Art all around
Floor to ceiling, MFAH’s nearly complete Kinder Building is a gleaming vestibule for 1,100 works
Drivers passing through the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s Sarofim Campus on Bissonnet can’t miss the nearly complete Nancy and Rich Kinder Building, now a gleaming vision of white tubes and glass.
Not too far below them, in an underground tunnel, a steady parade of workers in orange vests on Tuesday was wheeling about 100 white display pedestals from a storage room in the older Law building toward the new galleries. The great art move-in was underway.
More than 1,100 artworks are being installed before the Kinder’s public opening on Nov. 21. Every size imaginable — from monumental, room-sized permanent environments and other site-specific pieces to objects that could fit in the palm of your hand — will be spread across two floors of galleries as well as throughout dedicated ground-floor rooms, subterranean levels and outdoor spaces.
The building will hold the museum’s own international collections of 20th- and 21st-century art. Much of it has been acquired since 2004, when Caroline Wiess Law’s estate bequeathed a $450 million endowment for that purpose. Now the curators of Latin American and Latino art; photography; prints and drawings; decorative arts, craft and design; and modern and contemporary art will finally have ample room to play with the distinctive collections they continue to build.
“We are tremendously excited and energized by bringing in the art,” MFAH director Gary Tinterow said during a Tuesday tour of the building with the Houston Chronicle. “Of course, the curators and I all have trepidation … . We’ve been working more than two years on placing all the individual works of art in our model ‘dollhouses.’ We keep confirming those expectations with the reality of the building. We’ll say, ‘Really, is that what’s there?’ or, ‘The ceiling feels higher than I thought.’ So there will be some last-minute adjustments. A lot of the art we haven’t displayed, ever. A lot of the art we haven’t displayed in 20 or 30 years.”
Beauty below ground
Chief operating officer Willard Holmes and McCarthy project superintendent Winston Hesch walked us through the subterranean level. The drop-dead-gorgeous Lynn Wyatt Theater, a jewel box of rich, floorto-ceiling walnut supplied by the legendary Houston company Brochstein’s, looked ready for film screenings once the plastic tarps protecting the upholstered seats are removed.
Crews were finishing up two tunnel art environments that will alter perception in opposite ways. The wide, arched tunnel under Bissonnet by Carlos Cruz-Diez will saturate everything in bright colors. Olafur Eliasson’s narrower, catacomblike tunnel connecting to the Glassell School of Art has sodiumvapor lights that will subtract color, leaving everything gray except for moments when visitors pass under purple lights tucked into irregular arches.
The tunnels end in a circular vestibule whose concrete walls will be wrapped in a monumental tapestry by El Anatsui. “When you round the corner from the Eliasson tunnel and see the El Anatsui, your vision comes back but with a vengeance,” Holmes said. “So it’s like being in the Emerald City … . It will be the children’s route into the museum when they arrive on school buses. We thought this would be a great way to prepare them for what a museum is.”
Tinterow wants William Forsythe’s “City of Abstracts” at the ground floor’s Main Street door for similar reasons. Forsythe’s interactive, multiscreen video distorts mirrored images of passers-by. “So no matter where visitors enter the Kinder Building, they will be transformed — shaken out of their normal condition, I hope — in preparation for some extraordinary experience as they view other works,” Tinterow said.
In the dramatic rotunda atop the main foyer, Steven Holl Architects’ design itself is a mind-bender that expresses intentions as bold as the trapezoidal structure, LED-filled tubular skin and floaty, cloudinspired roof of the exterior.
The check-in desk wasn’t yet set up, nor any of the other furniture or art, so there wasn’t much else to distract us. But even later, I suspect, that view to the ceiling will assert magnetic power. Daylight glows through glazed clerestory windows under the swoopy ceiling, whose shape reflects that of the roof. Cast shadows create a sense of traveling through a glamorous, gravity-free spaceship as its portals are opening and closing.
