SWITCHING ON THE LIGHT FANTASTIC
Visitors are in for a magnificent treat at MFAH’s new Kinder Building
Aspectacular show of light and form awaits visitors at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s new Nancy and Rich Kinder Building.
Architect Steven Holl has filled the luminous, 237,000-squarefoot home for modern and contemporary art with dazzling effects that play out across ceilings, walls and floors at various times of day. Happily, the actual art also asserts itself profoundly.
The whole experience unfolds across three floors and then some. Its 13 spacious galleries line a central atrium with additional display walls. There’s big art below ground and outside, too.
The breadth of what’s on view can astonish even a visitor who frequents the campus’ two older exhibition buildings. At least half of the artworks are recent acquisitions or have been stored so long they feel new. Many others have appeared only in a past show or two.
The museum needed the Kinder Building because it enjoys almost obscene resources that accelerated after 2004, when the late trustee Caroline Wiess Law bequeathed a $450 million endowment for acquiring modern and contemporary art. And the buying spree continues.
The late director Peter Marzio expanded the museum’s scope of “modern and contemporary” art to embrace Houston’s growing diversity. On his watch, MFAH curators developed collections of photography and Latin American art from the 20th and 21st centuries that are now among the world’s finest.
“There is, of course, the story of modernism as it was developed in Europe and the Americas in the early years of the 20th century. But we’ve made a point of insisting on the Americas and not just America,” said Gary Tinterow, Marzio’s successor. “We’re very pleased to integrate works that have traditionally been segregated into the larger story of modernism as it unfolds in our galleries.”
Tinterow arrived in 2012, just as trustees hired Holl to execute a campus master plan and two new buildings. He has gunned it leading up to the grand finale of the Kinder Building opening, commissioning eight highprofile, site-specific works and acquiring a mother lode of other statement art to boost the MFAH’s depth of up-to-the-moment works by living artists.
Veteran curator Alison de Lima Greene oversees what’s still called the “modern and contemporary” department. That now means European and American art of the 20th and 21st centuries, ranging from a foundation of signature masterpieces collected during the museum’s early decades to the brand-spanking-newest piece — a large, untitled canvas Rick Lowe painted for his recent show at Art League Houston.
“You have layer upon layer of history,” Greene said, “and you realize that while there are new departments that have come into this story… it’s all part of a single history.”
Entry points
The new art commissions grace the Kinder Building entrances, expressing the diversity of the collections.
Most spectacular are two eye-tricking tunnels. Carlos
Cruz-Diez’s “Cromosaturación MFAH” feels like a brother to James Turrell’s “The Light Inside” under Fannin. Connecting the Law and Kinder Buildings under Bissonnet, “Cromosaturación” bathes visitors in blue, pink and green air. Ólafur Elíasson’s “Sometimes an underground movement is an illuminated bridge” glows bright yellow but actually subtracts color, rendering everything black, white and gray. It ties the Kinder to the Glassell School of Art’s parking garage.
Ai Weiwei’s lighted, loose, kitelike sculpture “Dragon Reflection” makes a whimsical welcome at that entrance, where children will disembark school buses (one of these days). Meanwhile, at the Main Street door, Cristina Iglesias’ earthbound basrelief reflection pool breaks audaciously through a new plaza. Her “Inner Landscape: The lithosphere, the roots, the water” is a masterpiece of jagged bronze “boulders” and tangled “roots” that holds a 50-minute water show.
The three abstract, vertical forms of Byung Hoon Choi’s black basalt “Scholar’s Way” rise elegantly above a reflecting pool at the west door. Just inside the building there, Trenton Doyle Hancock’s lush tapestry of colorful, bare-limbed trees enlivens a wall of a future restaurant that overlooks the Cullen Sculpture Garden and Aristide Maillol’s voluptuous nude bronze “The River.” A constellation of small lights by Spencer Finch hangs in the planned faster-fare cafe.
Street level
Holl’s architecture creates its own drawings, in a way, especially in the street-level galleries fronting Main. On sunny mornings, shadows dance from a reflection pond onto ceilings there, and the lines of the translucent tubes that create the building’s skin mimic draperies on the windows and walls.
Flimsy sculpture could be, forgive the pun, overshadowed. But these bright galleries exhilarate the eyes instead, right-sized for an opening display of nine spectacular, large-scale mechanical works by Jean Tinguely that the museum has been hiding from us for decades. Simpatico kinetic pieces by Niki de Saint Phalle and Jesús Rafael Soto make this a very fine room, indeed. Next door, the copper “hair” of Tunga’s massive “Lezart I” slinks ominously across the floor, in sight of Anthony Caro’s playful “Orangerie” — a cool yin-yang moment.
