A Monday Stroll in the Heights

True North

On Heights Boulevard just north of Interstate 10 there is a huge esplanade. It is so big that it is its own park, the Paul Carr Jogging Trail. The trail is a well-maintained unpaved path that runs two miles between the northbound and southbound lanes of Heights Blvd.

It’s a lovely shaded path, and there are always joggers and strollers on it. When I stroll along the path, I am astonished that the city didn’t rip this extra-wide esplanade out and turn Heights Blvd. into yet another stroad. A monstrous notion, but it has been the default city planning idea for major arterials in Houston since the 1950s. The notion that streets should be pleasant to walk down is simply not a factor in Houston urban planning. And while the Heights is now a pleasant upper-middle class neighborhood with a certain amount of political clout, that wasn’t always the case. They dodged the uglification bullet that hit most of the rest of Houston in the heart.

As if to celebrate this miracle, True North has been placing sculptures along its two mile length for 10 years. The sculptures are by Texas artists. True North was founded by Gus Kopriva, the proprietor of Redbud Gallery. I spent an afternoon this week strolling the jogging path looking at each of the sculptures for this edition of the annual True North exhibit.

Marsha Dorsey-Outlaw, Street Cred

This is Street Cred by Marsha Dorsey-Outlaw. These are kind of street signs (but not like any I’ve seen in Houston), with street names written in glass and ceramic mosaic. I wish street names in Houston were this poetic and abstract: “Reason”, “Righteous”, “Loud”, “Simple”, etc.

Sharon Kopriva, Snakes and Ladders

When I think of Sharon Kopriva’s art, I think dark, spooky objects. Her sculptures are mostly figurative, but they resemble corpses or mummies more than living persons. Snakes and Ladders tilts its head in the direction of spooky, but feels very different in tone of her other work. Perhaps an image of a decaying nun zombie would have been inappropriate for a public park. A nice gathering of fantastic snakes is a little more family-friendly.

Ed Wilson, Cyclone

Ed Wilson is well-known locally for his metal sculptures. His studio is in Itchy Acres near Independence Heights. In 2015 he was awarded a major public commission for a sculptural installation in the George R. Brown Convention Center, but it was snatched away at the last moment in a bit of quasi-political shenanigans. I remember thinking that the maquette Wilson made for the piece was not exciting, but that was definitely a case where if I had been able to use my imagination better. I would have realized that Soaring in the Clouds would look breathtaking in real life. In the case of Cyclone, Wilson took a seven hundred foot strip of metal and coiled it tightly into the tornado shape you can see above. The cyclone is connected to a hemisphere at ground level. The shininess of the metal strip catches the light shining down on the Heights in a dramatic way.

Patrick Medrano, Io

When I came across Patrick Medrano’s Io, I thought it referenced Anubis, the Egyptian god who guides the dead and who is usually depicted with a jackal head. But apparently it is based on a real dog, a Peruvian hairless dog named Io that Medrano has (or had—I don’t know if this is a tribute to a living dog or a memorial image). Given the number of dog-walkers and dog-joggers who use this trail every day, it feels apt. I still can’t get Egyptian imagery out of my mind when looking at it—especially because it is mounted on a chariot, the bronze age super-weapon of ancient empires like Egypt.

Joe Barrington, It always rains in Vicinity

I don’t recall ever seeing Joe Barrington’s work, so I don’t know if It always rains in Vicinity is typical of his output. It provides a nice little bit of country flavor to the Heights. And glancing through Barrington’s instagram, it appears that his work plays quite a lot with rural Texas—wild animals, hound dogs, horse shoes, etc.

Dan Havel, Cascade

Dan Havel is half of Havel Ruck Projects with Dean Ruck, who also has a piece in this iteration of True North. Four dog houses are stacked on top of one another while a blue structure snakes through them. Presumably it reflects flooding on a major scale—within the blue flow are little white objects that look like tiny office buildings. I don’t know what material Havel used for the blue water—it looks like blue rope, but when you look at it closer, it seems immobile and solid. This is the second work I’ve see recently depicting an environmental catastrophe. I suspect that this will become an ever more popular subject as the world gets shittier.

Dean Ruck, Brancouchi

Dean Ruck is the other half of Havel Ruck Projects. He and Dan Havel have made several of my all-time favorite art projects in Houston. Since so much of their work has involved taking existing structures and altering them in some way, Bracouchi feels like a spin-off from that work. Composed of couches left on the curb for heavy trash day, Ruck stacks them so they reach for the sky like early modernist Brâncuși did with Endless Column. What I can’t tell from just looking at the couches is if Ruck painted them. The colorful one (second from the bottom) feels like a cross between de stijl furniture and the Partridge Family’s bus. Did Ruck paint it that way, or did he find a Mondrian-esque sofa on the roadside somewhere?

Paul Kittelson, Wild Horses

The last piece is Wild Horses by Paul Kittelson. Kittelson has been one of my favorite local artists for over a decade now, and this piece feels typical of his playful approach to art-making. These bucking horse profiles reminded me of my high school mascot. We were the Memorial Mustangs and the symbol for the team was a silhouette of a galloping mustang horse all in red. It would have been nice if the high school had used jaunty patterns like these instead of solid red.

This is a delightful group of sculptures that makes this 2 mile jogging path just a little more enjoyable. You walk along and think, this would be great in other parts of Houston, right? Wrong. True North works because the Paul Carr Jogging Trail is such a pleasant place to stroll. I know this because Gus Kopriva did two versions of a similar public sculpture project on Long Point, a major east-west stroad in Spring Branch. When the first iteration went up, my brother and I walked the entire length of it. But Long Point is a busy, noisy street; there is no wide, shady esplanade on which to site the sculptures so the ended up in parking lots (because Long Point like almost every major street in Houston is surrounded by acres of parking), and people don’t stroll along it. It is not a place where anyone would go to relax, like the Paul Carr Jogging Trail. Sculptures placed alongside a busy stroad like Long Point can’t compete with the noise and visual clutter. But along Heights Blvd., the sculptures have an environment that works for them.

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