One of America’s premier folk art institutions is getting a major expansion for the first time thanks to a newly-unveiled design from Rogers Partners. 

The Orange Show Center for Visionary Art opened in 1980 and is dedicated to outsider and folk art. 

Orange Show traces its origins to a transplanted local postal carrier named Jeff McKissack, who transformed his East End Houston property into a shrine for the signature fruit of his native Florida over a three-decade span until his death the same year.

The expansion allows for one unified program for the first time in the organization’s 40-year history. A 31,000-square-foot warehouse building adjacent to the center will be turned into a flexible exhibition space and education center with a special feature that will serve as the new centerpiece to one of the city’s most important public art festivals.

Since the mid-80s, the center has hosted Houston’s celebrated Art Car Parade, a suis generis promenade of custom painted motor vehicles that will be elevated against the museum backdrop thanks to a new 800-foot user-activated ramp that runs through the campus and culminates at the top of one side of the building’s three-story facade. 

The eight-acre campus will also house some of the prominent cars featured in past parades as well as importantly uniting two-thirds of the center’s holdings -– the Orange Monument and Smither Art Park –– into a center for creativity and showcase for folk art.

The museum also owns and operates the nearby Beer Can House. Projected costs for the project run into the tens of millions with an anticipated completion set for 2026.

“With this expansion, we’ll be able to bring the community together in an entirely new way,” new director Tommy Ralph Pace said in a statement. “We want to encourage visitors not only to see the art but to participate, make, and engage with it; this experiential environment differentiates the Orange Show from other museums or gallery spaces.”