of his own tortured autobiography. Scar #82 (1999) relates a tale from his Christian Scientist upbringing. Dolan accidentally cut his leg with a new Swiss Army knife and his parents reluctantly brought him to the emergency room. Smith wrote, “I think my father was very disappointed that I did not call down Jesus Christ for an immediate and completely miraculous healing.” Scar #20 (1999) is an attempt to come to terms with his dyslexia: “It took a very long time to read, it took a long time to write corectly. It takes things longer for me to understand what people say. People think I’m not listening. People think I’m stupid. People think I’m crazy cause I jump around a lot when I talk, because I don’t make sense. I took a long time to figure out I’m dislexyc. When I told my mother she said, yeah, I do that too, I switch my words around. When I told my father he said I was just dumb. dolen 1999.” At the center of the exhibit is the scar man, an eight-foot-tall jointed human figure with a terrified expression, also made from scrap plywood and metal. He is a monumental piece of anguished folk art where concussions, hemorrhages, food poisonings, dog bites and broken bones are annotated in their proper anatomical locations. While Smith’s Scar Show was leavened with black humor, the plaques are still painful to read. How could one man be subject to so much trauma, and live to make art about it? When the plaques went up in the Scar Room gazebo at the Museum of the Weird, he added a shelf and a plaque that read, “The Shelf of Scars – Please feel free to leave a scar with us.” Many did, and some were as funny or as harrowing as Smith’s own: “In 1976 I was sliding down the slime in the drainage ditch in LA. Then I hit a dry spot. Smush, my chin hit the cement. The doctor had to scrape the slime from my chin-bone, then he stitched it up.” Another reads: “When I was about 12 my mother started burning the hair off my arms with a candle. She said I was too hairy for a girl.” Dolan’s Scar Room became a kind of anonymous group therapy session.



The Scar Room had other attractions, too. There was The Wheel of Truth or Doom. Dolan’s still got it, so we go downstairs from his studio loft to have a look. A push-button operated wheel turns inside a plywood shell to determine the users fortune. “They’re all bad,” admits Smith, as the spinner comes to rest on “You will spend time in jail. Cherish your freedom.” When the Orange Show came to call on their 2002 Eyeopener tour, one woman got very upset when she received her fortune: “You will drive your car off a cliff.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Dolan apologized, “but the wheel never lies.” He offered her a second spin, and a third. The same fortune appeared each time, and she stormed off in a huff.


strangled baby doll

Almost hidden among the room’s other features was a glass jar containing a baby doll, strangled by a rubber hose and floating in clear liquid. “My first scar,” he says, taking the same jar down from a shelf and looking at it tenderly. He shakes it gently, clouding the water with sediment from the rotting hose. “I was born with my umbilical cord wrapped around my neck four times, and I almost died.”

“I’m scared to open it,” he adds, grinning. “This thing would really stink.”

The Museum had really struck a nerve with the local art scene’s fringe element, which voted it “Best Shrine to the Abnormal” in a poll conducted by the Houston Press in 2002. It was written up in the taste making Texan art bible Artlies, and Dolan graced the cover of the glossy Houston lifestyle magazine 002. Meanwhile, the site itself continued to evolve. Smith built a suggestive art car called the Eyegina with a fiberglass and metal sphere; later, inspired by a viewing of the cult film Altered States, he cut off its top and grafted it onto the backyard Jacuzzi to make a sensory deprivation chamber. He turned his own bedroom into a miniature Chinese Theatre that seated six and featured secret compartments from which actors could spill forth.

He married Leslie in 2006, and moved with her into their “normal” home. He held onto the Museum of the Weird for two more years, but no longer able to claim his homestead exemption, the tax burden became unbearable. He considered forming a non-profit and hiring a staff, but friends in the local art scene warned him it might be more trouble than it was worth. “Not only that,” he says, “but I was getting tired of the museum. I didn’t want the hassle; I just wanted to make art. What was I going to do, was I really gonna do this for another ten years? You know the Watts Towers in LA? That guy just walked away in the end. I never really understood it until I got to that point myself.”

