TX Day 4 - Cars, Chapels, and Colossal Museums
Today started in the aptly named college town of College Station, home to the positively ginormous Texas A&M. I had spent the night there as it was a convenient spot between Austin and Houston, and in the morning there was no way I could resist getting my coffee at a place named Sweet Eugene's House of Java. The interior lived up to the hope-raising moniker with lots of eclectic local art all over the walls, very peculiar table settings, and candy bar flavored lattes as sweet as the titular Eugene. I was very happy with my choice to say the least.
I sat there and wrote for a little bit, but the whole time I was working I kept getting distracted by this hot little number. Maybe it's Irish pride, maybe it's homesickness, but this is at least the third time that I have been helpless to resist the allure of a St. Patrick's Day themed pastry. I haven't regretted any of them though, and this one had coconut on top which made me particularly happy.
The only problem with really sweet coffees is that as good as they taste, I never feel like I actually get the same energy surge from them so by the time I was done sitting in the considerable Houston traffic I was about due for another. I went to a really cool and cozy spot called Blacksmith in the Houston neighborhood of Montrose. Their coffee might not have been as sweet as Eugene's, but it really hit the spot for this low energy boy.
Reawakened, I made my way to my first major Houston stop, the Museum of Fine Arts. I didn't feel like paying for parking though so I drove around a bit and in a stroke of divine intervention I got some street parking outside of the really lovely St. Paul's Cathedral.
The Houston Museum of Fine Arts did seem to be trying to prove the adage that everything is bigger in Texas as it's collection sprawled across two massive buildings and they're working on a third. Luckily that quantity was also matched by the museum's quality. Things started off on the right foot with a sculpture right out front by my man Joan Miro of some abstract birds, and a big mural in the lobby by Kara Walker, whose satirical racial and social commentary laden silhouettes have been a highlight for me of contemporary art wings across the country.
The good first impressions kept coming as general admission to the museum is free on Thursdays which was a very happy accident. The first gallery I decided to check out featured art and artifacts from the Ancient Islamic World. This was really cool because this is a part of world art art I don't see in every museum. The gallery wasn't super large, but they had some really beautiful items including a lavish Moroccan Qur'an from 1318, some colorful mosaic works, and stunning intricately designed lute.
In the hallways between exhibits were different photography displays. The first display was of historic photographic negatives of major landmarks. I really liked he eerie quality of the inverted colors and the insight into the photographic progress that you don't see too often. I like the idea that while the finished product can be impressive, it doesn't mean that the steps along the way can't be beautiful in their own way.
The next gallery was a small collection of Native American crafts. They had some particularly impressive jewelry and ceramics, just amazing designs.
Of course, my favorite part was the Hopi kachina figures. These have really been a highlight for me across the Southwest. The highlight of this batch for me was two owl figures because they've got such funny shaped heads already even when they're not proportionately human sized.
After that gallery, I transitioned to the other museum building in style by using an underground tunnel/art experience called the Light Inside by James Turrell, a pioneer of large-scale environment-centric light art. Some museums might think, sure you could just walk to that other building, but this one said why not make a mesmerizing shifting light experience out of it so it feels like you're walking through an interdimensional wormhole instead.
Through the wormhole the next gallery was on contemporary jewelry which had some pretty wildly inventive designs. There were brooches made out of photographic prints of athletes, puzzle piece bracelets, and neck pieces (necklace seems like too weak a word) shaped like flower petals and mobius strips. None of them look particularly comfy, but they definitely caught the eye.
My favorite piece for just sheer wackiness was this matching mother child pair of Panda-mermaid brooches by Felieke van der Leest. I don't know why they're mermaids and I don't know why the mom is wearing such a stylish pink sweater, but I'm very happy on both accounts.
The next gallery was a special career retrospective of the photographer Raghubir Singh, who helped bring color photography and India into the forefront of the modern art world starting in the 60s up to his death in 1999. Unfortunately because this is a traveling exhibit, they didn't allow photography, but Singh's works were explosive capturing a bustling, colorful, dynamic India. He used really clever modernist stylistic flares like breaking the fourth wall by having his car door or window reveal the artist's presence and create a frame within a frame which was very neat. He also had a series where he would use the flash on his camera to see through Muslim women's faces through their hijabs, which ethically I find questionable if they didn't know he was doing that, but aesthetically made for spooky ethereal portraits with a sweetness at their center as the women still smiled whether it would be seen or not. Of the photos I found of his online though this was probably the most striking:
After the special exhibit was another hallway of photographs, this one capturing the history of different innovations in contemporary photography. These included early color photographs from the civil war that had to be painted by hand, photographic abstractions, daguerreotypes printed on silver, x-rays, big names like Ansel Adams, and a whole lot of strange and compelling imagery.
