TRUE NORTH 2020, a Heights Boulevard sculpture project

True North 2020

Visit the official True North Website:

www.truenorthheightsblvd.com

Photos: Kolanowski Studio

TRUE NORTH 2020 ARTISTS

LETICIA R. BAJUYO | Corpus Christi

“Forces of Nature: Blue Skies, Slinkys, and Hurricanes” | the 1200 block

Leticia Bajuyo was born in Paducah, Kentucky, and grew up in Metropolis, Illinois. A recipient of Hanover College’s Daryl R. Karns Award For Scholarly And Creative Activity, a Great Meadows Foundation Professional Development Grant recipient, a Visual Artists Network Exhibition residency and grant recipient, and a Director of Texas Sculpture Group, she received her BFA from the University of Notre Dame and her M.F.A. from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. In 2017, Bajuyo joined the faculty at Texas A&M – Corpus Christi as Assistant Professor of Sculpture. Among her exhibitions, Bajuyo’s installations have been featured in the silos of Site Gallery at Sawyer Yards for Sculpture Month Houston, the Nashville International Airport, the Tony Hillerman Library in Albuquerque and a Northern Mindanao Contemporary Art exhibit in Mindanao, Philippines. She recently installed “Iridescence” at Historic Market Square Houston—10,000 CDs that would have otherwise ended up in a landfill.

Bajuyo’s TRUE NORTH 2020 sculptural installation, Forces of Nature: Blue Skies, Slinkys, and Hurricanes (constructed of steel, blue PEX tubing and artificial grass), was inspired by diagrams of hurricane development and the spring movement of the “wonderful toy” Slinky (as the longest-running jingle in advertising history so memorably describes it). This delightful installation features three circular forms that appear to be large Slinkys connected at the ends into rings and circling perfectly-maintained “lawns” of artificial grass.

BILL DAVENPORT | Houston

“Big Cabbage” | the 900 block

Bill Davenport arrived in Houston in 1990 from Massachusetts—mattress strapped to the top of his truck—as a fellow of the prestigious CORE Program. He received a B.F.A from Rhode Island School of Design, Sculpture, and an M.F.A. from University of Massachusetts, Sculpture. His quirky objects and hyper-real paintings have been in “many shows everywhere” [Bill’s words]. Some of those shows have included Old Junk Art Center at Old Jail Art Center in Albany and Bill Davenport and the Golden Treasures of the Pharaohs at McKinney Avenue Contemporary in Dallas. Among his many public sculptures are New Mushroom Forest—a sculpture moved from its installment for the 2009 Texas Biennial, Auditorium Shores Park, Austin, to its current popular Heights location, serving as mascot for the neighborhood garden at Studewood and 14th Street—and Big Concrete Vegetables, a series of permanent public art installments at Houston Farmer’s Markets. Davenport’s studio is in the Independence Heights, and he is proprietor of the fabulous Bill’s Junk in the Houston Heights—a shop combining high art, low craft, nature and salvage.

Davenport’s deliciously-delightful seven-foot-diameter sculpture, Big Cabbage, is sculpted of polymer concrete and painted the perfect “cabbage green.” As Bill says about his TRUE NORTH 2020 sculpture, “It’s a cabbage, but bigger!”

VINCENT FINK | Houston

“Dodecahedron” | the 600 block

A native Houstonian, Vincent Fink is a contemporary surrealist and full-time artist working out of his Winter Street Studio in Arts District Houston—the colorful, urban, artist-centered community situated along the Washington Avenue Corridor and touting the highest concentration of working artists in the State. Fink continuously studies science and philosophy and received his degree in Media Arts and Animation from The Art Institute of Houston. His early life started with drawing, then music, and after college, a graphic design career where he met the love of his life—now his wife. His work has been exhibited extensively in domestic and international galleries. Fink has served on Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner’s Quality of Life Transition Committee as well as other creative committees within the Washington Avenue Arts District, Houston—helping to organize the growing art scene.