Dolan disposed of many of the Museum’s attractions in a blowout yard sale in December 2008, and it was left to realtor Weldon Rigby to sell the place. “Truly unique,” he declared in the sales flier. The asking price was $150,000, the value of the lot itself. In a gentrifying neighborhood, one imagined the house was a tear-down if ever there was one. But Rigby quickly found buyers in John and Kim Ritter, two art car people displaced from their Galveston home when Hurricane Ike punched its way through the coast.

Bill Davenport and his shop, Bill's Junk

Pete Gershon

[When Pete Gershon wrote Painting the Town Orange: The Stories Behind Houston's Visionary Art Environments (which we reviewed last week), one chapter dealing with four Houston artists had to be excised for space reasons. Gershon has graciously given us permission to publish the chapter as four separate blog posts on The Great God Pan Is Dead. This is the final post. Please check out the first post about Grace Bashara Green, the second about David David Smalley and the third about Dolan Smith's Museum of the Weird.]


Bill's Junk

“Every shopkeeper is an artist,” proposes Bill Davenport. And while he may not be Salvador Dali or Andy Warhol—both of whom designed store window displays—I can’t help but be impressed with the arrangement of clutter that fills Bill’s Junk, his 11th Street storefront. “Store display is a form of art, and I suppose junk stores have more flexibility than most. The kind of things I deal in are second-hand objects, so as you can see, I have a lot of scope of how I can arrange things.” The walls and shelves are filled with some twenty years’ worth of Davenport’s scrounges from the flea markets, yard sales and trash piles of Houston.

A painting of a goat-headed demon embracing a naked woman as New York City erupts in flames behind them immediately catches the eye. Here’s a tiny block of wood painted to look like an electric range resting on a leather-bound scrapbook stuffed with articles on infectious diseases. Beside it are some unusual rocks, plastic dinosaurs, one of Dolan Smith’s scars, and a twist of sparkly pipe cleaners made by a friend of one of Bill’s pre-teen sons. Its tag reads: “cybernetic organism - $22.”

“Okay, maybe that one’s a bit overpriced,” allows Davenport. “But then again, for a cybernetic organism, it’s not a bad deal.” There are stacks of used CDs and boxes of weird stuffed animals and an array of misshapen ceramics, the forlorn school art projects of decades past. It’s not too far a leap from the display found at Cleveland Turner’s house, a whirlwind of junk with no rhyme or reason to its placement except for one man’s aesthetic instincts.


"Balloons" to "Bill's": Bill's Junk in 2009

It’s become perceived of as something of an art installation within certain circles, owing to Davenport’s background as a sculptor who uses the most modest materials, but that wasn’t the original intent. In 2006, Davenport and his wife, the painter Francesca Fuchs, purchased the 4000-square-foot building at 1125 11th Street. Built back in the 1930s, for some seventy years it functioned as a fleabag flophouse, with a series of what Davenport terms “sad, pathetic businesses” downstairs: a procession of barbers, lunch counters, and most recently, a ramshackle party supply store. The latter’s window painting has been modified, transforming the word “BALLOONS” into “BI LL ‘S”. Davenport himself spent sixteen months renovating the structure from top to bottom, moved his studio into the back, made an apartment for his wife and two boys on the second floor, and pushed his surplus objects into the storefront.

“Sure, people buy things,” he says, “but there’s never been any thought about whether something was saleable. I don’t make any money doing this. I just don’t want this stuff in my studio, so I’ll just put it up here and maybe someone will take it. I’ll tell you what does sell quickly: dead insects. Dead bees, moths, you display them properly and they never last more than a couple of days.”


Bill Davenport and some of his junk for sale

Davenport, who was born in Greenfield, Massachusetts in 1962, picked up art degrees at the University of Massachusetts and Rhode Island School of Design. After graduation he taught a wood shop class at a Quaker school in central Massachusetts but moved to Houston in 1990 when he was invited into the Glassell School of Art’s Core Residency Program. He reaches into a cabinet and produces an example of the kind of sculpture he made at Glassell. It’s made from five small, unpainted scraps of wood, some with angled cuts, glued together.

“I’ve always made things that looked like people’s bad shop projects and then put them into gallery settings,” he says. “People get mad because they’re so badly made.” Shaila Dewan summarized the general attitude toward Davenport’s work in the tagline to her 1999 Houston Press article, "The Antihero: Is Bill Davenport’s art stupid? Yeah. Brilliant? That, too.”

