Sculptor leaves in art car but temple remains
David Best leaves Houston this week as he arrived from California late last month, driving a brightly striped vehicle topped by a life-size plastic horse painted safety orange. But Best, a sculptural artist, is leaving something behind after last weekend’s Art Car Parade.
Renowned for his intricately designed, ephemeral wooden structures, Best, his Temple Crew and a team of volunteers constructed his first temple in Texas over the past two weeks. The Houston Temple was unveiled on April 12, the day after the Art Car Parade, where Best’s Orange Horse was one of three first-place winners. Admittedly, “unveiled” is a bit of a misnomer: The temple extends far into the sky in the Gulfgate/Pine Valley area near East End. There is no veiling it.
But now that the assembly of art cars gathered for the Art Car Ball has dispersed, the Houston Temple can be appreciated on its own.
“It’s about 1,500 pieces,” Best said. “It looks like more. There’s a smoke-and-mirrors thing going on.”
Indeed, there is.
To stare into the Houston Temple is to see a layering of pieces that harmonize into beguiling patterns and textures.
The pieces are intricately cut into patterns that beg for a close look: wisps and wings and circles and shapes that resemble various flora.
Little pieces of scrap wood from all the cutting might have otherwise been discarded. Not here: They’ve instead been repurposed into little mosaics integrated into the temple.
“We saved everything,” says Pete Gershon, director of programs at the Orange Show.
Houston Temple will remain on the Orange Show campus through Nov. 6, at which point it will meet the same end as the nine temples Best has designed for the Burning Man festival — a weeklong desert-set art and community event founded in 1986 — as well as others around the world: It’ll be burned to the ground, part of a healing ritual.
The idea, for those new to Best’s work, is to welcome people who have suffered some recent loss or challenge. They can, for instance, inscribe the name of a departed loved one onto the temple’s wood.
Houston was a logical location for a Best temple since he was friends with recently departed artists and art patrons such as Jesse Lott and Ann Harithas.
“It’s about coming to terms with loss,” Gershon says. “People can inscribe something. They can leave behind something meaningful. If there was a thing you wanted to say to Mom and never had the chance to, this is the chance to.
“It’s designed to be a cathartic experience.”
The Houston Temple offers another draw from the Orange Show Center for Visionary Art while its centerpiece Orange Show monument remains closed while it undergoes a $1 million restoration. The monument, a joyful 3,000-square-foot space mostly made from found objects, was a decades-spanning project started in the 1950s by Jeff McKissack, a postal worker who wanted to pay tribute to his favorite fruit, the orange.
In addition to the monument’s restoration, the Orange Show is undergoing a major expansion of its campus, which was announced in 2021. The Houston Temple sits on the recently acquired 5.7-acre space that will be built out into an epicenter for future generations of visionary artists.