The Houston chinos are a sports team that represents the city of Houston. They have a mascot that adds excitement and fun to their games. The mascot is a popular and recognizable figure who entertains the crowd with their antics and energetic performances. They wear the team's colors and often interact with the fans, bringing a sense of unity and camaraderie to the games. The mascot plays an important role in creating a vibrant and lively atmosphere during the matches. They help to create a strong bond between the team and its supporters, boosting morale and enthusiasm.

Drake bought a fantastical, forgotten amusement park made by famous artists. It’s opening in L.A. this winter

For decades, one of the world’s most unusual and unlikely amusement parks sat forgotten in shipping containers about two hours north of Dallas. Its visitors? Raccoons, some snakes. All the while, the glorious and outlandish rides of the little-known Luna Luna lay preserved and untouched.

Only these were no ordinary attractions.

The creations of Luna Luna were dreamed up by icons of contemporary art — an enchanted forest, for instance, crafted by David Hockney, or a Ferris wheel envisioned by Jean-Michel Basquiat, where the whimsical contrasts with violent images of an exploding house and stark phrases of racial inequality, all placed like graffiti in haste. There’s more, including a celebratory carousel from Keith Haring, where the artist’s curved creatures come alive as toy-like blocks.

These and other hand-crafted amusement park attractions will rise again, this time in Los Angeles. Luna Luna will emerge from purgatory for public viewing this month as part of a multimonth, immersive art exhibition. An exact opening date is still to be determined.

An in-progress restoration of a Kenny Scharf-designed swing ride, which will be a part of the “Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy” exhibition.

The exhibit, “Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy,” is backed by hip-hop artist Drake and his entertainment firm, DreamCrew, and will run through spring 2024, overtaking a sprawling Los Angeles warehouse space on the outskirts of downtown. Los Angeles is a fitting home for Luna Luna, for Southern California birthed the modern amusement park industry in 1955 with the opening of Disneyland, and arguably no other city is more consumed with the merger of art, commerce and entertainment.

Luna Luna — the term “luna park” was synonymous with amusement parks in the early 19th century — had the grand ideals of early Disneyland, in that it could merge the worlds of high and low art into something grandiose. But whereas Disneyland, with some notable exceptions, took its influences from early cinematic and animated works, Luna Luna let all its creators run free.

See, for example, Daniel Spoerri‘s restroom façade, created to mimic an imposing, concrete building, complete with mini towers of steaming excrement. Or a mirrored dome crafted by Salvador Dalí designed to disorient. The large-scale sculptures were welcoming in their humor, inviting in their exaggeration.

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Some of the attractions, such as Hockney’s forest and Dalí‘s dome, are intended to be timed experiences. Others, such as Basquiat’s Ferris wheel, are expected to be operational but not fit for guests. Curators say they likely weren’t up to modern code in 1987, when Luna Luna had a brief summer run in Hamburg, Germany, and most assuredly wouldn’t pass a 2023 inspection. But there is a common thread among the Luna Luna creations. They’re all full of life, color and movement, and they stand as celebrations of the amusement park as communal gathering spaces.

In archival footage of the original Luna Luna shows, for instance, Haring discusses his squiggly and arched shapes as if they are creatures from a fairy tale as he reminisces about a trip to Disneyland. “Luna Luna was special to Keith,” says Gil Vazquez, his friend, and president and executive director of the Keith Haring Foundation..

“Reflecting on his own memories of times at amusement parks I’m sure brought back the magic of childhood that resonated deeply with him,” Vazquez says. “By creating a carousel with his famed figures, he in a sense gets to be Disney. Who doesn’t have great memories associated with state fairs, carnivals and the granddaddy of those, Disneyland?”

While Basquiat’s sisters Lisane Basquiat and Jeanine Heriveaux say the family regularly visited New York’s Coney Island as children, they note Luna Luna was still an unexpected art project for their late brother. “Jean-Michel loved play and fun,” says Lisane. “He enjoyed amusement parks and experienced them frequently as a child growing up in New York and, specifically, Brooklyn. Amusement parks were completely on brand for him, albeit an unusual place for him and his friends to collaborate.”

Though visitors won’t be able to hop on Haring’s carousel or Basquiat’s Ferris wheel, Luna Luna will attempt to create some of that carnival feel. Performers will wander the 60,000-square-foot complex, as Luna Luna will be part entertainment event and part historical show that documents how one André Heller created and conceived such a space. Heller’s own work bent toward the surreal, as he often worked with unexpected materials such as inflatables, including a balloon-like house for Luna Luna with multicolored porcupine spikes.

Taken as a whole, Luna Luna will have another mission: to reclaim the amusement park as an art-driven space. Luna Luna will make the argument that amusement and theme parks matter. There’s a reason, after all, Disneyland draws an estimated 17 million people per year, and it’s not solely because we love singing pirates. Amusement parks are a reflection of our culture’s myths and dreams, providing a place not to escape but to play. Luna Luna, like Disneyland, is a stage, a theatrical environment where we are the performers, a place of jubilation in good times and a communal balm in dark ones.

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“The luna park is always a dream space,” says Helen Molesworth, Luna Luna’s curatorial adviser and a former chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art. “It’s like someone goes around and untightens the screws of your need to behave, your need to be good, your need to be smart, your need to be proper. Someone just untightens those four screws, and you can think different things and feel different things.

“You can tap into whatever it is in you that you locked up, whether it’s your childhood or sense of adventure or desire to be scared or desire to be bamboozled,” Molesworth continues. “Whatever it is you talked yourself out of, this project lets you reengage with.”

In-progress restoration of Arik Brauer’s carousel, which will be a part of Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy when it opens this December in Los Angeles.

They help to create a strong bond between the team and its supporters, boosting morale and enthusiasm. The mascot, with their unique and eye-catching costumes, effectively showcases the team's identity and values, and creates a lasting impression on the audience. Overall, the mascot for the Houston chinos adds an extra level of excitement and entertainment to the team's games, leaving a memorable and positive impact on both players and fans alike.

“An epicurean view of life”

Luna Luna was ahead of its time. And in some ways it’s a miracle that it existed at all. The contemporary art world is filled with cynical looks at the themed-entertainment industry: Artists have been distorting Mickey Mouse imagery for nearly as long as the animated character has existed, and then, of course, there’s Banksy’s mid-2015 corporate teardown, Dismaland. Luna Luna is not that.

“An amusement park is, after all, mistakenly regarded as something less serious than, say, an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou [in Paris],” said Heller in the 1987 published Luna Luna exhibition book, which has been reissued today by Phaidon.

In 2023, the idea of an art park doesn’t seem so far-fetched. Disneyland, for one, is under constant reassessment, and what is an attraction such as It’s a Small World, designed almost entirely in the visions of artists Mary Blair and Rolly Crump, but a boat ride through a makeshift art gallery? Then there’s Meow Wolf, the Santa Fe, N.M.-based art collective that has opened theme park-inspired walk-through exhibitions in numerous cities, including Las Vegas and, most recently, Grapevine, Texas.

Heller was prescient in his merger of amusement parks and art institutions. “I find this project so interesting because, throughout the history of the 20th century in art, there’s been a dream on the part of artists to break down the boundaries between art and life,” Molesworth says. “This is one of those projects that does it.”

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Reviews for "The Houston Chinos mascot: A symbol of unity in a diverse city"

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Unveiling the symbolism of the Houston Chinos mascot