Kaneem Smith Creates Sculpture From Coffee Bags

Last Wednesday afternoon, I visited Kaneem Smith in the new studio space on Spring Street that she's sharing with her dad, the sculptor George Smith.* I wanted to take a look at the work she's producing for the lobby at 1002 Washington Avenue. I first saw Kaneem's fabric sculptural works at the TSU gallery last summer and I loved them. The day we visited TSU, Kaneem was in the gallery, so we got a personal tour. Knew at once that Kaneem could add an altogether different dimension to the artwork being created for this public space and I asked her if she'd like to join the artists' team. BTW, Kaneem teaches at UH Downtown.

When I walked in her studio last week, I laughed out loud because the pieces that she is assembling are delightful, playful and colorful. One wonders exactly what they are. I can only imagine how two dozen of these cone/columns will appear when suspended and placed in proximity to one another.

I really like what Kaneem is producing for the new Houston Permitting Center. She gathered several dozen large burlap coffee bean bags and is now sewing them into cone shapes, rather like a cluster nest of wood dabbers. Only Kaneem's cones are painted in bright pure colors and the coffee logos remain where they've been stamped on to each bag.

And yes, two dozen cones in many colors will be suspended from the ceiling in the lobby area between those two enormous return air ducts. Imagine the look of these colorful columns just floating there in space.

I hope they sway a bit. I hope folks will touch them and I hope children will walk through them instead of around them. I told Kaneem she ought to affix bells inside each cone, so when people do touch, they'll hear those bells jingle and be surprised. We'll see what she does.

In the meantime, Kaneem has a lot of stitching to do as many of the cones have intricate patterns made of folds and gathers. And then she'll be painting with those bright colors.

Can you imagine this work in the Houston Permitting Center? I continue to be amazed at the variety of the artwork that will be installed in this public building.

Just think about arriving and seeing Dick Wray's four story tower, a narrative in laser cut steel. Think about Dean Ruck and Dan Havel's extravagant assemblage of recycled metals. Think about Gonzo's aerosol murals. The list goes on and on. This is public art created by Houston artists and quite frankly, it's inspired.

No one can possibly anticipate how folks will experience all this art for the very first time. Imagine someone walking through those front doors for a plan review, a stamp of approval. And I like the surprise element in all of this. Feels to me as if we've given each person a series of gifts. If they take time to look at the work and wonder about it.

I am beginning to think that I'll spend time in the fall lingering near the artwork to listen to people's reactions.

To each artist working on this project - my very best wishes for smooth installations and my thanks for contributing to what will be a unique public space.

*By the way, George Smith taught sculpture for years at Rice U and one of his pieces can be seen in front of Lanier Middle School on Woodhead at Westheimer.

AIA Gala: 1002 Washington Avenue

What a lovely evening. Guests would never have guessed that on Monday afternoon, the main lobby was covered with piles of sand in preparation for laying the terrazzo floor. Who would have known that the concrete steps to one of the main entrances was still to be poured, as was a part of the front parking area. Party lights, filtered through geometric shapes, covered the lobby ceilings. Would that those lights could remain in perpetuity. Beautiful way to show off after dark.

1002 Washington Avenue looked good tonight. And I never saw so many bars at one party. A crowd of over 700 gathered to celebrate architectural firms receiving awards and to be the first to see this almost-finished City of Houston building. Must have been quite a night for Studio Red's Bill Neuhaus, architect in chief. Mayor Parker spoke with pride about the facility's greenness and the city's commitment to sustainability. The building is tracking for LEEDs gold right now. The Mayor also mentioned the public art that will soon fill the building which brought a burst of applause. I liked that response.

When I spoke with Mayor Parker after dinner, she asked when the art will be installed. "May," I told her. Everyone is anticipating the artwork. And strangely, though I know that May will be enormously busy and all kinds of things could go awry, I'm confident about the end result. The art is going to work in this place. There will be a lot of it and it will be exciting and totally unexpected. And for the record, civic art is good public policy in action. From the City of Houston website:

"The program was established in December 1999, when City Council adopted an ordinance mandating the inclusion of civic art in selectedcapital improvement projects. Each year, the civic art component of the CIP includes design, acquisition and/or construction of new civic art as part of the City’s collection.