My favorites from this series were works by by Sandy Skoglund, which featured elaborately painted sets with a combination of live models and sculptures to create dreamlike fake realities. All the purples dogs, floating goldfish, and green cats are not digitally added in but sculpted and staged showing that while photographs capture the real world, the real world can still be pretty damn whimsical.
The next hallway of photographs was all works by local high schoolers learning about documentary photography and trying to capture a story. They may not have had some of the technical knowhow of the modernist masters, but these kids still had an eye for subjects and stories to tell some of which were quite touching. If my selection of favorites is any indication, the ones that struck me the most tended to have to do with friends and families.
Up next came the museum's permanent collection. I started in the European Wing and was very excited to see that they started things off with my guys, the surrealists, cubists, and modernists. I love these beautiful weirdos, and they had some pretty big names including Miro, Picasso, Kandinsky, Dali, Brancusi, and Leger. I couldn't even narrow it down to favorites because I liked these all so much.
These more form-defying artists were complimented with the impressionists who paved the way for them by still representing traditional subjects with but with wild colors and inventive brushstrokes that made feelings just as foregrounded as the content. Seeing all the stranger twists and turns modern art has taken since then, it's hard to believe that these so clearly beautiful pieces were considered revolutionary, shocking, and even vulgar by some critics at the time they were first unveiled. This collection was really impressive featuring works by Signac, Degas, Money, Bonnard, Matisse, Rousseau, Braque, and Van Gogh among many others. Again picking out favorites is pretty hard so I really recommend clicking on these bad boys and seeing them in all their multi-colored glory.
As if to highlight these complimentary art movements, the main gallery of these late 19th/early 20th century European was flanked by two stunning alter pieces one by Matisse and one by Fernard Leger, the former capturing sensuous colors and female forms, the latter a dreamlike tableau of abstract and natural imagery. These were real jawdroppers.
The modernish European stuff wasn't all funky figures and colors and there were some more traditional but just as beautiful portraits and landscapes by the likes of Renoir and Mary Cassatt (technically American but she lived her adult life in France so I guess they grouped her in?), and one piece by a painter I'd never heard of named Gustave Caillebotte of a man reading under some orange trees that I thought was just amazing. A quick google search of Monsieur Caillebotte revealed that while he was an excellent painter, his more integral role in the art world was as a rich guy who basically funded Monet, Renoir and Pissarro at the beginning of their careers, helping to advocate for Impressionism and, in Monet's case, pay the rent. It's always nice to see artists looking out for one another.
Up next things went backwards in time a bit with a pretty large and in charge collection of works from medieval times (the era not the theme restaurant) and the Renaissance. Lots of magnificent landscapes and biblical scenes and weird looking kids.
Highlights of this collection for me were: a spooky David Lynch dream of a painting by Hieronymus Bosch; some wildly violent scenes from Greek Mythology and the Bible of Apollo flaying Marsyas the satyr alive for daring to challenge him to a musical contest and of King Solomon dangling a baby ready to cut it in half to show his wisdom; an incredible perspective bending painting of the Pantheon by the deliciously named Giovanni Paolo Panini; an El Greco style saints painting by Jorge Manuel Theotocopoulos; an incredible three dimensional terracotta painting of St. Jerome by Alonso Cano; a fun meta-painting by Paolo de Matteis of a painter futilely trying to paint a serene portrait while mythological chaos swirls all around him; a painting by Francois Boucher of cherubs pranking each other while they sleep; and an extremely anatomically improbable painting by Joos van Cleve of a baby creepily turning and grinning at the viewer while it breastfeeds.
Up next came the romantics and realists who still kept up the classic Biblical, royal, and mythological scenes (a Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot painting of Orpheus is a real stunner) but also started adding in more rural and working class scenes all refining the anatomical and geologic details of their predecessors.
After the Europeans came some artifacts from antiquity, which was mostly Greek and Roman though there were some Egyptian mummies and burial art adding a more global flavor. The sophistication of the stone and ceramics work from these ancient peoples never ceases to amaze me.
After the European Wing, I went to to check out the Americans. Things started off with my some of my favorite modernists including works by Georgia O'Keeffe, Childe Hassam, Willem de Kooning, and even a rare non-abstract work by Jackson Pollack.
