1330 Four Oaks Place

In 2005, I received a call from the management office of this upscale office building in the Galleria area of Houston, saying, “The new owners of Four Oaks Place would like to up grade the auditorium and conference center in the 1330 building. Gensler is the architectural firm. Are you interested in purchasing the art?” I readily agreed.

Months passed before I received the call to move forward. Representatives of the owners would be coming from New York City in two weeks and the management office wanted me to present some options for art while the owners were in town.

In preparation, I viewed art in every major gallery in Houston. I determined what I would recommend for the building and took digital photos of the selections to email to the client. The client screened the art and I arranged for my crew to pick up his choices and deliver them to the building for my presentation. During the presentation, we placed various art pieces at focal points and made our final decisions based on how each piece worked in the space.

In the end, we selected four paintings by Marco Villegas for the auditorium; two large Ann Stautberg black and white photos, hand-painted with oil, for the conference center public areas; and, for the four conference rooms, 25 black and white photographs by Rick Gardner, featuring images of Texas homes and landscapes, a series funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

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Shell Oil Company

In 2005, John Hofmeister, president of Shell Oil Company, called and asked me if I would work on an art redesign/update for the executive floor at the One Shell Plaza location in Houston. I said I would be delighted to collaborate with him and his Shell Communications team charged with the project internally.

Mr. Hofmeister believes Shell is a great company because of the employees and wanted to illustrate the diversity of the work force engaging in Shell’s business interests, assets, and products. Mr. Hofmeister’s opinion is that “The business of business is people.”

All the existing original art was removed from the floor and reinstalled throughout the building. The Shell Communications department chose a wide range of color photographs of employees representing Shell operations around the U.S. and per Mr. Hofmeister’s request opened up selection of the final photos for the floor to all U.S. staff – about 22,000 employees.

Shell Oil Company’s Communications Manager and I made the final selections based on which images would work in a 3’ x 4’ format or a 2’ x 3’ format. Sometimes the resolution/quality determined our selection. We selected images representing exploration, refining, research, retail, community activities and the diversity of the employee base.

Larger scale dramatic photos were chosen as key focal points on the floor – a crew working on a South Texas natural gas well in the seating area outside the president’s office, Shell’s Geismar, Louisiana refinery seen through glass doors while standing at the floor’s elevator bank, and Shell’s 4-D seismic virtual reality room at the Bellaire Technology Center in Houston for the main reception area.

Continuous tone photographic images were face-mounted onto Plexiglas and then installed onto the walls, using stainless steel stand-offs. I supervised the crew as they placed the photos.

Royal Dutch Petroleum Company in the Netherlands merged with Shell Transport and Trading Company in the U.K. and formed a new company, Royal Dutch Shell. The day the stock sold with the Royal Dutch Shell name, Mr. Hofmeister opened the New York Stock Exchange. To commemorate those events in the Board Room, the Communications team placed photos of the New York, London, and Amsterdam stock exchanges taken the date of the first offering of the Royal Dutch Shell stock.

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Interfin

In 1987, Interfin Corporation hired me to purchase two pieces of art for the West lobby of their corporate office building located on the Four Oaks Place property near the Galleria in Houston. Cesar Pelli was the architect for two high-rise condominiums and four office sky scrapers. The client requested realistic art to contrast with two large abstract Charles Schorre paintings in the East lobby of the building, so we purchased two Willard Dixon landscape paintings.

In 2003, the property manager called to say that the lobby of the Interfin Building was going to be renovated and asked me to arrange for all the paintings to be stored during construction. The two large abstracts in the East lobby were installed into indentations in the granite walls and I hesitated to remove the paintings without a clear understanding of how they had been originally installed. Luckily a person, who had worked with the original architect, stated that metal springs in the granite were holding the paintings in place and the springs could possibly break if the paintings were removed from the space. The paintings might not remain secure when reinstalled if the hinges broke, so we decided not to move the paintings.

My crew wrapped the paintings with an acid-free clear material called DARTEK and a contractor built a freestanding box to cover the paintings during the renovation of the ceiling above the paintings. One of the Dixon paintings needed cleaning because of a coffee stain on the surface. A restorer picked up the paintings, cleaned them, and delivered them to the framers for reframing.

When the lobby was totally finished and cleaned, the Dixons were delivered and installed. The protective boxes were removed from the Schorres. The restorer returned, removed the overlay, and cleaned the paintings to finish the project in time for Christmas of 2003.

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Staubach

In 1994, The Staubach Company, a diversified commercial real estate company headquartered in Dallas, opened a new office in the Galleria area in Houston. Roger Staubach, the famed former quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys, was head of the company.

Dan Bellow, the president of the Houston division, asked me to help him develop an art direction for his branch of the company. I searched artists’ studios and art galleries in Houston to present to the firm. Works on paper by David Caton, Benito Huerta, Derek Bosier, Peter Thomas Brown, Heather Ryan Kelley, and Meg Loomis were purchased. In 2001, when Staubach moved their offices to a larger space, I arranged to reframe their existing collection and purchased photography and canvases for the reception and workspace areas.

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KPMG

I became the art consultant for the Houston division of Peat, Marwick, Mitchell & Co. in 1983. I reviewed their art inventory and advised them what to keep and what to sell. I supervised the reframing and installation of 60 quality pieces of art that became the foundation of the art collection. I purchased more realistic art based on the results of a questionnaire submitted to all the employees regarding their preference for future acquisitions.

When KPMG and Peat, Marwick, Mitchell & Co. merged in 1987, I was brought in to advise how to merge the two art collections. I first inventoried the KPMG collection and arranged to move 80 pieces of art from their offices to the Peat, Marwick, Mitchell offices.

In 1998, KPMG hired me to review all the art and ascertain how to use it in the merged company’s renovated space. I sent all the original paintings on canvas to an art restorer for cleaning and reframing as necessary. The better quality works on paper were removed from their frames and inspected as to their condition. The artwork was re-matted and replaced in frames with conservation and decoration considerations, totally unifying the look of all the artwork, so that it read as a single art collection rather than separate collections purchased in different decades or acquired through mergers. This moved the KPMG collection from merely regional toward a value transcending region.

New art was purchased locally and internationally. Computer technology revolutionized the business of indexing and cataloguing art collections, so management decided to photograph each piece of art with a digital camera and inventory the art on computer.

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Galleria III

One of our higher-profile projects was for Gerald Hines at the Galleria III. Here, we arranged the commissions for the hand-painted sky mural on the ceiling above the stairs and for the hand-painted ivy design frieze that extends from Macy’s to the parking garage on levels one and two, and also decorates the center atrium.

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Selected Projects

In this section you will see selected acquisitions and deaccessions from some of my other projects. If you are interested in seeing a more complete showing of my works, please contact me to arrange a presentation.

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