’HOOD ORNAMENTS
Two Houston streets offer outdoor sculptures that are worth visiting.|
Carter Ernst’s “Pointing,” a big sculpture of an attentive Labrador retriever, appears to have strayed.
“Pointing” debuted in 2014, when it was up for nine months as one of the first works of “True North,” the revolving show of public art that’s designed to be a people magnet along Heights Boulevard’s leafy, 60-foot-wide scenic right of way. Built in the early 20th century for the city’s first electric streetcar system, that esplanade is lined by a genteel landscape of restored Craftsman bungalows and trendy restaurants. “Pointing” looked like the family pet there.
Now the sculpture has reemerged at 8141 Long Point, in Spring Branch. The art hasn’t changed, but everything around it has. The pooch looks more pitiful but maybe also more purposeful, with its paws balanced on a bed of gravel in the wide-open, asphalt parking lot of a shopping center in transition.
“Pointing” is one of seven sculptures in “Art on Long Point,” a new program modeled on the Heights show that also will rotate works every nine months. Josh Hawes, deputy executive director of the Spring Branch Management District, said the sculpture program is an element of a 15year plan to transform Long Point Ernst’s sculpture is displayed has brought in a yoga studio and a coffee shop. “We’re trying to walk a fine line on economic development,” Hawes said. “We’re doing a huge push for local restaurants.”
He said the district spent $50,000 to get “Art on Long Point” up and running because the community wanted it. With more private property than public along the street, businesses are sponsoring most of the sculptures, and Hawes said the response has been enthusiastic, and some businesses want to keep their pieces.
Still, he admits, everything around the art program has a ways to go.
Driving about six miles on Long Point from Gessner to Hempstead Road, I had to U-turn and double back more than once to spot the sculptures. Finding the art was a scavenger hunt amid the visual clutter of a hardworking street of used-car lots, tire shops and barber shops, furniture stores and laundromats, clinics and dollar stores; and a wealth of Korean barbecue joints (this area is home to what is said to be Houston’s largest Koreatown), carnicerias and panaderias. Houston’s only torteria is there, and a Mexican-vegan place that I will go back to, someday.
An intrepid urban trekker could spend the better part of a day walking that show. I wouldn’t. But it’s a revealing drive, especially combined with “True North 2020.” Both shows allow for comfortable social-distancing.
I prefer the west-to-east route, starting at Gessner and Long Point.
The first three pieces are delightfully scrappy, all made with found materials. They are within a third of a mile of each other, so you can park and walk between them. Randall Mosman’s “Stilt House,” a towering steel structure, has plants and shards protruding through its roof. Anthony J. Suber’s “Time Traveler,” an imposing mound of lumber and steel, has a primitive human head. Robbie Barber’s “Southern Comfort,” a mobile-hometurned-baby-carriage, sits in a sunny corner of Haden Park.
Back in the car, look for Keith Crane and Chris Silkwood’s mosaic tile “Dazy May,” which could depict a butterfly or a flower. It sprouts from the lawn beside St. Peter United Church of Christ. While you’re there, take in some history. Spring Branch was settled by German farmers and merspace
chants starting in 1830, a few years before the Allen brothers landed in what would become downtown Houston. The old wood structure at the west end of the modern, brick church dates to 1848.
Walk a block or so, and you’ll come to Susan Budge’s ceramic, totemic “Harvey,” a graceful, abstract form that’s installed in a small grove of crepe myrtles with benches — a somewhat serene space, if you can ignore the traffic. Drive on, and you’ll find Patrick Medrano’s “Our Lady of the Island,” a surreal and assertive figure with her hands on her hips, a building for a head and a pontoon base. Ernst’s “Pointing,” made of a patchwork of resincoated fabric on a steel frame, is almost across the street.
To get to the Heights, turn right onto Hempstead Road, then left onto 11th. This plunks you just about in the middle of “True North 2020,” which has eight sculptures.
This is a pleasant walk of about a mile in each direction, or a 4-mile loop. Whether it’s a matter of the curating or the setting, I don’t know, but “True North 2020” feels more refined to me than “Art on Long Point.” Co-curators Linda Eyles, Simon Eyles, Chris Silkwood and Kelly Simmons chose works with an environmental theme.
Head south first, and you’ll encounter a large head of cabbage. That would be Bill Davenport’s polymer concrete “Big Cabbage,” which measures 7 feet in diameter. OK, not so refined but very, well, green. “Hard Rain,” Jack Gron’s 10-foot aluminum and painted steel sculpture, looks like a tilted water tower from a distance. The top turns out to consist of puffy cloud forms. Long rods form the “rain” pelting colorful geometric forms at the base, representing a cityscape.
Vincent Fink’s “Dodecahedron” looks like a clear, giant gemstone, painted with images of sacred geometric forms. This piece could be at home outside the Houston Museum of Natural Science. So could Jack Massing’s inventive “Loculus,” a functional wind vane in the shape of an oil derrick powered by a wrench and a huge pencil. If you’re lost, you can find your place on Earth, literally, by viewing the geographic coordinates on the structure.
North of 11th, Leticia Bajuyo’s playfully serious “Forces of Nature: Blue Skies, Slinkys, and Hurricanes” hugs the ground, as if someone dropped a couple of monumental doughnuts there made of steel, blue tubing and artificial grass. Maybe I was just hungry. Joseph Havel’s evocative, 9-foot bronze “On History” rises near the local library. A ghostly sliver of thin forms rising from a small stack of books, it provokes questions about the evolution of the Heights. Next comes Sherry Owens and Art Shirer’s sophisticated “Carbon Sink,” sculpted with discarded crape myrtle cuttings that have been carbonfinished to evoke a depository for greenhouse gases.
The tour ends with a whiff of whimsy, minus the implied barnyard odors, conceived by the late Bob “Daddy-O” Wade before he died last Christmas Eve. Kids love “El Gallo Monument.” Its brightly colored pigs, piglets and rooster were inspired by the “roadside stuff” Wade remembered along old Texas highways.
Redbud Gallery owner Gus Kopriva, who had a hand in both shows, has known both neighborhoods his whole life. He grew up in the Heights and worked as a stockboy when he was in high school for an uncle who owned UtoteM convenience stores in Spring Branch.
As a German/French American, he especially loves the history of Spring Branch. The COVID-19 pandemic had him thinking about an old cemetery not far off Long Point. “It’s full of yellow fever victims,” he said. “During that epidemic, people moved to Spring Branch to get away from the bayou and its mosquitoes. Of course, it followed them.”