One Giant Step . . .

A new mural going up a block from where I live

I walked over to the supermarket yesterday afternoon and stumbled across this work in progress at the corner of Gray and Milam. Up Art is painting an enormous astronaut mural here. This office building was abandoned for quite a while, but was rehabbed a few years ago. During its unoccupied years, a graffiti artist catapulted paint-filled balloons against the side of the building to produce a colorful abstract wall decoration. I wish I had a photo of it. Now the powers that be are making an effort to make this part of downtown a little less intimidating—the Greyhound bus station was removed in the past year (it was viewed by many local busybodies as a magnet for a bad element), and now this big mural. Shit, if they are successful, my rent will probably go up! Come back to Main and Gray, scary homeless people!

If you’ve driven around Houston in the last few years, you will certainly have noticed an uptick in very large murals (and many very small murals on electrical signal boxes). I assume this fad is everywhere in North America, not just Houston. Lots of things that are local points of pride turn out to be pretty ubiquitous. Canadian YouTube pundit J.J. McCullough has made a whole series of videos under the category of “Your City is Not Unique.” Often, however, local pride is not about how our city is unique, but about how a particular landmark or custom is something that characterizes us, whether it’s unique or not. If we believed our murals were particularly good, we could hold their excellence over other cities. It would be the same as rooting for your World Series-winning baseball team. I haven’t ever heard that Houston’s murals are considered especially excellent compared to, say, Dallas’s murals. Ours seem to be about the same as any other city’s murals. And given how many murals there are in Houston, we should be making judgments on their quality—which ones are the best? I’m an art critic; judging esthetic things is my job. I need to step up my game here.

This mural could be part of Big Art. Bigger Change, a project sponsored by Central Houston, Inc., a downtown business association. They have covered downtown Houston with murals, and this astronaut mural is within the area that most Houstonians call “downtown” (I think of it as Midtown, but I don’t expect he average Houstonian to have the finely tuned instinct for my own neighborhood’s borders that I have). And this mural is especially patriotic for Houston—NASA is located here. This is the kind of anodyne image that Central Houston, Inc. would be comfortable to sponsor. (As opposed to a George Floyd memorial mural.)

This mural is being produced by Up Art Studio, who are responsible for murals and other creative graphics in public places, like those traffic signal boxes that get decorated by various artists. There is a subculture of mural artists in Houston that I am at most only vaguely aware of. Indeed, Up Art Studio hosts a resource for Houston area muralists and mural fans (and people organizing somewhat artsy scavenger hunts) called the Houston Mural Map. The number of murals they list is staggering—actually kind of intimidating. They count almost 750 murals in Houston. There should be a ranking of the best murals in town—the time and effort required to see all 750 murals on the Houston Mural Map would be a major challenge for even the most dedicated urban explorer.

I don’t really have a grasp of this subculture the way I do for the Houston museum and gallery art world. It seems that some of the most prominent muralists come out of the graffiti world, some of whom can be seen in the current round of installations at Project Row Houses. But the painters of this astronaut seem to me to have an entirely different esthetic basis than the graffiti artists like Dual and Daniel Anguilu. I wonder if these two worlds—the graffiti-influenced muralists and the somewhat more illustrational muralists like those who make murals for Up Art Studios—have any crossover. Do they share ideas or collaborate? Up Art Studios pays them honor—many of Houston’s best known graffiti artists are listed in the Houston Mural Map.

As of this morning (happy Mother’s Day to all you moms reading), the mural is still incomplete. When they finish it, I’ll add an image of the completed mural to this post. In the meantime, I’ll use the Houston Mural Map to familiarize myself with the scene. Their map allows you to see the murals and provides a little bit of information, including the artist if known. Most are anonymous, but the Houston Mural Map does provide a way for members of the public to submit murals to the Mural Map, including detailed artist information. Gathering this data is the first step to establishing an art history of the Houston mural movement. A task that appeals to my archivist heart.

Furthermore, I am of the opinion that Trump must go.

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