The primary objective of the program is to enhance the environment through the inclusion of artist-designed features in new municipal facilities, contributing to a sense of community pride. The Civic Art Program supports the City’s commitment to neighborhood enhancement and improving overall quality of life. As projects are completed,they will add to Houston’s image as a vibrant and culturally rich metropolis, both nationally and internationally."

Nice to be working with such clear objectives.

Earl brought his camera tonight and suddenly there were pictures of me at the party. A new experience as I am usually the one behind the viewfinder.

I am wearing that costume I made with brocades, silks and linens salvaged from Hurricane Ike flood waters. I thought it was the thing to wear because it mirrors this building where the original interior brick and concrete have been preserved and reuse and repurposing are the verbs of choice. Repurposing is at the core of some of the artwork too. Dean Ruck and Dan Havel's piece is assembled from recycled metals and is dynamite, baroque, wonderful. If we care to toot our own horn, Dan's included a bouquet of trumpets and coronets in the piece.

Saw Minnette Boesel, Mayor's Assistant for Cultural Affairs and Susan Christian, Mayor's Office of Special Events.

Here is Lorie Westrick, Rey de la Reza Architects. When I was president of the Greater East End Management District, we worked together on the East End Streetscape Project with TXDOT. Seems eons ago.

Lovely to see Rock Gremillion and his wife. Rock and his brothers own A&E Graphics and they will be involved in fabricating two of the my text walls for this new facility. Wait until you see those walls.

Here I am with Steve Andrews of Texas Timber Plank, the company that supplied the recycled wood beams that form the lowered floating ceiling on the main floor. Each section of the lowered ceiling spells out a word in bar code. If you stretched out flat on the floor and looked up, you could read all the bar codes. that is, if you could translate into the language you speak. the barcode words are meant as encouragement as one goes through the permitting process. Subliminal messages. By the way, Texas Timber knows the provenance of each piece of its timber. Lots from Hurricane Ike and lots of good reused Texas trees.

Chatted with Sarah and Lance Gandy, Gandy2 Lighting Design. Every fixture in this facility comes from them.

At dinner, we sat with Louis Skidmore, consultant to Skidmore, Ownings & Merrill, LLP and his son Chris Skidmore who manages the art gallery Gremillion & Co. Charming dinner companions. Louis told me that lamb shanks seemed to be the plate of choice at this year's galas. Seems he's eaten more than one or two of late. I'd say those lamb shanks made a very tasty dinner.

Now, about the bathrooms. For months, I've wanted to put text interventions on the wall near the bathroom ceilings or at the tops of columns where folks don't expect words. The words would be sly green messages and thoughts about code. I see them as plexi conversation bubbles or I'd have a sign painter paint the words or, what about Gonzo 24/7? He's already painting two aerosol murals for the place. I am still hoping I have a sliver of budget funds for small messages up high on bathroom walls. Folks wouldn't forget them. I really do want to do this.

Just time for one last photo as we waited for the car. BTY, I saw JB White, General Services for the City of Houston and Manhattan's Charlie Genella. Both of them sure look great in black tie. Absolutely should have taken their photos. You'll just have to imagine them.

So, here we are. Earl's seen the building for the first time. Tonight was the 'before'. The 'after' will be when the building is filled with what are called 'artful interventions'. Indeed. The artists are intervening all right. All twelve of them. It's the art that will make this building sing the really high notes, that will give voice to its greenness, that will speak to the city's energy and diversity, that will bring wonder and perhaps a smile to those folks working the permitting process. Don't you think?

This green building is a terrific project and does the City of Houston proud. I am glad to be a part of it.

For the record, here a list of the artist's who will absolutely make this building. They are quite a group:

Dick Wray

Dean Ruck

Dan Havel

Serena Lin Bush

Joe Mepplelink

Andrew Varna

Kaneem Smith

Jesse Sifuentes

Gonzo 24/7

Agnes Welsh Eyster

Geoff Winningham

Mary Margaret Hansen

Main Entrance Now Has Steps

Lovely to see the building after a week away. Concrete steps have been poured for the main entrance. Work's been done on the green roof area. The air ducts on the main floor where Kaneem Smith's piece will be installed look great. Carpet is being laid on parts of the first floor. The recycled wood timbers above the racetrack are all installed and are quite good looking. Each group of timbers spells out a word. Should one lay on the floor and look up - and if one could read bar code - then the ceiling would speak to you. Good things are happening.

