Fresh air, wide open spaces and eight newly-installed temporary public art sculptures await you along Heights Boulevard’s walking/jogging trails with the latest installment of TRUE NORTH 2020, a Heights Boulevard sculpture project. This first in a series of articles to appear in the Newsletter features Jack Massing’s whimsical and educational sculpture, LOCULUS — a colossal metal wrench that swings around cardinal directions, turning on a jumbo-sized No. 1 Repair Air pencil that points to its (and the viewer’s) exact location on Earth, as identified with geographic coordinates.
Photo courtesy of Kolanowski Studio
“As a long-time Heights resident, I am honored to be a part of this outdoor exhibition of sculpture,” says Massing. “I have taken the title of this exhibit ‘True North’ to heart and designed a piece that displays the cardinal directions and its exact location on the face of Earth. 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.”
Massing’s works in collaboration with Michael Galbreth (together known the world over as “The Art Guys”) have been included in more than 150 exhibitions and 40 solo shows in the United States, Europe and China. Massing and Galbreth met while students at the University of Houston and collaborated more than 35 years until Mr. Galbreth’s untimely death last year, which devastated Houston’s close-knit art community. High profile public art installations by The Art Guys include two 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 airport’s perpetually moving baggage carousels. They have lectured at universities, museums and other institutions throughout the United States, including Harvard, Chicago Art Institute, and School of Visual Arts, New York, and their works are in permanent collections at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Menil Collection, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Columbus Museum, Columbus, Georgia, and The Children’s Museum, Houston.
Photo courtesy of Kolanowski Studio
Described in the New York Times as “a cross between Dada and David Letterman, John Cage and the Smothers Brothers,” The Art Guys used humor and everyday materials as a way to demystify art in an attempt to welcome a broad range of audiences into the discourse of contemporary art, and their performance art events have included The Art Guys Marry a Plant, at the Lillie and Hugh Roy Cullen Sculpture Garden, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Height Like Mike, where Massing wore platform cowboy boots — making him as tall as Galbreth — at special appearances over the course of a year, and The Art Guys Take Times Square, an eight-hour continuous runway walk for SUITS: The Clothes Make The Man, with designer Todd Oldham in conjunction with Fashion Week, New York.
To say that the TRUE NORTH 2020 team is proud to have Massing’s sculpture in this year’s exhibition is putting it mildly.
All of the TRUE NORTH 2020 sculptures are for sale and LOCULUS is offered at $10,000. Additionally, the artists have generously agreed to donate 20% of any sales back to TRUE NORTH, which will go directly toward future projects.
Look for our second article in next month’s Newsletter when we’ll feature Vincent Fink and his sculpture, Dodecahedron, and be sure to like us on Facebook @TrueNorthHeightsBlvd and follow us on Instagram @truenorthheightsblvd.
Photo courtesy of Kolanowski Studio
