The Expanded MFA Houston Will Host Seven Splashy Sculpture Commissions, Including Not One, but Two Hallucinatory Artist-Designed Tunnels

These days, it seems no major encyclopedic museum is complete
without an equally major program of contemporary sculpture.

That’s why the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston,
is planning a series of high-profile commissions to debut alongside
its $450 million expansion and redevelopment in fall 2020. The
seven site-specific installations are by an international crew of
artists: El Anatsui, Byung Hoon Choi, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Olafur
Eliasson, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Cristina Iglesias, and Ai
Weiwei.

The museum’s director Gary Tinterow announced the project’s
projected opening date and the new artworks at a lunch in New York
City. The works will be scattered across the museum’s 14-acre
facilities in downtown Houston, an area dubbed the Susan and Fayez
S. Sarofim Campus.

The centerpiece of the plan, which has been in the works since
2012—and has already seen the opening of new public plaza, a new
home for the Glassell School, and the new Sarah Campbell Blaffer
Foundation Center for Conservation—will be the new Nancy and Rich
Kinder Building for 20th- and 21st-century art.

It’s a major development for the Houston museum, explained
Tinterow, because “modern and contemporary art haven’t had a proper
home in our galleries since the 1950s.” The new facility will allow
curators to finally showcase dozens of artworks acquired since 2007
through an endowment established by Caroline Wiess Law specifically
for modern and contemporary works. The endowment is also funding
the new commissions.

Designed by Steven Holl Architects, the building adds 100,000
square feet of exhibition space, a nearly 75 percent increase for
the museum as a whole. Its facade is clad in vertical glass tubes
that will be illuminated at night and a canopy-style roof inspired
by Texas clouds designed to let in natural light. The trapezoidal
building’s floorplan has been laid out, explained Steven Holl, with
consideration for how visitors move through the space.

“The Museum of Modern Art [in New York] is full of dead end
galleries—but we won’t talk about that,” joked the architect.

In front of the Kinder building’s main entrance, Iglesias is
creating a sculptural pool of cast bronze. “It’s going to be truly
extraordinary and an apparition in the center of the city like no
other,” Tinterow enthused. At another entrance, Choi’s
Scholar’s Way, a trio of sculptures made of Indonesian
basalt, will stand in a courtyard pool. Inside the building,
Anatsui is planning one of his signature metallic curtains. “We
expect it will be in the mode of the sculpture he made for the
Ghana pavilion at the Venice Biennale,” said Tinterow.

Two of the new works will take the form of tunnels, connecting
the new Kinder building to existing campus structures. An
underground chromatic passageway by Cruz-Diez, designed before his
death in June, will bring visitors into the Caroline Wiess Law
Building across the street. Tinterow described it as “three zones
of color which will transform our perception as we move through the
tunnel.”

To get from the Kinder to the museum’s Glassell School of Art,
visitors will walk through a yellow light installation by Eliasson
that mixes warm sodium lights with purple light, a combination of
chromatic opposites that tricks the eye into thinking everything
else is black and white. “It’s like The Wizard of Oz,”
Tinterow explained. “When you emerge again, you’ll be able to see
in color, but it will be extra vibrant for a few minutes.”

Inside the Glassell, a kite-like dragon sculpture by Ai will
hang from the ceiling. Elsewhere on the campus, local artist
Trenton Doyle Hancock is creating and a 10-by-22-foot tapestry for
the museum’s new restaurant. “Our ambition is that it will be
Houston’s finest restaurant,” Tinterow told reporters. “It will
certainly have Houston’s finest public tapestry.”

The post The Expanded MFA Houston Will Host Seven Splashy
Sculpture Commissions, Including Not One, but Two Hallucinatory
Artist-Designed Tunnels appeared first on artnet
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