Issue link: http://papercitymagazine.uberflip.com/i/1094653
GENTLEMAN, POLYMATH, SAILOR, ARCHITECT, MUSEUM MAKER, CITY BUILDER, MAD FOR MAPS AND SHIPS' MODELS, PLAYS A MEAN JAZZ GUITAR. AN AFTERNOON WITH MR. CARRINGTON WEEMS. C arrington Weems is a paradox. This old-guard bastion of River Oaks is the person responsible for forging one of the most avant- garde museums in America, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Almost single-handedly, he raised funds for the sleek parallelogram of folded stainless steel, which nearly 50 years later still appears contemporary and ageless. He hired the architect — Gunnar Birkerts, a disciple of Saarinen — and did the land deal for a prime spot on Montrose and Bissonnet. All of this is detailed not only on Weems' own website, weemscollections. com, but in Pete Gershon's recently published monumental volume, Collision, a tell-all of the wild, raucous, and pivotal decades (the 1970s and 1980s) that birthed the Houston art world as we know it. The book begins with the patrician patron's outsized role in the CAMH, with vintage photos of nattily dressed Weems, a fellow museum supporter, and director Sebastian Adler gazing at a building model. A Man of Maps, Ships, and Substance At 90, he's also one of the youngest energies in the room, astoundingly spry, who fields commercial real estate deals on his cell and dispatches sage and rapid-fire advice. This, after all, is the gentleman who developed Houston Center, a $2 billion transaction, the largest ever in Texas up to that time 1979. That it took place on land where his grandparents' Tiffany-designed house once stood adds another layer. During one of our visits, he dispensed with a phone caller, saying with a laugh and firm conviction, "That deal will never fly." A widower — his beloved wife of 55 years, Mary Ann, died in 2013 — Weems is in demand on the social circuit, frequently squiring a younger widow, Gabrielle Girard, and putting together an impromptu musical group with fellow city builders; he and Patty Hubbard are known to croon duets. Then there is the collector Weems, whose passions are attuned to ships' models and maps — not surprising for an avid yachtsman who once raced to Cuba with a crony, a nautical endeavor that set a record, and collected the winning sailing trophy at the Havana Yacht Club. The love for models and maps is visible in his home but pales in comparison to his office, which could double as a museum, with great, if not arcane treasures such as early-19th- century canvases of storied schooners. The painting collection is an accessory, though, to the intricate ship models. Like talismans from another time, Weems' to-scale antique replicas render in three dimensions the great clipper ships, schooners, frigates, and ocean liners of the past. Handsome honey-colored wood prows are topped by lacy rigging threaded through fragile masts; each model in this impressive fleet is encased in its own beautifully designed vitrine. Then there are the maps, relics of an age centuries before GPS. In that The Patrician BY CATHERINE D. ANSPON. ART DIRECTOR MICHELLE AVIÑA. PHOTOGRAPHY PÄR BENGTSSON. Carrington Weems at home