Ant Farm

So long as we're on the subject of Houston, Blaffer Gallery at the University of Houston just opened an exhibit celebrating the provocative, multi-disciplinary work of the Ant Farm. Conceived by architects Doug Michels and Chip Lord while teaching at UH in 1968, the Ant Farm was a San Francisco-based underground architecture collective most famous for its Cadillac Ranch installation on Route 66 outside Amarillo. They designed and built the futuristic House of the Century in Angleton (destroyed by flooding in 1985) and critiqued media reality versus lived experience by staging a video re-enactment of the Zapruder film in Dealey Plaza in 1975. The Ant Farm disbanded in 1978 after a studio fire destroyed most of their work.

"Ant Farm: 1968-1978" includes drawings, models, blueprints, publications, photographs and video footage documenting the collective's fascinating history. The exhibit runs through March 5.