It’s been 25 years since the release of SUITS: The Clothes Make the Man. The film follows the Houston based conceptual art duo The Art Guys as they traveled around the country for their project of the same name.
To celebrate the anniversary the film will be shown at the historic River Oaks Theatre on Tuesday, January 6 with a handful of special events surrounding the screening. There will be music by violin master Fiddle Witch prior to the film along with special screenings of two additional Houston centered short films.
The event will present Houston a Love Letter in Black & White by Cooper Sukaly, a short black and white film which romantically highlights some of Houston’s most notable spots and sometimes grungy imagery associated with our city.
They will also be screening the short film, David Best: TEMPLE by Jon Conner, a film documenting the 2024 project housed at The Orange Show by world renowned sculpture David Best.
Attendees are encouraged to wear suits to match the theme of the project and director W. Ross Wells along with producer Merideth Melville with be in attendance and part of the Q&A after the film.
In SUITS: The Clothes Make the Man, Jack Massing and Michael Galbreth brought to fruition their idea to turn themselves into walking billboards leasing advertising space on their custom made Todd Oldham suits.
The film follows the two as they cold call companies to sell them on their idea and then travel the country to showcase their idea on local shows, sidewalks, airports and even the statue of liberty culminating into a New York Fashion show ending the entire project.
“It’s the 25th anniversary and a lot of people that I know that are younger don’t really know much about what we did as The Art Guys,” explains Massing who currently is the executive director of the Orange Show Center For Visionary Arts.
“They kind of have an idea of stuff we did but this documentary is part of the SUITS project which was a major project. It took us almost four years to do it from beginning to end. We were wearing the suits for a solid year, that was a big part of it.”
Massing and Galbreth worked together as The Art Guys for over 35 years until Galbreth passed away in 2019. The two were constantly finding ways to merge art, humor, satire and mixed media making them legends in the Houston art world and beyond.
Tuesday’s event is a perfect way to celebrate not only what The Art Guys created but the many wonderful things Houston has to offer. “It is,” Massing agrees adding, “And it shows how we are all connected and tied together especially through time. With The Art Guys we were so busy for so many years here, it only makes sense for me to tie those things together and to express Houston on different levels in different ways.”
The Art Guys were constantly finding ways to collaborate not only with one another but with the entire city. For their SUITS project, they took it all to another level. “It shows how much impact one person can make just being here and helping out and being cognizant of community and civic pride will garner a lot of great assets to the whole town.”
The idea for SUITS came from Massing watching a New Year’s Eve football game and really paying attention to the many levels of advertising used in these games, not only with televised commercials but the stadiums themselves often named after products or companies.
“It’s just absurd,” says Massing. “Why can’t you just focus on what you’re doing instead of trying to monetize everything? So we decided to monetize ourselves.”
They ended up with 56 different company logos on their suits, which are now housed in the MFAH along with the complete archives of planning and creating SUITS. In the film, you can see how the two artists would cold call these companies sometimes leading to success and other times radio silence.
“You have to think about getting to the right person at a company especially if you’re doing a cold call,” says Massing. He recalls how right away when calling Krispy Kreme donuts he was met by someone who just got it right away and he immediately landed the deal.
It was also through their advertising space from publisher Harry N. Abrams that the project was turned into a beautifully crafted book of the same name. Massing laughs as he remembers their friend Ann Richards calling from the private plane of August Busch, securing them a suit space for Budweiser.
To pull this all off and be a walking billboard, Massing and Galbreth had to play the part and walked the world as their stage demanding attention from others everywhere they went, a non characteristic trait for the two artists. The film shows strangers greet them with excitement and others with skepticism.
“We were playing the part but that’s what a lot of theater and a lot of performance and a lot of fame and fashion and all that stuff is. The very well known or famous people that I know all struggle with the fact that they have to act famous. They have to fulfill that role and not everybody is really that good at it and some people are too good at it,” says Massing with a laugh.
When asked how the project would be perceived today in a world where everyone seems to know everything and is constantly fed images of advertising he says, “It would land differently today. I think it would be less perplexing to people because they would already be up to speed on what was going on.”
When they filmed the project in 1997, no one knew what they were up to unless they asked the two or happened to have caught one of their many media appearances. “I think they were just perplexed. When you see something that you’ve never seen before, it disrupts the patterns that you’ve developed mentally, and you can’t really see it until you see it enough then you can understand it.”
Massing adds, “What’s really important about art oftentimes is that it is of its time and when art is of its time it seems to work better than if it tries to be futuristic or looking back at the past.”
Watching the film takes the audience on a sort of passenger seat ride with the artists and really shows how an idea can become a reality and how artists and their audience can interact directly, even when the audience is unaware of their role in the process.
“What artists do is come up with something and then endeavor to make it perfect or finished or make it great and then to show it you. You have to have an audience with anything you do. You can do things all by itself alone somewhere but there’s a dialog between audience artist and critic that are super important.”
SUITS: The Clothes Make the Man will be shown on Tuesday, January 6 at The River Oaks Theatre. For more information, visit theriveroakstheatre.com.
For more information on The Art Guys visit theartguys.com.
This article appears in Private: Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2026.