He shows me another project from his time at Glassell. It’s a small wooden box, painted Pepto-Bismol pink, entitled Counter. I imagine how sensual and luxurious the textures of its sloppily applied paint and its badly fitted joints must have looked under bright gallery lights. “It’s very much a conceptual piece. It’s about making the piece, and the desire to make it. The things that I love the best are things where people worked really hard to do something they don’t know how to do, which for me is what all great art is. Sometimes they come up with something the most highly trained artist couldn’t accomplish.”


Yes, everything is really for sale!

To illustrate his point, he points to a yard sale painting hanging in a corner near the ceiling, an unassuming landscape depicting a sailboat on a mountain lake. “I mean, look at old Mr. McKenick here,” Davenport says. “Some of the things he did here, the boat, this tree over here, didn’t really work, or they’re pretty commonplace. But then you get to those mountains in the background, and you’re like, wow, that’s better than just about anything you can imagine.”

Davenport went on to teach classes in sculpture, painting, art history and art appreciation at just about every school in the Houston area, along the way working with painting, crochet and large-scale outdoor sculpture as his preferred mediums. A bin on the curb in front of the store is filled with one of his current sculptural modes—mystery objects, wrapped in newspaper and wound with colorful yarn. A price tag dangles from each, for example: “Object that could bring you luck - $3”.

His work is handled by Houston’s prestigious Inman Gallery and he’s equally well-known for his daily blog updates for the Texas art website of record, Glasstire, for whom he’s written since 2001. When he opened Bill’s Junk in 2008, a steady stream of friends and strangers came to browse. Then one day, Toby Kamps walked in, and asked him if he’d be interested in recreating the store for an exhibit he was curating at the CAMH called No Zoning.

“Up until then it wasn’t an art project,” says Davenport. “I had a lot of fun arranging stuff, yeah, but it wasn’t art. I mean, it was art, but I wasn’t thinking of it like that. It was a case of a curator making the art by designating that it was. I had to think really hard about whether I wanted to do it.”

Davenport accepted the invitation, but he admits it was with mixed feelings. “It was a bit of a crisis. You’re an artist. Important curator comes to your studio, and he doesn’t want your art, he wants your junk. What do you do with that?” In this case, he went with the flow, and replicated his shop within the CAMH’s gallery space, selling thrift store art, decorated sea shells and macramé owls to show-goers—in fact, eager buyers emptied out his store three times before the exhibit came down. The process had come full circle. Not only was the collection of cast-off materials art; now so too was the act of its resale. With Bill’s Junk, Davenport was making a sly (and possibly inadvertent) commentary on the art’s commercialization.

“From a critical point of view, you could say his work with Bill’s Junk is an important turning point for this kind of site work,” says architect Cameron Armstrong. “When an artist creates a space like that and then turns the process around, turning the accumulation into a dispersal, and that dispersal becomes its meaning. I think that’s amazing.”

Armstrong says, “the things we’re talking about, this all comes up right out of the soil of Houston.” He shakes his head and adds, “You’re going to have a hard time explaining all of this to outsiders.”

HOU do HOU: Will the City Ever Recognize its Own Culture?

Dean Liscum

Over a 48-hour period, Houston has let two cultural "icons" be destroyed. One, the Funnel Tunnel by Patrick Renner, was new and had regional attention. To be honest, it was a potential icon that showed real promise. The other, The Flower Man's House by Cleveland Turner, was almost two decades in the making and had achieved international acclaim. It was a bona fide icon. Both were hugely popular within the communities in which they resided.

What puzzles me is why the city of Houston (or the Houston Arts Alliance [HAA], manager of the city's civic art collection) which is in constant search of a cultural identity, didn't seize the opportunity to own this locally produced art and attempt to preserve it?

Institutions pay exorbitant amounts of money to event organizers to generate exactly the type of community involvement and identity that these artworks generated naturally. The City of Houston regularly forks over millions to rebrand itself, a.k.a. give the city a cultural identity. For instance, in 1997, Bob Lanier spent $1M in tax payer money and another $2.5M in private funds to produce "Houston: Expect the Unexpected." That is only one of many branding rat holes down which city leaders have poured tax payer money. HAA had a similarly disastrous foray into sloganeering with it's "Houston is Inspired" mural by committee. Local blogger Harbeer Sandhu at texphrastic painfully detailed it.