The AIA Gala is this Saturday evening. 700 people will be partying in the lobby. I can see there is plenty of work still to be done to make it a safe and elegant party place. I am sure they'll make it happen.

Blue Skies in the Basement

Met with Serena Lin Bush at the site today along with Cody, one of her IT partners. She wanted to check the stairwell pit once again, now that the row of recycled wood timbers has been set in the space. Serena's monitors will be attached to the recycled timbers. She brought white paper cut in the sizes of each of the monitors. Just to check on placement and ease of seeing. She opted not to use the wall behind the stairway. We decided that the stair railings themselves would cover the monitor and it would loose its effectiveness. So all monitors will be flat in the pit.

I still get goose bumps when I think about Serena's piece. Several cameras will be mounted on the roof of the building and will photograph the sky continuously. Cabling will bring the images down to the monitors in the basement. So viewers will see real sky in the bottom of the stairwell and will be able to look up all the way to the top of the stairs four stories high and see that same sky through a skylight. It's a very cool idea.

A Green Message From Yellowstone

Disheartening to read that Yellowstone National Park has tons of garbage left by sightseers at Old Faithful. The park used to ship this plastic garbage overseas, but now they send it to Georgia where it's made into a woven, fleece-like material for carpeting backing. Makes for jobs in the U.S. and that's a good thing. But what a pity that American citizens litter their own national monuments. Makes me long for the days when there were commercials on television with an old Native American giving an anti-litter message with a big tear running down his cheek. You won't see a commercial like that these days. I suspect that even the Don't Mess With Texas campaign against highway litter has been defunded.

None of this has anything to do with the civic art project at 1002 Washington Avenue, except for the fact that the city is making this facility a model 'green' building that is currently tracking for a LEEDs gold rating. And some of our artists are using recycled materials in work created especially for this building. They would be Dan Havel, Dean Ruck and Kaneem Smith. I think we can add Metalab Studio to this list. They plan to have some recycled trumpets and coronets in their piece as receivers of CO2. Yes, we'll be encouraged to blow CO2 into these horns and see what happens on a large screen at the end of the main lobby.

We can't wait to show the public all the art in this building.

Civic Art Gets Thumbs Up From Fellow Blogger

It is so nice to get a positive mention for work done, or in the process of being done. I just read a recent on The Great God Pan Is Dead, an always interesting blog that follows the Houston art scene. Thank you, Robert Boyd, for recognizing how unexpected it will be to see so many Houston artists in one very public building.

This project is terrific and I've loved working on it. The art will be installed in May. City employees, now housed in a half dozen locations around town, will begin moving in about the same time as the art. We'll see how they like their new digs and we'll see how their customers - the contractors, architects and designers - like visiting this new space where they'll see all this unexpected art while they get those permits and the coveted red stamps of plan approval.

Folks will see art as soon as they hit the parking lot. Dick Wray's work is the outer skin of the four story exterior elevator. Here's a photo of Dick and his wife Beth taken during the meeting when we first saw the model for this four story work. It'll be laser cut powdered coated metal installed in panels on the corrogated exterior wall now in place.

Actually, you will see Dick Wray's four story work even if you never enter the parking lot or the building itself. That four story exterior elevator is visible from the freeway that circles downtown. Spectacular. BTW, it's safer to look if you are in the passenger seat.

This blog post also published on Rockbridge Times.

Art In Progress

Wonderful to see what a dozen artists are producing for the new Houston Permitting Center at 1002 Washington Avenue. The building opens to the public in early summer. Here's a preview of some of the art work that will make this public building unique in Houston. This has been a very satisfying project on which to work. Especially now that we begin to see the work take form.

Here's Dean Ruck and Dan Havel's piece. It's huge, baroque and extravagant. All assembled from recycled metals including a bouquet of trumpets and coronets. I'm loving it.

Jesse Sifuentes's murals are near completion. I photographed him and the work a week ago at Texas Southern Universtiy where he teaches ceramics and mural painting.

I love the way Jesse included coffee cups amongst the magnolias as a reference to Houston's East End coffee processing plants. His second mural will be installed on the lobby level across from a coffee shop.

It truly has a coffee theme, beginning with the ships that bring green coffee into the Port of Houston (the only green coffee port west of the Mississippi). From there, many of the green beans go to plants in the East End, the biggest two being Maximus Coffee and Sara Lee. The beans are roasted in many different ways for many different brands. Then the roasted beans are shipped all over the country. But I digress simply because I know something about the coffee industry here in the East End. Jesse's mural tells the coffee story in pictures.

