Quirky Houston?

One of the easiest ways to save a bit of money but still see the "real" version of a city when you travel is to check out the local art scene. Afterall, artists are usually pretty adept at having to save money...

When I was in Houston recently, I took a day tour visiting the more eccentric sites of the city. It was organized by the fine folks at the Orange Show Centre for Visionary Art, who have a mandate to "preserve and present works of extraordinary imagination", and the places that they took us certainly fit that bill.

When I read about places such as the Beer Can House, I thought that it would be some novelty - just a huse covered in beer cans. But in fact, it's like a house-sized folk art installation with a fantastic story behind it.

The Art Car Museum (located in the "Garage Mahal"... ahem) is an adjunct to Houston's famous Art Car Parade. The museum is home to a number of the cars, along with a gallery with a rtating exhibition. These are not just cars with fancy paint jobs. They're amazing pieces of sculpture on wheels.

The home of Cleveland Turner (aka The Flower Man) is half resting place for junk, half enthusiastic garden. He had a vision, one that has kept him sober for more than thirty years, and that was apparently a conceptual art piece of toys, household items, signs and flowers of both the real and artificial kind.

Our last stop was the Orange Show. A strange name, and all day when our hosts would refer to it, I had a really hard time grasping what the concept was. Was it a theatre? An amusement park? The name of the centre? This is what I can tell you now... it's a hard thing to wrap your head around, even when you've seen it.

The Orange Show was conceived as an amusement park with the theme being oranges (the fruit). It's small, about the size of a regular housing lot, and it mainly made of found objects like tractor seats and wheels. There's not really much to do there. But boy, is it a cool thing to see - it's a giant piece of folk art that you get to walk through and up and down. Even the women's washroom is an adventure.

I've made a map of the sites here.