Fink’s TRUE NORTH 2020 sculpture, “Dodecahedron”—a 12-sided polyhedron with pentagonal faces of translucent acrylic glass, with paintings of celestial imagery, specimens and geometric orbital patterns—represents space or ether. “From the smallest particle to infinite galaxies, all things are interconnected via Sacred Geometry; the harmony of space,” says Vincent.

JACK GRON | Houston

“Hard Rain” | the 800 block

Jack Gron’s choice of metal as his primary sculptural material goes back to his upbringing in Steubenville, Ohio, where industry reigned supreme in the 50s, 60s and 70s, and his family all worked in the various mills, plants and mines, and where, during college, he worked on the blast furnaces producing iron that would be converted into machine parts and structural and sheet steel of all alloys and shapes.

Gron has balanced a long professional career as a working sculptor and academic—most recently serving as Chairman of the Department of Art at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi where he retired in 2017 to focus on his art and other passions. He received his BFA in sculpture from Columbus College of Art and Design and an M.F.A. in sculpture from Washington University.

Gron’s sculpture for TRUE NORTH 2020, Hard Rain—fabricated of aluminum and painted mild steel—is a ten-foot-tall depiction of a cloud form, driving rain and a vulnerable cityscape below. He says, “I am honored to be included in this exhibition of works from such a diverse and talented group of artists. As in so much of my studio practice, the concepts and sketches become a point of departure. I like to focus on the formal issues of design, engineering and fabrication and ultimately color and finish. Hopefully the viewer can appreciate the work on several levels.”

JOSEPH HAVEL | Houston

“On History” | the 1300 block

Joseph Havel was born in Minneapolis, graduated with a BFA in studio art from the University of Minnesota and received his M.F.A. from Pennsylvania State University. Of Havel’s many grants and awards, he received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1987 and was named Texas Artist of the Year by Art League Houston in 2010. His works can be found in numerous museum collections, including The Menil Collection, The Museum of Fine Art, Houston and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. A selection of his solo exhibits in museums and art centers have included the Center for Contemporary Art Kiev, Ukraine, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, and an upcoming 2020 exhibition at the Dallas Contemporary. Havel currently holds the positions of Director, Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Art, Houston and director of The Core Program—an internationally-recognized post-graduate fellowship and residency program.

Havel’s TRUE NORTH 2020 sculpture On History is a nine-foot bronze figure located on the boulevard esplanade across from the Heights Neighborhood Library. Havel says, “My sculpture in general and this work particularly is about the intimate and tactile way we experience questions about our place, relationships and history. The last few months experiencing the distancing needed because of the pandemic, intimacy as a way of feeling connected seems even more important. We need art to help make us feel our humanness.”

JACK MASSING | Houston

“LOCULUS” [wind vane + weather station] | the 400 block

Jack Massing, whose works in collaboration with Michael Galbreth—together, well-known as “The Art Guys”—have been included in more than 150 exhibitions in the U.S., Europe and China, in more than 40 solo exhibitions and in high profile public art installations including two installations at Bush IAH—Video Ring, with a circle of 80 television monitors displaying a rotating sequence of calming audio and video imagery, and Travel Light, where 360 cast fiberglass suitcases glow with changing colors among the perpetually moving baggage carousels. The Art Guys met while students at the University of Houston and collaborated more than 35 years until Mr. Galbreth’s death in 2019. Among their many accolades was Texas Artist of the Year, Art League Houston, in 2005.

Massing’s TRUE NORTH 2020 sculpture, LOCULUS, appears at first glance to be a simple, large metal wrench wind vane that swings around the cardinal directions. On closer inspection are a number of meteorological components allowing the viewer to understand direction, time and temperature, among other data, to identify weather conditions at LOCULUS’s (and the viewer’s) specific point on Earth.

