Lemon gelato at Dolce Neve
Dolce Neve
This Austin-born sweet shop wows with real deal Italian gelato — more than a dozen flavors daily along with seasonal scoops and ice cream sandwiches. Perfect for summer: refreshing organic watermelon sorbet, ricotta-honey-pistachio gelato, and lemon gelato.
Fat Cat (photo by Chuck Cook)
Paws up for this Heights favorite dishing up scoops crafted with hyper-local ingredients like Waterloo strawberry buttermilk and milk chocolate ice cream made with Convict Hill oatmeal stout. Retro confections tempt like push-up pops, sundaes, milkshakes and floats (remember those?!).
Frohzen case at Cafe Leonelli (photo by Emily Chan)
A summer day at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston isn’t complete without popping in for a chilly treat. Popular gelato flavors include cookies and cream and guava Maria; there’s also mango sorbet. Expect novelties like artful ice cream sandwiches and frozen pops.
Honeychild's Sweet Creams (photo by Lauren Marek)
Handmade frozen custard made from all local ingredients is the star of this scoop shop. Flavors like buttermilk pie, creamed corn, and Texas sheet cake keep the regulars coming. Cucumber shishito lime sorbet is another must try.
Dairy-free cones at Jeni's
This national brand peppered around town features flavors that mimic restaurant desserts: think mango cheesecake; sparkling cherry pie; and brandied banana brûlée. Summer flavors include sweet cream biscuits with peach jam and golden nectar ice cream. The newest shop is in Rice Village, and like all the locations, it offers gluten- and dairy-free options.
Sweet Cup Gelato
With 200 rotating flavors, Sweet Cup in Montrose crafts handmade gelato, sorbets and frozen yogurts from scratch on-site. Wildly inventive flavors like turmeric-mandarin gelato, lychee basil, and Blue Moon swirled with marshmallows and local blueberries are gaining a cult following. Want to stock up? Pints are sold at all Houston Whole Foods Markets and Central Markets statewide.
Tiny's Milk & Cookies
This precious spot with several locations has a secret weapon that isn’t in the name — ice cream! You’ll want to grab a few of the famous chocolate chip cookies to go along with classic scoops like rich coconut milk chocolate, fresh strawberry and birthday cake.
Van Leeuwen ice cream
The Brooklyn-based ice cream shop specializes in French ice cream and also offers vegan ice cream, sorbet, sundaes, milkshakes, and ice cream sandwiches. Three Houston locations are scooping indulgences like peanut-butter-brownie-honeycomb, buttermilk-berry-cornbread, and chocolate-caramel-cheesecake. Anticipate midnight cravings? Central Market carries pints and ice cream bars.
Artwork by May, Magallon and Carter
Each work in this group show is a collaboration between three different artists, created using the rules of the surrealist parlor game, Exquisite Corpse, or “cadavre exquis” for you Francophiles, in which a player draws on a portion of a sheet of paper, folds the paper to conceal what they’ve drawn, and then passes it along to the next player to do the same. When unfolded, the juxtaposed images can be startling, even bizarre, thanks to the synchronistic nature of the process, and the twisted humor of the artists. (The show’s title sets the vibe for this summertime (hot) exquisite corpse (bod) exhibit.)
To pull this off, Basket Books and Art co-owner Edwin Smalling, a practicing artist with an MFA from Yale, and a purveyor of and advocate for physical media (i.e. books), chose to do it the hard way. After selecting a total of 120 participants, about a third of whom are based in Houston, Smalling initiated a long-distance form of “exquisite corpse” using the venerable, but not always reliable, United States Postal Service.
The artists received a “kit” containing three envelopes each, with a strip of blank paper, postage, and instructions to adhere to the rules of the game and mail their artwork to another artist, and finally back to Smalling. By eschewing the cloud and file-sharing platforms, Smalling hoped to inspire a broader, more inclusive spirit among the artists, and create “a map of the geographic and artistic network that the drawings have traversed on their way back to Basket Books and Art.”
Given the fact that USPS moves in mysterious ways, works for Hot Bod are, at the time of this writing, still arriving in the mail.
Among the Houston artists in Hot Bod are photographer and visual artist Jermani May paired with Darius Carter, a.k.a. OGPopzIG; and Areli Navarro Magallón, Communications Coordinator for Art Is Bond. Carter has been especially busy this summer. His artwork was included in Boston Center for the Arts’ 27th Drawing Show Yušká: Uncoil and the Brooklyn Art Cave’s third annual art exhibition Where We From, and he regularly drops short, fast-cut, hip-hop soundtracked video montages on Instagram highlighting current gallery and museum shows in Houston and beyond.
May, Magallon and Carter
'Exquisite Corpse' artwork (photo by Chris Becker)
May, Carter, and Magallón’s contribution to Hot Bod is an explosive, psychedelic mini-mural, with the trio posed alongside Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas’ poodle, the namesake and mascot of Basket Books and Art, looking cool and composed beneath a burning sky and bulbous cloudscape teeming with syncretic icons. Other standout artists to search for in the exhibit include Joseph Havel, Terry Suprean, Rabéa Ballin, Jeremy DePrez, Corey Sherrard, and Dana Frankfort.
Works from Hot Bod are available to purchase; 50 percent of each sale will be donated to support the Women’s Storybook Project of Texas, a non-profit program that helps incarcerated mothers stay connected to their children by recording stories and messages of love. Hot Bod is on view until Sept. 1, and a reception is scheduled for Saturday, Aug. 17, from 4-6 pm.