On a mild spring afternoon twenty years ago, David Thompson and Randy Twaddle, then partners in the Houston-based marketing firm ttweak, got a call from an editor at Texas Monthly who was working on a story about how the rest of the country viewed their state in light of the upcoming presidential election. The duo began talking about image campaigns, especially those that were attempting to sell Houston to the rest of the country.
“It was ludicrous stuff like Houston: Expect the Unexpected,” recalls Twaddle, one of Houston’s most beloved artists who also serves as the Executive Director and Artist-in-Residence at the John Fairey Garden in Hempstead, Texas. “I thought a campaign for Houston should be non-hyperbolic; it should be real; and it should be self-deprecating because Houstonians have a self-deprecating sense of humor. It should say, ‘Sure, it’s hot as hell here, and we have mosquitoes and the traffic sucks, but it’s worth it because we have this great art scene and food.’ So then Dave goes, ‘Houston. It’s worth it!’ And we both said that’s it, that’s perfect.”
Despite their list of pet grievances, which Thompson and Twaddle cheekily dubbed the “twenty afflictions” (think heat, humidity, traffic, construction, hurricanes, no mountains, etc.) they found exponentially more reasons why the city was worthy of internal – and external – praise. By the summer of 2004, their unsolicited, unofficial campaign, Houston. It’s Worth It. (HIWI) was receiving hundreds of endearing submissions to its website. They began making t-shirts and coffee mugs with the former “swag guy” of the Los Angeles Lakers and the project was featured everywhere from The New York Times to The Today Show. By 2006, they’d also compiled more than 600 Houston-affirming photos, which formed the basis of a widely attended exhibition at the Houston Center for Photography.
“We just hung the photos on clothing lines and people were lined up around the block at the opening,” says Twaddle, who went on to publish three in-demand books from the campaign with Thompson. The duo also hoped to capture as much of the city’s diversity as they could as Houston is widely considered one of the most diverse cities in the country, with some 145 languages or dialects being spoken within its limits. “It was a really big crowd-sourced project because, if one person were to document the city you couldn’t get it, but we had all these diverse perspectives that were free to be what they were. It was magic.”
In the ensuing decades, the virality of this unofficial campaign, and Houston’s exponentially expanding list of worthy cultural endeavors – from the landmark expansions of top museums like the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Menil Collection, and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; its seemingly endless array of multicultural culinary destinations; the Houston Sound; pockets of world-class architecture, fashion, and design; and a bevy of beloved independent artistic projects like the Orange Show Art Car Parade and Project Row Houses – has attracted no shortage of artists to live and work in Bayou City. It’s also a city that has no-zoning, so on Montrose Boulevard you might find two galleries, a drug store, a hotel carved out of a 100-year-old mansion, an oyster bar (in an old gas station), or you might find an incredible Asian fusion and craft beer joint in a strip mall just outside NASA’s Johnson Space Center. Both are compelling (and delicious) ways to spend an afternoon. Or maybe it’s a series of James Beard award winners and murals in the buzzy East End District. Or a new boutique hotel across the street from the new Menil Drawing Institute, which is a stone’s throw from the Rothko Chapel.
Having spent more than two years on the ground in Houston meeting with countless gallerists, curators, museum directors, art collectors, artists, chefs, hoteliers, and, yes, NASA, Untitled Art is hoping to add another layer of worthiness to the city’s funky cosmology when the inaugural edition of the fair opens in September 2025 at the George R. Brown Convention Center, a space which will begin its own multi-phase, $2 billion reconstruction project next year that will include a 30-acre park.
With cultural partners including Discovery Green, Buffalo Bayou Partnership, CAMH, the University of Houston School of Art, La Colombe D’or hotel and the Houston First Corporation, a select group of award-winning hospitality partners and a host committee that spans the entire state, Untitled Art is planning not only to organize a top international art fair but to instigate a city-wide cultural activation that we hope will become the premier art week in Texas. One that begins with all the incredible local talent.
“I always describe Houston as a place that’s full of really smart, sophisticated, highly functioning people who, for whatever reason, didn’t have the ambition to go, or maybe stay, in metropoles like New York or L.A.,” says Twaddle. “If I was going to redo the campaign now I think it might be: Houston. We’re worth it.”
We couldn’t agree more.
Michael Slenske is an award-winning writer and independent curator based in Los Angeles. For the past 15 years, Slenske has been writing features about the art world and in-depth profiles of artists – from Ed Ruscha and Henry Taylor to Lauren Halsey, Danh Vo and Jimmie Durham – for publications including WSJ, W, Art in America, Interview, Modern Painters, The Hollywood Reporter, LA Times, and New York Magazine. His writing has also appeared in catalogs for Kenny Scharf, Jose Davila, Bari Ziperstein and Abraham Cruzvillegas, among others. In the past decade, Slenske has also curated several notable group and solo exhibitions: at the Paramount Backlot as part of Frieze LA, at the iconic Bradbury Building in collaboration with NeueHouse, and at various galleries including Wilding Cran, Praz-Dellavalade, Nicodim, Jeffrey Deitch, Make Room, Diane Rosenstein and the Landing. He was also a co-curator of the Los Angeles edition of DRIVE-BY-ART, a city-wide, public art exhibition organized alongside Warren Neidich, Renee Petropoulos and Anuradha Vikram in the spring of 2020. Michael will lead the inaugural edition of Untitled Art, Houston, launching in September 2025.