The wacko outdoor rooms of the Orange Show Monument usually dare a visitor not to grin from ear to ear, so I was dismayed this week to see its stucco walls crumbling in some places, with ceramic tiles missing, paint peeling, and a door splintered and disintegrating. Weeds poked up through cracks in the base.
Jack Massing was pointing out how subsidence and a few years of extreme weather have done a number on the exuberant structure, which is Texas’s most iconic visionary environment. Still, he lost himself in a mosh pit of happy memories. His head was back in the freewheeling 1980s, when Houston’s art happenings could make wildcatting sound like prim business. No stage was better suited for shenanigans than the multilevel Orange Show on Munger Street, not far from the city’s Hobby Airport.
“I was here doing all kinds of nonsense,” Massing told me. Before he and the late Michael Galbreth became internationally famous as the Art Guys, Massing formed “a noise band” with some classmates and played the Orange Show like a big percussion instrument. During an early Art Guys’ performance called “Stunt Night,” Massing “fell” into the pool, which he had filled with potato chips. Another Art Guys event involved tossing a TV monitor into the pool, minus the potato chips, as a video on it played. Those shows were always packed. One quiet afternoon, when Massing thought he was there alone, he came face to face with Frank Zappa.
His reverie wasn’t just wistful thinking. This month the 65-year-old Massing became the executive director of the Orange Show Center for Visionary Art. That in itself is such a wild turn of events that I half expected him to say, “Just kidding!”
The center owns the monument, the adjacent Smither Park (a green space of fantastical mosaic tile structures), about nine more acres of land, a couple of towering temporary sculptures (including David Best’s glorious “Houston Temple,” which will be ceremoniously burned in November), and the Beer Can House in the city’s West End. It also stages the city’s biggest annual free public event each year: the legendary Art Car Parade, which is to wheels what the monument is to architecture.
I hopped on a golf cart with Massing and other center leaders to explore the nine-acre sea of asphalt and warehouses behind the monument, where they are planning a campus expansion. The front half, acquired just a few months ago, opens up the Center to the Gulf Freeway. A couple of tractor-trailer containers left by a previous owner will be repurposed. “We have all the fixin’s to turn the Orange Show into a trucking company,” Lafayette Herring, the president of the board, quipped. Not exactly. The New York architecture firm Rogers Partners, which drew up the master plan, is designing slick additions.
The project will probably cost at least $30 million. Its capital campaign got a boost this summer with a major undisclosed gift from the South Texas Charitable Foundation that includes assets from the late Ann and Jim Harithas’s now-shuttered Art Car Museum. The Orange Show and the museum were joined at the hip philosophically but separate legally, so it’s a wise marriage.
Meanwhile, the Kensinger Foundation donated funds to restore the late Bob Wade’s ninety-foot tall “Smokesax” and install it permanently in nearby Fonde Park. Fashioned from materials including a Volkswagen Beetle and an oil field pipe, Wade’s dismantled saxophone sculpture has spent a few years near the Center’s back warehouses. About a gazillion exponentially smaller objects from the Hyde Park Miniature Museum, a midcentury visionary environment recently rescued from an attic, fill several indoor rooms. You begin to see why this organization needs warehouses. Although not technically a collecting institution, it is the art world’s version of an ever-expanding animal shelter.
The Orange Show Monument sits among the modest houses of a small neighborhood built in the forties and fifties. Isolated by Houston’s notorious lack of zoning and runaway freeway construction, it’s easy to miss if you’re speeding by on Interstate 45. Most of its 150 or so homes still belong to their original families. The show’s eccentric founder, Jeff McKissack, became one of them after migrating to Houston from the Deep South. He found work delivering mail and built his house with concrete blocks, adding a smaller concrete block enclosure on a small lot catty-corner to his house in 1956. He was preparing to transform the structure into a side-hustle beauty parlor in the mid-sixties when a voice in his brain whispered, “orange show.” He was moved to create an attraction that would awaken the world to the benefits of oranges—a source of pure energy that could keep a person alive and spry to the age of one hundred, he believed. Presumably he ate tons of them during the dozen or so years the project consumed him.
McKissack built every inch of the Orange Show by hand, and none of it to code: stucco-ed walls with ceramic tile inlays that held inspirational messages, a wishing well, a pool, an amphitheater, a colonnade of whimsical umbrellas, a museum room, upper decks with fire escapes for stairs, furnishings fashioned from tractor seats and filigreed porch railings, further embellishing it with geegaws that ranged from concrete statuary to plastic banners. The project attracted the attention of the media and art world insiders—most importantly, the patron Marilyn Oshman, who became the monument’s fairy godmother when McKissack died suddenly of a stroke in 1980, seven months after opening his masterpiece to the public. She established the Orange Show Center for Visionary Art to preserve it.
Bringing the monument back to life won’t be as easy as telling stories about its past, but it’s a top priority. The space is closed through 2025 for its biggest restoration yet, a $1.1 million project buoyed by a federal grant, 3D mapping, and the painstaking cataloging of elements that will be lifted to shore up what’s under them (essentially, nothing). It’s a miracle it hasn’t sunk entirely. The funds provide just enough to make the Orange Show safe, fix its drainage issues, and bring back its opening day splendor. The amphitheater will keep its funky sag.
Massing started his new job week. He replaced Tommy Ralph Pace, an up-and-comer the center’s board of trustees hired away from the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami three years ago after a nationwide, consultant-run search. Pace beefed up the staff and programming, and the organization’s momentum seemed good when he released the campus expansion news. But this year Pace and the board quietly parted. A job offer from Aspen Museum of Art was involved; Pace is now the head of major gifts and partnerships there. (He didn’t return my call.) Herring described the shift as an opportunity for the center to bring in “a new leader with strong and longstanding ties to both the Houston community and the organization, which we found in Jack.”
No scrappy organization grows up easily. Massing loves the monument; it’s the soul of the place, he said. He likened the expansion effort to pushing a car uphill, but he’s as determined as McKissack was to succeed—and proud there’s nowhere in the world quite like the Orange Show.
