MFAH announces opening date for Kinder Building
The corner of Main and Bissonnet will be hopping come Nov. 1.
That’s when the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston will open its new Nancy and Rich Kinder Building to the public, kicking off a week of free general admissions across the Susan and Fayez S. Sarofim Campus.
The museum’s curators have already been jamming for months to organize the first comprehensive displays of collections they have never before been able to show in depth. The new building’s 100,000 square feet of gallery space include rooms devoted to postwar U.S. painting; postwar Latin American art; international photography; prints and drawings; and decorative arts, craft and design.
Recent acquisitions by Magdalena Abakanowicz, Mark Bradford, Yayoi Kusama, Glenn Ligon, Ursula von Rydingsvard and Kara Walker will be among the highlights. Entering the building through street-level doors as well as tunnels, visitors also will encounter seven major, new site-specific commissioned artworks that connect the Kinder Building to the rest of the campus. Those pieces are by El Anatsui, Byung Hoon Choi, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Olafur Eliasson, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Cristina Iglesias and Ai Weiwei.
Museum officials also expect to have the building’s cafe and restaurant open by Nov. 1 but have not yet announced the operator.
The completion of the Kinder Building will cap an eight-year redevelopment of the campus and off-site storage facilities that has been the largest cultural project in progress in North America,
involving 650,000 square feet of new construction.
“The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, has, over the last dozen years, become one of this nation’s fastest-growing art museums in terms of collections, programs and audience,” director Gary Tinterow said. “Through our campus plan, we have been stepping up in every way to match the growth, diversity and dynamism of our city.”
Steven Holl Architects designed the master plan along with the Kinder Building and a new home for the Glassell School of Art. Lake|Flato Architects designed the museum’s Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation Center for
Conservation. Both the school and the conservation center opened in 2018. Green spaces by Deborah Nevins & Associates, in collaboration with Mario Benito, will help unify the 14-acre campus and make the area more walkable.
Holl’s trapezoidal Kinder Building — the snazziest architecture the city has seen in some years — is clad with vertical glass tubes that will be lit at night. It also features a distinctive, cloud-inspired roof and inset courtyard pools.
Funding for the project has exceeded its goal, raising more than $470 million to date.