While it may be the most widely known, the Milkovisch family home hasn't exactly cornered the market on eccentric decor. A few miles away at 1317 Arlington, painter Sharon Kopriva, one of the rising stars of the Houston school, has taken the desire for keepsakes from friends to an unusual extreme. After making plaster casts of their faces, she had the casts worked into the exterior stucco of her studio, a former coin laundry that now resembles a Santa Fe pueblo.
Kopriva's studio is a subtle, schooled aberration among the city's outbursts of yard art. More anarchic and notorious is Victoria Herberta's home, Pigdom (at Crawford and Eagle Streets), in a deteriorating neighborhood just south of downtown. The house's purple and lilac paint job would grab the attention of any casual passer-by. A yard full of road and advertising signs, heavy on references to pigs, moves the home into the realm of the double-take. Eyes, snouts and ears lend a porcine touch to the mailbox, a trailer, and a wire mesh trash basket.
Herberta has actually shared her home with a succession of porkers. The most famous was the
first,
Priscilla, who made national headlines in the 1980s after swimming ashore with a drowning boy
in
tow. When overconsumption of morning glories sent her back to the farm, her sister (also called
Priscilla) came on board. Eating havits wreaked havoc once again, and when she topped 800s
pounds and broke the wading poll, she had to flee to the country as well.
Her successor was Jerome (son of Pricilla I and nephew of Priscilla II.), who grew into Herberta's
greatest controversy when he became the focal point of another one of her passions, feeding the
homeless. As hambassador to the homeless, he was the draw for a series of parties that
extracted
canned good donations as an admission fee. Coincidentally or not, neighbors began making
complaints to the city about his living with Herberta, which violated a city ordinance against
keeping
livestock. (The tenacity of their complaints raised suspicions that the real beef was against the
presence of undesirables in Herberta's front yard, where she gave away baked goods she'd
bought
by the crate.) Jerome left town in flurry of publicity and attempts to push through legislation that
would have sanctioned his urban residence. Since the controversy peaked in 1988, he fell out of
the
limelight. Word has it that he was struck by lightning..