Of course my favorite of the lot was my original dude Edward Hopper. I think he really was the first painter I ever fell in love with when the Boston Museum of Fine Arts had an exhibit of his work when I was just a wee lad in my formative years. This painting though, entitled Excursion Into Philosophy, quickly became one of my all time favorites. I just feel like the scene is so vague and interesting that there are whole novels going on in the look of the man's eyes. Some critics, including Hopper's wife, suggest that the partially nude woman next to him may actually be dead, which is a darker read than I would have come up with, but I like that there's that much open to interpretation.
Other highlights were some Modernist decorative arts such as an abstract mobile by Alexander Calder and truly breathtaking Tiffany glass woodland scene.
It wouldn't be Texas though without some good old fashioned Cowboy paintings, and the Western art gallery did not disappoint. They had the legends Remington, Russell, and Bierstadt, but the highlight's was series of illustrative paintings by an artist named Thomas Sully of key scenes from Robinson Crusoe (not quite a cowboy, but he had that pioneer vibe for sure).
Last but not least was some pieces from Colonial days including some fascinating prints of political cartoons and illustrations. It's always amazing to see these historical periods have real life breathed into them by seeing what people were actually reading and thinking about back then.
The real prize of this collection though was this immaculate silverware by founding father and famous horse rider Paul Revere himself.
At this point in even though I had another whole building and continents' worth of art left to see, I made the executive decision to leave because I was worried the other places I wanted to see in Houston might be closing soon. My next stop was the Rothko Chapel, a simple but elegant brick octagon dedicated to the city of Houston by wealthy art patrons John and Dominique de Menil as a non-denominational place of quiet reflection, peace, and worship.
The big draw of the chapel though is fourteen monumental all-black but textured paintings by its namesake abstract expressionist. Rothko's never been one of my personal favorites, but seeing these works in this solemn and peaceful environment really elevated these works to new heights of emotional power. Something about their huge size and dark colors just made them hugely absorbing like you were being totally sucked in. There were no cell phones allowed inside as that would have disrupted the entire spirit of the place, but this photo from google captures some fraction of what it was like in there, though the experience is definitely more than the sum of the artwork.
Outside of the chapel was a small reflecting pool and a sculpture by Barnnett Newman called Broken Obelisk. This perfectly balanced steel pillar is sleek and strong up to the point where it appears to break at the top. The city of Houston in 1969 was looking to put a more modern monument in front of City Hall, so the de Menils offered to buy this and donate it to the city on the condition that it be dedicated to MLK, who had just been assassinated. They felt it was a fitting monument to him capturing the sadness of the death, but the underlying and persisting strength, but the city of Houston felt like it would be too much of a pro-Civil Rights statement to have a public monument to Dr. King (different times), so the de Menils rescinded their offer still bought the sculpture and decided to dedicate it to MLK anyway in front of their chapel. With the added serenity of the reflecting pool, I really think Houston City Hall lost out.
After the peaceful meditation at the chapel, I paid my respects at a much stranger and more whimsical shrine, the Garage Mahal of the Art Car Museum. As the name implies, art cars are cars that folk artists and fine artist alike deck out in all manner of wild adornments and they have a proud history in Houston with the city hosting one of the largest annual Art Car parades in the country. The museum is housed in a former used car garage bought by local artists James and Ann Harithas and redesigned to look more like an airplane hangar. It makes for a pretty striking first impression.
The museum is small, but free and filled with gonzo art you're not gonna find anywhere else. Right now there are only two true Art Cars on display, a Buick with a Madonna figure on the hood made out of reflector strips and a more extravagantly custom built Gargoyle mobile by W.T. Burge.
The art cars were complimented by some artful but not explicitly artistic rare and vintage cars. These included a classic pink cadillac, the only surviving 1937 Packard LeBaron, and a Model T. They were such fun displays of history and artistry.
To show off the full depth of art car collection beyond the confines of the Garage, the museum also had video displays of art car parades past and interviews with the people behind these extraordinary machines. Of course this being an outsider art museum, they didn't do anything so straightforward as just show a video, instead putting up multiple TVs playing a kaleidoscopic Rorschach test of simultaneous video feeds.
The museum also tries to highlight different non-car artists each year to spruce up the walls of the garage. This year's artists in residence were two photographers Ricarda Redeker and John Bernhard. Redeker's photos were remarkable snapshots of seascapes and the sand dunes of White Sands National Park that made naturally occurring phenomena look like abstract paintings. The seascapes were lovely, but the sand dunes were especially captivating with the highly contrasting white sand and blue skies making for some truly alien looking landscapes.
