The Beer Can House actualmente está abierto los sábados y domingos de 12 a 5 p. m.
The Beer Can House actualmente está abierto los sábados y domingos de 12 a 5 p. m.
THE TEXAS-SIZED ROADTRIP DIORAMA OF WONDER
2025 ORANGE SHOW ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE
ERIKA NELSON
AUGUST 24 - NOVEMBER 2, 2025
The Orange Show Center's annual artist residency is central to the program and allows visiting advanced visionary artists to create new, temporary work with the support of community, and to educate and share their practice through workshops, lectures, and/or performances. The emphasis is on exploring the process of art-making, environment-building, robust community participation and engagement, and the creative reuse of common and/or castoff materials. This year's resident artist Erika Nelson arrives in August to work with community to build a new immersive installation: "The Texas-Sized Roadtrip Diorama of Wonder."
About The DIORAMA OF WONDER
This sixty-by-sixty foot topographic map of Texas will be built on site with dozens of local volunteers using almost entirely found objects and repurposed materials, recreating Texas’ plains, hill country, and gulf coast from old tires, scrap lumber, Styrofoam, and cardboard. Guests will stroll along paths that represent the state’s major highways and view a growing collection of “mini-monuments” made by visitors representing many of the roadside attractions, artistic spaces, and historical sites found everywhere across the state, from the Beer Can House to Cadillac Ranch to Prada Marfa. This mega-diorama is a meditation on geography, tourism, and travel, designed to highlight built environments in Texas that help give the state its sense of cultural identity and mystique. Erika arrives in Houston on August 22 to begin work with local volunteer support. The completed piece will be on display from September 13 through November 2.
Visitors to the exhibition are invited to participate in a series of workshops where they may create their own monument model to add to the display, and a lecture series provides background and context on both the state’s many artist-built unreal estates and about Texas’ highway system itself.
Funding for Orange Show Center programs is provided in part by grants from the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance, Texas Commission on the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, Brown Foundation, Houston Endowment, Wortham Foundation, Team Gillman, Silver Eagle Distributors, as well as private contributions, in-kind support, and volunteer assistance.
Special Events
INTRODUCING THE TEXAS-SIZED ROADTRIP DIORAMA OF WONDER
Sunday, August 24, 2025 | 1 - 4 pm
Meet the Orange Show's 2025 artist-in-residence Erika Nelson,
learn about her experiences with roadside attractions and artist-built environments, and sign up to participate in this year's ambitious community build. Everyone's invited to this casual, free event.
JOIN THE CREW! VOLUNTEER SHIFTS
Monday - Friday, August 25 - 29, 2025 | 9 am - noon; 6 - 9 pm
Monday - Friday, September 1 - 5, 2025 | 9 am - noon; 6 - 9 pm
Monday - Friday, September 8 - 12, 2025 | 9 am - noon, 6 - 9 pm
Help Erika Nelson build the Texas-Sized Road Trip Diorama of Wonder!
The Orange Show's resident artists don't come to make art *for* us, they come to make art *with* us! We offer opportunities for community members of all ages, backgrounds, and experience levels to get inside the artistic process in a very hands-on way, and it is the most exciting and rewarding part of the residency.
Build skills, make friends, and be part of something creative and positive.
MONUMENT MAKING WORKSHOPS
Saturday, August 30, 2025 | 1 - 3 pm
Sunday, August 31, 2025 | 1 - 3 pm
Saturday, September 6, 2025 | 1 - 3 pm
Sunday, September 7, 2025 | 1 - 3 pm
Erika Nelson leads a series of hands-on workshops that invite participants to contemplate the phenomenon of roadside attractions through both a historical overview and an invitation to share one's own memories and experiences. Participants then work with found objects and common materials to create their own roadside attraction replicas, which can then be added to the map display at the heart of the residency (participants may reclaim their creations at the closing of the exhibition on November 2). $20 suggested, nobody turned away for lack of funds. Ages 14 and up.
DIORAMA OF WONDER SPEAKEASIES
Saturday, September 13, 2025 | 2 - 4 pm
Saturday, September 20, 2025 | 2 - 4 pm
Celebrate the opening of the Diorama of Wonder as road trip bird-dogs share their experiences with artist-built environments and other roadside attractions found along the Texas highways and byways. Live music and cold Texas drinks as well.
Details to come!
About ERIKA NELSON
Based in Lucas, Kansas, Erika Nelson is the cultural resources director for S.P. Dinsmoor’s Garden of Eden and the founder and curator of the Roadside Sideshow Expo and the World’s Largest Collection of the World’s Smallest Versions of the World’s Largest Things.
From an early age, she routinely traveled around the country with her vacationing family, and visited with her grandmother the yard environment of Missouri’s Jesse Howard. After earning degrees at Central Missouri State University (BFA 1995) and the University of Kansas (MFA, 2001), Nelson lived entirely on the road for three years, “in search if the syperlative,” visiting and researching various roadside attractions and self-made worlds. She then settled in Lucas, eleven miles south of the geographic center of America, where she became involved with the preservation of Dinsmoor’s Garden of Eden, Frances Deeble’s Rock Garden, and Roy and Clara Miller’s Park. She has also joined restoration efforts at another artist-built environment, Pasaquan, in Columbus, Georgia.
Nelson has participated in numerous art car parades in Houston and elsewhere; visited states with voting access issues with her “Step Right Up Voting Booth” installation; and challenged stereotypical cultural representations with her touring exhibition “Inappropriation Along the American Road.”