“As a long-time Heights resident, I am honored to be a part of this outdoor exhibition of sculpture. I have taken the title of this exhibit “TRUE NORTH” to heart and designed a piece that displays the cardinal directions, a whimsical No. 1 Repair Air pencil of painted wood, metal and rubber, and the viewer can find their “specific point” on Earth by the geographic coordinates located on the sculpture’s architectural structure. The wind vane element will allow the viewer to see which way the wind blows, which will at some point in the future be either coming from the North or perhaps blowing directly North.” Jack A. Massing

SHERRY OWENS/ART SHIRER (collaborating) | Dallas

“Carbon Sink” | the 1600 block

Sherry Owens and Art Shirer’s collaborative sculpture for TRUE NORTH 2020 is sculpted from discarded cuttings of the sinewy crape myrtle which are beautifully sculpted together with hardware and then carbon finished. Owens and Shirer say that Carbon Sink “is a visual metaphor of an organic storage place for the carbon dioxide present in our atmosphere [and] . . . [t]his sculpture represents a depository for the greenhouse gases that affect our environment.”

Owens was born in Mt. Vernon, Texas, and received her BFA from Southern Methodist University. She has exhibited throughout the US, internationally in Austria, Denmark, Germany, Greece, India, Peru and Turkey and in 2018 was included in Commanding Space: Women Sculptors of Texas, at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth.

Shirer was born in Cincinnati and received his BFA from East Carolina University and M.F.A. from Louisiana Tech University. Of his many awards, Shirer received the top prize in the North Carolina Sculpture ’79 exhibition as well as an Artist Fellowship from the State of Louisiana Division of the Arts.

Together they have merged their aesthetic sensibilities on over twenty projects spanning three decades. Among their many exhibitions together, some of their more recent site-specific collaborations were “Art on the River,” Port Jefferson History & Nature Center, Jefferson, Texas, and “entangled” UMLAUF Sculpture Garden & Museum in Austin. They each maintain their busy studios in Dallas.

the late

BOB “DADDY-O” WADE | Austin

with WILL LARSON | Austin

“El Gallo Monument” | the 1800 block

TRUE NORTH 2020 lost an important member of the sculpture project when Texas folk artist Bob “Daddy-O” Wade passed away last Christmas eve. TRUE NORTH 2020 is honored and thrilled that Mr. Wade’s vision for the boulevard sculpture project has been installed in its originally-planned site—the esplanade of Heights Boulevard at 18th Street. We are thankful to Bob’s wife, Lisa, his daughter, Rachel, and long-time friend and collaborative fabricator and artist, Will Larson, for making this happen.

Will Larson on the left during installation

Wade’s sculpture for TRUE NORTH 2020, El Gallo Monument—replete with piglets and a towering rooster—was inspired by his childhood fascination with “roadside stuff . . . during long trips on those old Texas highways.” His other outdoor works include the 40’ tall cowboy boots in San Antonio, the 25’ wide longhorns at UT Alumni Center in Austin and a 70’ tall saxophone now at the Orange Show (all in the Guinness Book of World Records). Wade was born in El Paso and received his BFA from University of Texas Austin and his M.A. from University of California Berkeley.

Close friend and upcoming book collaborator, W. K. Stratton, Texas Monthly, wrote shortly after his death:

Bob was an accomplished artist, best known for his outsize sculptures of cowboy boots and an iguana and his series of paintings of cowgirls based on postcards from the early 1900s. He had earned a master’s degree in painting from UC-Berkeley and could quote Clement Greenberg and other important art scholars. His work has been exhibited at the Whitney and other highbrow museums, even though, as art critic Dave Hickey observed, the biggest influence on Daddy-O’s work seemed to be the homecoming float. Bob’s sculptures and paintings are taken seriously by his peers, yet they are also as much fun as any parade. His fans include legions who have never read a word of art criticism or set foot in a gallery. That was fine by Bob.

There is a 1999 documentary film about his work, Too High, Too Wide and Too Long: A Texas-Style Road Trip, directed by Karen Dinitz, and soon there will be Daddy-O’s Book of Big-Ass Art, being published by Texas A&M University Press this fall. A documentary, Flight of the Iguana, is currently in production by South Austin Museum of Popular Culture.

Full articles:

BOB “DADDY-O” WADE – TEXAS MONTHLY

BOB “DADDY-O” WADE – NEW YORK TIMES