Then there is Gonzo 24/7 who's having a very good painting year. He was commissioned to paint the wall of the parking garage below the downtown public library. He spent over a month in Nigeria last fall as one of a team of artists recruited to create work for a privately owned oil company. And now he's in the middle of painting two murals for the Houston Permitting Center.

There's way more than all of this. Metalab Studio is creating an electronic piece for the building lobby with a screen that shows where folks are congregating on the lobby floor because it's connected to six devices attached to six concrete columns that will register CO2 levels. The more people within breathing distance of a monitor the more movements will show on the screen near the main entrance. I guess folks will discover just how their movements affect the big screen. Along the top of this screen is another smaller screen that will be hooked into the facility's system that records heating and cooling levels, electricity generated and use so that viewers can see in-the-moment this building's energy consumption.

It is Serena Lin Bush's piece that gives me goose bumps every time I look down the four story stairwell in the center of the building and tell someone standing next to me that they will see the Houston sky on monitors placed at the bottom of those stairs. Why will they see sky in the basement? Because there will be three cameras up on the roof recording Houston's sky moment by moment and monitors in the stairwell pit to display what the camera record. There are real windows at the top of the staircase, so one can look up and see blue and then look down and see that same blue too. Here is Serena's rendering and here is Serena.

Dick Wray's iconic piece is just about ready to be installed. His piece is constructed from a series of black powder coated laser cut panels that will become an envelope over the exterior elevator shaft at the front of the building. We chose Dick to create a memorable image for the building's exterior, that would identify this facility. Well, he certainly did that. He didn't live to see the final product, but we can point to it and say that this is Dick Wray's only piece of civic art and Houston is lucky to have it.

There is still more. Kaneem Smith is constructing a series of hanging structures pieced together with burlap coffee bags. She'll stamp and paint on them and as a group, they will form an organic mass of columns. They will be installed near the big windows in the main lobby. We sometimes liken her piece to a mud daubers creation, those cone shaped mud homes built by wasp-like insects. Have you ever seen them under the eaves of your house? Except that Kaneem is adding color so they'll not look like mud. I am hoping that they may all just sway slightly as you pass by them.

There is more. You've seen Agnes Welsh Eyster's etched metal panels for the lobby reception desk. Here is another glimpse.

And then there is my work which is all about language. I don't have images yet, but I can tell you that I've spent many hours listening to conversations among the various plan reviewers, inspectors and their clients. An entire wall will be covered with excerpts from these conversations.

Another wall or two will have a running line of acrylic hands making statements in sign language: "Fewer problems down the road, if you solve the issues today." and "The code connects all the dots." and "Communication is the art of finding common ground."

In the basement there is a long corridor, perhaps 60 feet long, where I will install a running powder coated metal strip with laser cut out words in several languages. The words will all be re-words: "recycle, reuse, repurpose, renew, revise, reboot, retread, retry, remember, resume, rely, refasten, repose, relive, redo and so on." By the time that a person walks the entire length of the corridor, they'll have a pretty good idea that 'recycle' is the message.

I'll soon have some images to show. I'm working with S.O. Creatives and it's a real collaboration we've got going.

Ah, one other text intervention will be a large bar code made of reused Texas woods fabricated by Bob Card at Greenwood Bay. All the wood he uses is recycled Texas wood. He'll use many kinds of wood for this bar code, so we can see the variety of Texas woods. We are considering several words for a bar code translation right now: recycle, green, permit and approve. Also 1002, which is the street number of the facility. So there you have it. Not as much fun without images, but that will come.

Then there are Geoff Winningham's photo murals on sheets of metal. They are exquisite. His biggest mural will be three panels in width on the stairwell in the Green Building Resource Center. Lots of daylight streaming in on this image of Buffalo Bayou from two big windows.

This civic art project is unique in that it's an experiment or a pilot of sorts. in There has never been a selected artist hired to serve as a member of the architectural team, planning and coordinating a team of artists creating work especially for a building. It's been terrific because I can bring so many different artists' work into one public facility. There will definitely be a lot to see and experience. The artists are creating really good stuff. And for a space where it will be totally unexpected. I think folks are going to be surprised.