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In the study, Shinn's Vermont Column, 2006, dates from his pre-light period. Other curated pieces in the collection, resting on a white-lacquered B & B Italia wall cabinet, include works by Douglas Cartmel, Phillippe Richard, Jens Hanke, Dallas-based Bret Slater and Pard Morrisson. Spring office chairs by Giorgetti. Another dialogue that Oshman fosters is between the hometown hero, the visionary and the international. Witness University of Houston sculpture department chairman Paul Kittelson's droll cracker curtain, in a tête-à-tête with circa-1930s tramp-art men formed from bottle caps, resting atop a table topped by an Afghan embroidery scored from a New York flea market. Clockwise from top: Oshman praises Ed Wilson's hand-hewn metal stairway for its unerring beauty. Under the stairway, note the Menil-exhibited Sharon Kopriva's sculpture of mummies, alongside famed Indian outsider artist Nek Chand's regal figure adorned with broken glass used like jewels. In one corner of the Dessert Room, outsider creator Eugene Von Bruenchenhein's tower formed from chicken and turkey bones, circa 1970s, is as delicate and beautiful as it is seminal. The late Milwaukee visionary (1910 – 1983) is a rare find, and also in the collection of the American Folk Art Museum, New York. Houston-based Ed Wilson was commissioned to make the decorative metal grate, depicting a heron, that covers the air-conditioning return. Above, a work by internationally exhibited Houston-born Mel Chin that presents a political statement in the form of a sculpture of the extinct Carolina parakeet. A stately mid-century dining table keeps company with Chippendale-style chairs acquired in New Orleans; an impressive Indian portal; and a pair of figures by Charmaine Locke. Designer Ed Harris, who has worked with Oshman for 30 years on three different homes, arrived one day to find his client had removed the fireplace to make room for this towering Indian architectural fragment. NOVEMBER | PAGE 54 | 2013 with her every afternoon and look at the walls and say, "What is that? What is that, that looks so strange!" Growing up in Texas, even though I had taken a year of art history, nothing hit me until she said, "Well, my in-laws said if I don't take a contemporary art appreciation class, they're going to take all of the paintings back." So she told me she was taking this class, and I said, "Well, I'll take it, too." I was at Finch College. In this course, Ivan just spun my brain around. I was an English major and a history major, and he was able to tie all of these strange forms, ideas — what came to be iconic images — to the world of literature. He gave us poetry to read that was based on a lot of the same thinking. It started to make this extraordinary sense, just because of the way he taught and the way he thought. I told him, "I'm going to be your worst student," because I always picked a fight with him. He would say things like "Have you ever considered eating things from a wooden spoon? Natives did that. I mean, why do we eat out of metal spoons? It's cold; it's hard; it doesn't taste that great." He always did these counterbalances of different ways to look at the same thing. He was a fantastic teacher. And years later, he said I was the best student he ever had. It changed my life. When I moved back to Texas, all of a sudden I was asking people like Meredith Long, "Well, where is the pop art in Houston?" Pop art in Houston in 1961? Forget it! And that's how it all started. OTHER ADVENTURES WITH IVAN KARP , CASTELLI'S TALENT SCOUT, THE DISCOVERER OF WARHOL. He took us to the first art happening that Jim Dine ever had as part of a field trip. I was married when I was a senior in college, so I took Alvin Lubetkin, my husband, to the happening. I could not believe it. I started to really think about it, and it got me. Then when I got back to Houston, ultimately I met up with a woman named Louise Ferrari, a dealer who carried the Surrealists. She had Christo; she would bring these unusual people to town. That was the beginning of my collecting. FIRST FORAYS INTO COLLECTING. I bought some stuff from Louise, and at the same time, I was becoming involved with the Contemporary Arts Museum. I guess I never really thought of myself as a collector until about three or four years ago, when I finally broke down and admitted to it. I looked around and saw that I had a lot of stuff here. I just always thought of the art as adding something really special to my environment. I never considered the art as investments until they became serious investments, and nobody was more shocked than I was. I always looked at the pieces as: "Are they going to be interesting over time?" And, of course, you never really know until you live with them. And when they "die" on the wall, it means, for me, that they go into storage. So