Detail of Dixie Friend Gay’s mosaic Wild Wonderland in Houston’s Midtown Park

Speeding away from the sleepy South Carolina town I grew up in, I rolled into megatropolis Houston at the nadir of the mid-1980s oil crash. Local shops were shuttered, regional banks were going out of business, and it probably seemed like doomsday to many Houstonians. But to me, a wide-eyed 17-year-old, Houston was exotic and thrilling and full of adventure.

A few snapshot memories from 1985: driving down Main Street past the hulking Astrodome and strutting hookers; eating my first-ever Asian meal in a packed-house Vietnamese restaurant where I was the only non-Vietnamese; cruising Westheimer in the gay-friendly Montrose neighborhood, where a muscleman walked down the street wearing a lemon-yellow boa constrictor around his neck like a living scarf; late nights at House of Pies on Kirby, where you could get your fill of pie and people-watching. It was multicultural and fascinating. Houston was like nothing I’d ever seen.

And it still is. Truly a melting pot, “[m]ore than 1 million immigrants — nearly one of every four residents — call [the Houston] metro area home,” according to the Houston Chronicle. That energy and diversity has led in recent years to the city’s recognition as one of the top foodie cities in the country. (If you haven’t seen it, watch Anthony Bourdain’s wonderful Parts Unknown: Houston, season 8, episode 5, on Netflix.)

Austin likes to think it’s the coolest thing going in Texas, and we trash-talk sprawling, traffic-clogged, L.A.-like Houston. Well, that’s all true, but when you look past the sprawl and traffic you find a vibrant, international city that offers a smorgasbord of good eating, shopping, art, and more.

GQ has just published an article declaring Houston the New Capital of Southern Cool, which I expect will stick in Austin’s craw. But I’m not a bit surprised. I make multiple visits to Houston each year to visit family and friends, see shows, try new restaurants, and check out the city’s public art scene. I always have a wonderful time.

I was in Houston a month ago and spent a sweltering Saturday with my daughter, sister, and sister-in-law investigating several new works around town, including a glass-tile mosaic by Dixie Friend Gay called Wild Wonderland, pictured here and in the above photos.

Dressing up a concrete retaining wall in Houston’s Midtown Park, a new playground and greenspace at 2811 Travis Street, Wild Wonderland depicts a bug’s-eye view of a garden and its inhabitants. As the Chronicle explains, “Each piece begins with photographs, which [Dixie Friend Gay] combines digitally, prints out and paints before creating a scan that can be printed at wall size and sent to the Montreal workshop Mosaika, where the mural is manufactured. Wild Wonderland holds more than 800,000 pieces of hand-cut glass that Friend received in roughly 2-foot-square sections, mounted on gauze. Four assistants helped to install and grout it all.”

It’s a dazzling work, which draws you in close to admire the remarkable detail, like dewdrops on leaves and wire-like filaments of a passionflower. (Austinites, you can see more of Dixie Friend Gay’s work in the Mueller neighborhood: Lake Nessy and Arachnophillia.)

A new public artwork that’s gotten a lot of press is Anish Kapoor‘s Cloud Column at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Located in a newly landscaped plaza outside the Glassell School of Art, Cloud Column, a vertical, gravy-boat-shaped vessel, reflects the world and viewer funhouse-style in its convex, stainless-steel skin, all of which gets flipped upside-down in its concave center.

As you walk around it, you’re stretched and flattened by the curving, mirror-like surface, which also captures the sky and clouds and Houston’s ubiquitous construction cranes.

To some Chicagoans Cloud Column is a mere knockoff of their iconic Cloud Gate sculpture (aka The Bean), and the two cities’ opinion writers have been duking it out, tongues-in-cheek. Here’s the tart takedown from the Chicago Tribune: “If being surrounded by a cultureless abyss insufficiently communicates to confused tourists that they are in Houston, the bean’s verticality will…act as an additional reminder of their poor life choices.” And here’s the ensuing and hilarious duel between the Houston Chronicle‘s Lisa Gray and the Chicago Tribune‘s Kim Janssen.

Also at the Museum of Fine Arts is an interactive installation made of bamboo. Big Bambú: This Thing Called Life by twin brothers Mike and Doug Starn is part treehouse for adults and part 3-D tsunami in the style of Japanese woodblock prints. You enter the artwork of lashed-together bamboo poles via an upper-story bridge, feeling a bit as if you’re walking across air thanks to the see-through nature of bamboo construction.

Red, blue, and green ropes hold the whole thing together. Being a kid at heart, it reminded me of the vertigo-tempting Swiss Family Treehouse at Disney World, which is no doubt heresy to fine art aficionados, but hey, they’re both aerial forts!

But it’s also a gigantic wave, as seen from the 2nd-floor entrance, and you seem to dive straight into the curl of it as you enter via the bridge. Inside, the bamboo construction eddies and swirls around the spiraling ramp as you “surf” through the wave. It’s fun! The exhibit ends on September 3rd, so if you want to see it, go now.

For past art-filled visits to Houston, see these posts:
Alpha males along Buffalo Bayou: Tolerance sculptures by Jaume Plensa
Twilight Epiphany Skyspace at Rice University, a de-light-ful work of art
Soaring over Houston: Jorge Marin’s Wings of the City exhibit
Foliage architecture (and art) on Rice University campus
Out and about in Houston: Public art and an artful home

For a different sort of stick artwork in Austin, see my post about Patrick Dougherty’s Stickwork Yippee Ki Yay in Pease Park.

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