Alexander Calder’s organic-looking, white “International Mobile” has found a gorgeous forever home hanging in the central atrium, surrounded by Holl’s boomerang-shaped stairwell.
A somewhat hidden back gallery holds three of the museum’s immersive installations that evoke stepping off the edge of the world. One might look for signs of life in the dangling lucite galaxies of Gyula Kosice’s “The Hydrospatial City” again, aim for heaven or hell in Turrell’s “Caper, Salmon to White: Wedgework” or sense infinity in the gazillion tiny lights of Yayoi Kusama’s “Aftermath of the Obliteration of Eternity.”
Second floor
Galleries devoted to specific histories and mediums fill the second floor. They are organized by department: decorative arts, craft and design; prints and drawings; photography; modern and contemporary art (really European-American art) and Latin American art.
The strengths of the decorative arts and prints and drawings departments are a revelation. With works dating from the late 19th century to the present, the decorative arts, craft and design displays are spaciously arrayed by type, material or era. A rare Josef Hoffmann dining chair from 1904, jewelry from the Helen Williams Drutt Collection and a superb display of Italian design from 1960-85 are highlights. The more intimate and dark prints and drawings galleries hold thematic displays of innovative, experimental art made from 1905 to the present. A nearly spiritual display of works inspired by the earth’s fragile and shifting environment is a standout.
The photography galleries feel dynamic with a mix of salon-style hangings, largescale contemporary images and a dark, padded video room, amounting to about 150 works covering every period and major movement from 1840 to the present.
A confab of monumental, crème-de-la-crème works around the second floor’s atrium puts the modern/ contemporary and Latin American departments into a vibrant conversation. For starters, Louise Nevelson’s matte-black “Mirror Image
I,” Magdalena Abakanowitz’s sexy red “Abakan Rouge III” and Lee Bontecou’s engineinspired wall relief stand resolutely across the hall from rowdy, highly textural paintings and assemblages by Thornton Dial Sr., Antonio Berni, Jorge de la Vega and others.
Smaller works tell other compelling stories in those galleries. The Latin American rooms emphasize that department’s famous strengths, focused on modern masters from Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Venezuela. The long-unseen and boldly meditative works of the Adolpho Leirner Collection of Brazilian Constructive Art are especially magnetic.
The modern and contemporary galleries hold legacy paintings, drawings and sculptures that are like family now, made fresh alongside recent acquisitions and longstored gems that jazz up the conversation.
Third floor
The third floor feels like a stand-alone museum of contemporary art, with five terrific, themed galleries of works acquired in the past decade. These rooms mash up works from across the museum’s departments, illustrating the freewheeling, global and border-neutral nature of art today. “I’m not aware of another museum in this country that has given over such important space to art made after 2000, almost all of it by living artists,” Tinterow said.
“Line Into Space,” based on formal aesthetics, delivers a sublime experience. It’s organized around the delicate works of the Venezuelan Gego, who gave tangible shape to invisible space through wire constructions and drawings. The “Color Into Light” gallery also has exciting moments, and three subject-based galleries consider social-justice issues with provocative works that can be raw or insanely perfect, made with an anythinggoes mix of techniques and materials. A few are literally electrifying, involving lights.
In the “Collectivity” gallery, Carrie Mae Weems’ black-and-white “Kitchen Table Series” photographs, a monumental painted collage by Mark Bradford and Teresa Margolles’ somber installation of 400 adobe bricks handmade from soil in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, are in the mix with one of Nick Cave’s jaunty, quilted “sound suits.” “LOL!” offers relief with works based on humor,
and the art in the dramatic “Border/ Mapping/Witness” galleries is like a force field. You can’t ignore any of it, including Guillermo Kuitca’s dirtymattress sculpture “Le Sacre,” Kara Walker’s silhouette-based “Slaughter of the Innocents (They Might be Guilty of Something)” and Vincent Valdez’s near life-size painting of a hanging victim.
Some of the third floor’s atrium displays might help quiet the brain. The battered orange squares of Gerhard Richter’s “Abstract Pictures (Rhombus Cycle)” are religiously spaced, and Frank Stella’s “Damascus Gate” could be seen as a giant wing.
Or there’s the deliberate poetry of the building’s ceiling, which literally aims to take heads into the clouds.