Menil Collection facts for kids
The Menil Collection is a special place in Houston, Texas. It's both a museum and a huge collection of amazing art! It was started by John de Menil and Dominique de Menil. Inside, you can see paintings, sculptures, drawings, photos, and even rare books.
The Menil Collection is a non-profit organization, which means it doesn't try to make money. It's supported by the Menil Foundation, the City of Houston, the State of Texas, and even the U.S. government through the National Endowment for the Arts. This helps keep it open for everyone to enjoy.
The museum has many different kinds of art. You can find works from the early to mid-1900s by famous artists like René Magritte, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Henri Matisse, Jackson Pollock, and Pablo Picasso. There's also a big collection of pop art and contemporary art by artists such as Andy Warhol, Mark Rothko, and Robert Rauschenberg. Plus, the museum has ancient art and art from the Byzantine and Medieval times, as well as tribal art.
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History of the Menil Collection
The Menil Collection museum first opened its doors in June 1987. It was designed by a famous architect named Renzo Piano. The museum is managed by The Menil Foundation, which was created in 1954. Its main goal is to help people understand and appreciate culture, especially through art.
Dominique de Menil, who was part of the Schlumberger family, was the first president of the museum. She led the museum until she passed away in December 1997. In 2016, Rebecca Rabinow became the new director of the museum.
The Menil Campus and Area
The museum isn't just one building! It has grown to include four other special galleries near the main building. These are:
- The Cy Twombly Gallery, also designed by Renzo Piano.
- The Dan Flavin Installation at Richmond Hall, which has cool light art by Dan Flavin.
- The Byzantine Fresco Chapel.
- The Menil Drawing Institute.
Another important building started by the de Menils, which is now its own foundation, is the Rothko Chapel.
In the 1960s, the Menil Foundation started buying many of the small, bungalow-style homes in the area. They painted all of them the same shade of gray. When the main museum building was built, it was also painted this special "Menil gray" to match the houses around it.
In 2013, a landscape architect named Michael Van Valkenburgh was chosen to make the Menil Collection's 30-acre campus even better. The plan includes adding more green spaces, walking paths, a cafe, and new buildings for art.
Visiting the Menil Collection
The Menil Collection is open to everyone, and the best part is that admission is completely free! The museum is open from Wednesday to Sunday, from 11 AM to 7 PM. You can find it close to the University of St. Thomas in the Neartown area of Houston.
The Byzantine Fresco Chapel
The Byzantine Fresco Chapel is in a separate building near the main museum. It used to hold two very old 13th-century Byzantine church paintings called frescoes. One showed the Virgin Panagia and the other showed Christ, known as Christ Pantocrator. These frescoes were taken from a church in Lysi in Turkish-occupied North Cyprus by art thieves. They were found and brought to the museum in the 1980s. The museum said they were the only frescoes of their kind in the Americas.
In 2011, the Menil Collection announced that the frescoes would be returned to Cyprus in 2012. This was a great example of art repatriation, which means returning art to its original country. In 2015, the Menil decided to use the chapel space for modern art installations. The first art piece shown there was "The Infinity Machine" by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller.
Cy Twombly Gallery
In 1992, Dominique de Menil asked Renzo Piano to design a small, separate building just for the art of Cy Twombly, Jr. This gallery is different from the main museum. It's made of sand-colored concrete blocks and has nine galleries inside. Like the main museum, it gets light from the roof, but it has special shades and a fabric ceiling to make the light soft and gentle for the artworks.
Menil Drawing Institute
The Menil Drawing Institute opened in 2018. It's the first building in the United States built specifically for showing, studying, storing, and taking care of modern and contemporary art made on paper. The building was designed by Johnston Marklee and Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates.
This building cost $40 million and has 30,000 square feet of space on two floors, with one floor underground. It's located near the Cy Twombly Gallery. The building is not very tall, only 16 feet high, which is similar to the gray bungalows nearby. Half of its space is for underground storage. The ground floor has a large central "living room," about 3,000 square feet of exhibition space, rooms for scholars and events, and a special lab to care for the art. All these areas are built around three courtyards.
Museum Management
Menil Foundation
The Menil Foundation continues to manage the museum. The foundation is responsible for buying new art and for the museum's daily operations. Important groups like the Cullen Foundation and the Brown Foundation have also given a lot of money to the museum. By 2001, the Menil Foundation had $200 million to help support the museum's operations, exhibitions, and research.
Louisa Stude Sarofim became the president of the Menil Collection and Foundation in 1998, after Dominique de Menil passed away. She has become one of the museum's biggest supporters.
Directors
The museum's first director was Walter Hopps. He helped Mrs. de Menil plan the museum before it even opened. From 1999 to 2003, Ned Rifkin was the director. After him, Josef Helfenstein became director in 2004. During his time, the number of visitors to the Menil doubled, and the museum added over 1,000 new artworks to its collection. These new pieces included art by Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra, and Kara Walker.
See also
In Spanish: Colección Menil para niños
- Charmstone (sculpture)
- Isolated Mass/Circumflex (Number 2) (1968–1978)