While Redeker took classic photos of extraordinary subjects, Bernhard took more traditional subject matter (nudes, portraits, and cities) and used more non-traditional methods to transform them into surreal and eerie works of art. His two series were one of faces that had been blended with different photos of nature to off-putting and captivating effect, and one that was created by chance when a Chinese printer working on a retrospective of his career accidentally printed a set of photos on paper that had already been used for other images. Bernhard discovered these misprints in the trash and was captivated by the overlapping images juxtaposed entirely by chance. I'm sure the originals would have been powerful in their own right, but I agree with Bernhard that there really is something oddly compelling about their haphazard combinations.
After the Art Car museum, I went to see a strange and incredible curiosity shop called the Wilde Collection. The Collection featured macabre art and artifacts from around the world, resembling something out of Tim Burton's dream journal. They had ceramic devils, skeletal madonnas, taxidermy zebras, coffee tables with mummies in them, mice dressed up like medieval knights, and Victorian photographs with the heads replaced by bird heads among all kinds of other oddities.
One thing this collection had that I'd never seen in any Curiosity Shops before though was a collection of live exotic birds that you could watch play in their natural habitat. You know how Peacocks naturally hang out among fields of human skulls, right?
After the curiosities, I went to meet my friend Theo for dinner. Theo was in band with me in college and is one of the nicest guys I've ever met. He also has a blog of baseball commentary and general musings that I highly recommend because if someone who knows as little about sports as I do can enjoy it you know it's gotta be good.
On my way to meet Theo, who was also joined by his brother, and his brother's girlfriend, I stopped for one last coffee for the day at a spacious local favorite for craft coffee called Boomtown Coffee. The Coffee was really strong and tasty and outside the shop I learned a very valuable life lesson.
I met my friend at a place Torchy's Tacos, a local chain which is incredibly beloved across Texas. When I posted a photo from there on Instagram, I got positively flooded by excited former and current Texans raving about the place. I got excited as soon as I walked in because they had some really great works of art hanging on the walls. Something seemed slightly different from the originals, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it.
The food lived up to all the expectations as well. I got two tacos, the Tipsy Chick which had chicken fajita, spinach, corn, cheese, chipotle sauce and bacon bourbon marmalade, and the Democrat which had shredded beef barbacoa, avocado, cheese, lime, and tomatillo sauce. Both tacos were little explosions of flavor, a perfect confluence of good ingredients done well. We also got chips and guac for the table, and the only thing better than the food was the company. Theo was a couple years ahead of me in school, and while I've seen him at a few band events since he graduated this was really the first time we got to have some quality catching up time.
After dinner, we had all planned to go to an open mic but I found out when I got there that comics were supposed to sign up the night before. I talked to some of the other comics there, and they said I could try to still get on but the odds wouldn't be too good. Fortunately though, the club was right across from 8th Wonder Brewing so the night wasn't a total loss and I was able to make it up to my friends who had hoped to see me perform with some good beer. We got some flights. I went with the cream ale, red ale, porter, and an unusual and delicious Vietnamese coffee porter. The cream ale didn't really do it for me, but everything else was fantastic. The coffee porter was a particular highlight that I'd never seen before with a creamy robust coffee and malt flavor.
Walking out of the brewery, I was struck by the mix of high and low brow in this street art mural of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol reimagined as Beavis and Butthead. What an odd mix of references.
After the brewery, we went back to Theo's place. He had been working on microbrewing his own stout, so we drank those and played one of our favorite board games from college: a superhero themed turn based game called Sentinels of the Multiverse. The makers of the game created a whole diverse roster of heroes and villains, and players work together to defeat the villain. We tried the hardest villain and lost hard, but it was still a pretty perfect night.
Favorite Random Sightings: A keg just laying by the side of the highway; Santa's Wonderland (Texas seems a little far south for that); Dentiq Dentist; Lightbulbs Unlimited (who needs that many lightbulbs); Slick Willies; Parking lot patrolled nightly by car thieves (kind of ominous way of trying to get people to lock their cars); Herb 'n Legend Smoke Shop; Cutthroat Barbers (poor choice of words); The Merman Law Firm (are they mermen or do they represent mermen?)
Regional Observations: I've never seen more lanes on any highway before and somehow they're all still full of cars. Houston traffic is unreal.
Albums Listened To: Rancid (1993) by Rancid; Rancid (2000) by Rancid (not the most original at coming up with album names); Rarebreed Flexi Subscription by Various Artists (the singer from Westbound train started a little indie ska record label so how could I not support a Boston boy); Rarebreed Summer Spring Sampler by Various Artists; Rarebreed Winter Sampler by Various Artists; Rarebreed Recording Company Summer Sampler by Various Artists.
People's Favorite Jokes:
What does a mermaid use to wash her tail? Tide
Songs of the Day:
They might have been a pretty average punk band if not for the exceedingly above average bass playing of Matt Freeman
Hard not to be happy listening to this one