Mixing styles and inclusivity
But back to Earth. The gray, black and white terrazzo floors carry over a theme from the Law building designed by Mies van der Rohe, minus the green tint. (Both were made by the same company, Houston’s Southern Tile & Terrazzo.)
Stairs from the foyer’s center wind up to the two floors of galleries that hug the building’s facades. Some of the concourse’s oak floors are still being stained, but the galleries look ready for art, complete with complex grids of small spotlights. The second-floor suites will highlight collection strengths by department, so visitors can explore, say, the history of photography, major movements in Latin American art or the development of modern and contemporary European art in a focused way. The photography galleries include a room with black walls that’s dedicated to video art.
The third-floor galleries will open with five thematic, multidisciplinary shows of art made since the
1960s: “Collectivity” (about building community), “Color Into Light” (about how artists from different parts of the world investigate color); “LOL!” (as fun as it sounds, based on humor); “Border, Mapping, Witness” (works that address social, geographical and political issues); and “Line Into Space” (explorations of the line in multiple dimensions and media).
The list of artists who will be represented looks purposefully inclusive, featuring numerous women, artists of color and artists from across the world, along with the familiar masters. Among some of the longtime greatest hits: John Biggers’ emotive drawing “The Cradle,” Georgia O’Keeffe’s spiritually sexual “Grey Lines With Black, Blue, and Yellow,” Antonio Berni’s whimsical dragon sculpture “La sordide” and Frank Stella’s geometric painting “Damascus Gate.”
The mix also will be apparent across the ground floor’s display spaces. A corner “black box” area devoted to immersive installations will open with Yayoi Kusama’s infinity room “Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity,” Gyula Kosice’s “The Hydrospatial City,” which imagines a utopia in outer space; and James Turrell’s heavenly light environment “Caper, Salmon to White: Wedgework.” It was all there Tuesday, in boxes and crates full of components waiting to be made into magic.
Tinterow said a new tapestry by Houston’s Trenton Doyle Hancock, commissioned for the museum’s new restaurant, has arrived from India. The restaurant space, however, is still under construction. Through a silhouette of scissor lifts there, we peered across an already inspired, beautiful view toward the Cullen Sculpture Garden. The more casual cafe will have a lighting installation by Spencer Finch.
A beautiful place
Everything will change, of course, once all the art is in place. But Tuesday, the rooms that felt most right were the simplest. You might call them the storefront galleries. They face Main Street, with floor-toceiling windows so the art inside will be visible from the outside.
A prize collection of
Yves Tinguely kinetic sculptures that’s been in storage for decades was waiting to be unpacked in one of the storefronts. The canonlike “La Bascule VII,” slightly menacing under a translucent tarp, hinted at the fun to come. Tinterow is most excited about seeing “Méta-matic No. 9” running again; it’s a drawing machine he first experienced as a 10-year-old kid in the ’60s. Back then, visitors were allowed to take home the drawings it produced. Tinterow got one and still has it.
“This is kind of great, to see the Tinguelys silhouetted against the trees and the view of Main Street,” he said.
Every gallery’s ceiling is articulated in some way to echo the cloud concept of the building’s roof, but they seem subtle in the storefront galleries. Visitors don’t always need bells and whistles; just a beautiful place to convene with art will do, I suggested. “The proportions are really good,” Tinterow agreed. “It’s going to take a while to find the works of art that resonate with the proportions of the galleries. That’s a learning experience for us, but we’ll get there.”
Getting a clear, simple, good-feeling space “actually took a lot of work,” he added. “There’s no single white cube. That is a hallmark of Steven Holl that we appreciate strongly. But my job was to ensure that the building’s utility — its function with the needs of works of art, and the lighting, the HVAC, the orientations, could all work for us. It’s one thing, and not easy to do, to design great spaces. It’s another thing to make those great spaces work well, in a variety of different contexts, for different art.”