The Heights Art Crawl Runs Through One Family's Old Boat Shop

On the north side of the 300 block of E. 11th Street, across from C&D Hardware, sits a long, low building that has been a grocery store, a furniture store and a boat shop. The Leader described it as a place neighbors "often drive by without giving it a second thought." Today it is Redbud Arts Center, and it takes up more than half of that block face.

On Saturday, November 7, from 1 to 5 p.m., the Houston Heights Association's Artcrawl will send ticket holders through 14 stops. Five of them sit at 301 and 305 E. 11th Street. The tour's last stop is the sculpture exhibit on Heights Boulevard, and one of the people who opened that 11th Street building is listed among the exhibit's organizers. Two of the neighborhood's best-known art addresses trace back to the same couple.

The building across from C&D Hardware

The boat shop opened in the 1960s, and Red Ortman owned it until the early 1980s. Longtime residents may remember it as Red Ortman's Outboard. In 1999, his daughter Sharon and her husband, Gus Kopriva, bought it and turned it into a gallery and studio space. The Redbud name is a nod to Red Ortman.

For more than two decades it was the privately owned Redbud Gallery. The Koprivas converted it into a 501(c)(3) nonprofit at the start of 2023, a move The Leader framed as a way to keep the mission going over the long term. Redbud's own site now names Gus Kopriva as president and Tanja Peterson as executive director.

The Koprivas have Heights roots that go back further than the building. Gus graduated from what is now Heights High School, then Reagan High School, and met Sharon there during their sophomore year. Sharon Kopriva's career is anything but local. Her work has been exhibited continually since the Fresh Paint exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in the mid-1980s, and she has had a solo show at the Menil Collection.

That is why Redbud's corner of 11th Street works as the hub of the walking half of the tour:

Runnels co-founded MotherDogStudios in 1984, and the HHA calls it the oldest surviving artists' warehouse in downtown Houston. Anguilu's mural mixes pre-Columbian imagery and graffiti traditions with animal forms, shaped by his Mexican heritage. Johnston, the outsider musician and artist, is the subject of the mural Carazan painted on the same property. Down the block, The Heights Petite Shoppe sells art prints, vintage pieces, leather goods and textile home decor, and holds hands-on workshops.

The same family on the boulevard

Along the Heights Boulevard esplanade, True North places eight sculptures by Texas artists each year. The organizers' site traces the project to 2013 and describes it as a volunteer effort run with City of Houston Parks and Recreation, with the Houston Heights Association as its nonprofit sponsor. The organizer credit on Glasstire's listing for True North 2026 names Donna Bennett, Dean Ruck, Gus Kopriva, Chris Silkwood and Kelly Simmons.

This year's exhibit is the project's 13th installation. Here is where each piece stands:

The Artcrawl counts the whole sculpture walk, the 400 to 1800 blocks, as stop 14. On the walking side of the tour, the Heights High bulldog by Joe Barrington, a welded-metal sculptor who often works with recycled materials, sits at Oxford Street and E. 13th Street. That puts it between the 11th Street cluster and the boulevard, at the school where the Koprivas met.

Why November 7 lands at the end of the season

True North runs from March to December each year. Glasstire lists the 2026 exhibit as March 1 through December 1, 2026. The Artcrawl falls in its final weeks. After December 1, the eight works in the table above are scheduled to come down, and the next installation brings a new set of artists. Anyone who has been meaning to stop at "Mantis with Saddle" on the 400 block or "Migrations" on the 1800 block has the Artcrawl as an organized chance to do it before the season ends.

The tour also opens private working studios. Stops 1 through 5 sit just north of the neighborhood, on Delz Street, Martin Street and Thornton Road, and the HHA describes the tour as a rare look inside them.

The north studios, and who works in them

The northern cluster is where the tour reaches into the region's teaching and conservation community:

• Karin Broker Studio, 506 Delz St., half a block east of N. Shepherd Drive. Broker taught drawing and printmaking at Rice University from 1980 to 2021. Susan Budge's sculptures are also on view there.
• Balinskas Preservation of Art, 410 Martin St., run by art conservator Ray Balinskas and art historian Lourdes Balinskas, whose focus is colonial Spanish artwork and iconography.
• Paul Kittelson & Carter Ernst Studios, 415 Martin St. Kittelson teaches at the UH School of Art and makes large-scale public art. Ernst's work deals with the natural world and the mark people leave on it.
• Ed Wilson & Magda Boltz-Wilson Studios, 405 Martin St. Wilson is a sculptor with an MFA from the University of Houston. Boltz-Wilson is a printmaker and photographer whose work addresses political, historical and social themes.
• Tim Glover Studio, 404 Thornton Rd. Glover, a high school art teacher, lives in an artist community called "Itchy Acres."

The HHA's event page says that decades ago the Heights was home to 20% of the working artists in Texas. The association does not cite a source for that figure. The broader history is better documented. A Houston Press look at the neighborhood describes low rents drawing artists, musicians and other creative people to the Heights in the 1970s and 1980s.

Planning the afternoon

The HHA suggests driving between the north studios, then parking once and walking the Heights stops. Since the stops can be visited in any order, one route that follows that advice looks like this:

1. Start at 1 p.m. at the north cluster. Delz Street, the three Martin Street addresses and Thornton Road are a short drive apart.
2. Drive south and park near 11th Street. Visit stops 7 through 13 on foot, from 305 E. 11th west to The Heights Petite Shoppe at 223 E. 11th.
3. Walk north to the Heights High bulldog at Oxford and E. 13th.
4. Finish along Heights Boulevard, working through the True North sculptures between the 400 and 1800 blocks before the tour ends at 5 p.m.

The practical details matter, because the tour is stricter than a typical neighborhood event. Tickets cost $50 per person, and no children under 12 are admitted. Each pass is digital and emailed before the event. Volunteers check in the live pass at every stop, and screenshots are not accepted. There are no rain checks. The organizers ask guests not to touch the art and to wear shoes suited to walking on grass, and they suggest rideshare or street parking. Net proceeds go to the Houston Heights Association.

On November 7, the HHA lists the working studios at 303 and 305 E. 11th as tour stops, next to the building the Koprivas bought from Red Ortman in 1999.

If the walk from 11th Street to the boulevard has you thinking about which Heights blocks fit your plans, Uptown Real Estate Group can walk through it with you, in English or Spanish. Book a private real estate consultation.