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(Photograph by Gerald Moorhead )
The Orange Show is a folk art site built over an eleven-year period by Jeff McKissick, a retired postal worker. It celebrates McKissick's personal mythology of the orange, which he understood to be a privileged transmitter of the sun's energy to humankind. Occupying two lots in a working-class neighborhood just south of the Gulf Freeway (I-45), it is a walled compound containing a series of open-air enclosures meant to showcase specific performances and highlight specific themes. McKissick's good-natured but obsessive devotion to his project attracted the attention of people involved in Houston's art world, including James Harithas, director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in the 1970s. This led Houston collector Marilyn Oshman to assist McKissick. When McKissick died in 1980 just months after opening the Orange Show, Oshman formed a foundation to acquire the property, maintain it, and keep it open to the public. The Orange Show Center for Visionary Art has become a nationally important advocate for the appreciation and conservation of self-trained visionary artists. It has discovered, publicized, and assisted other such artists in Houston. In the Orange Show's neighborhood is a trim modern courtyard house of 2006 by Stern and Bucek at 2279 Jean Street.