LOCAL Houston | The City Guide JUNE 2016 | Page 32

HOUSTON’S ART SCENE HEATS UP
By Emily Westbrooks

SCHOOL MAY BE OUT FOR THE SUMMER AND THE HUMIDITY INDEX IS INCREASING BY THE DAY, BUT
THAT DOESN’T MEAN YOU HAVE TO SHUT YOURSELF INSIDE FOR THE NEXT FEW MONTHS.

HOUSTON’S SUMMER ART SCENE IS HEATING UP ALONGSIDE THE TEMPERATURE.

Downtown Poetry with New Street Banners
When creative design duo ALAN KRATHAUS and FIONA MCGETTIGAN,
owners of Core Design Studio, posed their idea for a new take on streetlight banners to the Downtown District team, they weren’t sure what sort
of reaction they’d get. But to their delight, it’s exactly what the Downtown
District was hoping to add to our city’s streets in their ongoing downtown
beautification project. Before Fiona and Alan knew it, the project had
grown in participation and poetry to a whopping 575 banners hung
from light posts in high traffic areas downtown, running the gamut from
cynical to humorous, quirky to poignant.
“So many people wanted to contribute and say things about the city,”
said Alan, “but only writers can bring to light the things that make our
city unique.” To that end, they enlisted the editing expertise of Miah
Arnold at Grackle and Grackle Literary Studio, as well as Writers in the
Schools, Inprint Poetry Buskers, The High School for the Performing and
Visual Arts, and the Creative Writing Program at the University of
Houston. Layered over images of Houston in white text, each banner
offers a poetic description of our fair city.

Banners are located on light posts downtown at Main Street, Theater District, Minute Maid
Park, St. Joseph Medical Center and City Hall, and along Louisiana, Smith, Milam, Travis,
McKinney, Lamar and Dallas Streets, among other locations.

Museum of Drawing Launches
Gallery owner APAMA MACKEY has had her hands full this spring. She
has been busily working to re-open the Apama Mackey Gallery with an
exhibit that focuses on the 2016 presidential election, as well as opening
the Museum of Drawing’s inaugural exhibit within the gallery.

Mackey is a self-proclaimed drawing enthusiast: “I just have always
adored the pure draftsmanship of drawing...To me, it’s the beginning
of everything. Even the beginning of a painting is drawn, if only in the
mind.” And with that enthusiasm at the forefront, Mackey set out to set
up the Museum of Drawing, or MOD.

THE MOD’s opens its inaugural exhibit from the Panik Collective, curated
by Los Angeles gallery director Matt Kennedy, which runs June 11–
August 31. The Panik Collective is a team of credentialed painters,
sculptors, musicians, mathematicians and curators dedicated to elevating artwork to activism.
Meanwhile, the Apama Mackey Gallery takes on the presidential election with POLL(ITICS) 2016/THE DOCUMENTARY. The exhibit looks at
the 2016 election cycle through the eyes of photographers, videographers, painters and print artists, and features a wall of election memorabilia, from humorous to absurd.

The Museum of Drawing is located at the Apama Mackey Gallery at 628 East 11th Street,
Houston, TX 77008. For more information, visit www.themod.org.

Art Everywhere in Houston
When you envision large, iconic art, like DAVID ADICKES’ We Love
Houston piece off I-10 at Yale or the giant presidential heads beside I45, you don’t immediately think of them as moveable. But later this summer, We Love Houston is headed for an as yet undetermined new location, to be replaced by two even larger sculptures.

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| june 16