Funnel Tunnel and Flower Man's House grew out of the urban ecosystem that is Houston. They were created by local artists, are unique, have garnered national and international publicity, and had popular support in their neighborhoods.

What more could a city struggling to establish its identify ask for?


Patrick Renner creator of the Funnel Tunnel

There are, of course, official reasons why both exhibits were torn down.

The primary one given for the Funnel Tunnel was that it was established as a temporary exhibition. Temporary alludes to the fact that the Art League doesn't have the infrastructure (read money because that's what were talking about) to maintain the structure long term. Nonetheless, the artwork itself was partially constructed by volunteers, maintained by volunteers, and disassembled by volunteers. Plus, it's steel infrastructure looks anything but temporary. It seems (from the outside) that a small amount of money from the city, some weather proofing of the substructure, and the efforts of volunteers could easily sustain it in perpetuity.


If you can't preserve it, cannibalize it. Volunteers helping to disassemble and collecting souvenirs.

Imagine if you will an annual or bi-annual neighborhood festival centered around a local art work that is popular with its adjacent residents and Houstonians everywhere. The city/HAA could close down the northbound lanes on Montrose and make the southbound lanes two-way, thus limiting traffic for a few hours but not blocking it. (I'm not a heretic.) The Art League Houston could donate it's parking lot and facilities to the cause. Vendors could turn the ALH parking lot into a mini-festival while volunteers maintain the sculpture. 4 hours. $20K. Cultural icon established.


Only the skeleton remained

The Flower Man's house was a little more complicated. By complicated, I mean it would have cost more money to restore/preserve than the Funnel Tunnel and it's in a historically African-American neighborhood. History and empirical evidence reveal that money tends not to flow these neighborhoods.


Cleveland Turner, a.k.a. The Flower Man. Photo by Pete Gershon, author of Painting the Town Orange: The Stories Behind Houston's Visionary Art Environments

The verdict on the house was that it was a public safety hazard. Turner died in December 2013 and so the house had been left unattended for over a year and became infested with mold.


Inside the Flower Man's house. Photo by Pete Gershon
 
Mold is a harsh reality in Houston. If you're poor, mold remediation is virtually impossible. If you have $1M that's been redirected from a poorly conceived rebranding campaign, it's totally do-able. Worst case, the city/HAA acquires the property, demolishes the building, builds a replica of the house or a museum, and donates it along with the annual funds to properly maintain it to a non-profit already in the area like Project Row Houses. Then, it could function as a cultural destination like the Orange Show or the Beer Can House.


Street view of the Flower Man's house. Photo by Candace Garcia

I know. I know. I know.

The Orange Show and the Beer Can house have private, non-governmental organizations that fund them. Actually, it's the same one. My response: who gives a shit. The fact that those white folk artists, their family, and their very wealthy friends\supporters had more disposable income than the Flower Man is irrelevant to his cultural significance. He's a folk artist with the same passion and intensity as Jeff McKissack and John Milkovisch. He deserves the same treatment and would very likely inspire a non-profit foundation to augment and possibly take over any initial support from the city.

Imagine the same volunteer festival that I fantasized about for the Funnel Tunnel. However, in the case of the Flower Man's house, it isn't a fantasy. Over the years, Project Row House organized several volunteer efforts to help paint and repair the house.

Plus, Cleveland Turner's personnel story from homeless drug addict to community advocate is the perfect redemptive story...except he's not white or overtly religious. His religion was his joy, which manifest itself in his art. What's not to love about that?

Nevertheless, nada from our cultural curators at city hall/HAA.


Demolition of the Flower Man's house. Photo by Francesco Conti

And so by night fall of February 8, 2015, both were no more. It's a shame because efforts to save those public art works would have supported the city's unique culture. The Funnel Tunnel and the Flower Man's house could have contributed to a Houston identity based on the efforts of Houstonians, which in my opinion, is a far better use of tax payer dollars than a lame rebranding campaign that leaves us all wondering "Who were the ad wizards that came up with that one"...and alas, culturally poorer.