We’re on a three-week road trip in Texas!
Here’s what we saw while wandering around Houston’s Midtown last Saturday.

Making art in a public place

It was a beautiful Saturday in early March, the start of our Texas road trip. Craig and I were looking for a place in Midtown Houston to have lunch, but something was obviously going on in Bagby Park, so we moseyed on over to have a look. All along the strip of sidewalk that bordered the park, artists were hard at work on chalk drawings. Consulting their phones or iPads or sketches, some were still roughing in the outlines of their pieces, while others had already laid in a lot of color and detail.

One of the artists explained to me that this was a monthly event in Midtown Houston called “Chalk on the Block” (although it apparently had not actually taken place since September — perhaps due to bad weather). Each month a theme is chosen, and a rotating group of artists are each allotted a four-by-five-foot block of pavement in which to work. They have four hours to create a piece based on the theme of the month. Since the Houston Rodeo is going on now, that was the theme for March.

It was wonderful to see art happening in this space, where the artists could interact with the public and passersby could see the work emerge. We ambled along looking at the work in progress and were favorably impressed with the quality and variety of what we saw.

Drawing in chalk on a public sidewalk on a warm morning is not the most comfortable way to create, it seemed to me. Many of the artists were using some sort of knee pads; others were squatting or had assumed some other uncomfortable-looking pose from which to work. My own knees ached in sympathy! But they persisted, putting a lot of effort into something that would soon weather away. Between the time when we first spotted them and when we came back from lunch, some of the artists had finished their pieces. Others who had chosen more intricate designs were still hard at work.

Here’s a sampling of what we saw at both earlier and later points in their progress.

In the kid zone

Adults were not the only ones having fun in the park that day! Two large sections of the pavement were set aside as “kid zones.” There was a big pile of chalk for the kids to sort through, and then they were free to add their own creations to the sidewalk gallery.

• Allison Bagley: Rodeo-themed chalk-art festival takes over the streets of Midtown Saturday (Houston Chronicle: Preview, 2 March 2023)
• Midtown Houston Chalk on the Block
• Here are links where you can learn more about the artists I was able to identify from my photos:
  • Jessica “Jexxi” Hipolito (Instagram: @studio.jexxi)
  • KP and Corie Art (Instagram: @kpandcorieart)
  • Sara Ward Murals (Instagram: @swmurals)
  • Nasha Scott (Instagram: @nasha_artwork)

You might also like…

• Work in progress