What to Expect at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston
August 4th, 2008 at 10:13pm Under Main Content
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston contains galleries, a restaurant, a museum store and curatorial space; it also houses the museum’s permanent antiquities and European collection. After its completion in early 2000, the gallery space from the Audrey Jones Beck Building, coupled with the existing Museum of Fine Arts, Houston buildings, raised the museum’s rank in square footage among art museums to sixth in the nation. The Hirsch Library also has received a number of large book collections as gifts over the past few years, and a new full-time Cataloging Assistant position was recently added to help catalog them.
Items probably more important in this collection (somewhat more mundane though none-the-less exquisite) are the non-Western textiles and Indian and Indonesian costumes. Founded in the 1900s, Texas’ first municipal art museum houses a vast permanent collection of more than 27,000 pieces. The Glassell School of Art, established in 1927 as the teaching wing of the museum, presents exhibitions by its students and the best of today’s Texas artists. There are tons of lectures and symposia pertaining to the exhibits and collections, including the always enjoyable annual Textiles and Costume Institute public lecture.
The older Law Building, connected to the Beck Building via an underground tunnel, is where you’ll find the museum’s modern and contemporary art collections. Although most of the collection is very young and perhaps excessively American in focus, they have some impressive works from the early 20th century, including some outstanding works with a definite southwestern flavor from American masters like Frederic Remington and Georgia O’Keefe.
The museum also comprises two decorative arts centers, Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens, which houses one of the nation’s best collections of American decorative art and furniture , and Rienzi, a collection of European decorative arts begun in 1999. Each year, 1.25 million people benefit from museum’s programs, workshops and resource centers. Of that total, more than 500,000 people participate in the community outreach programs.
Staff conservators carry out treatments on paintings, sculpture, works on paper, and photography. Technical examination of art works is a vital component for devising treatment and methodology. There is ample Pre-Columbian gold, and the European and American paintings and sculpture from post-1945 are particularly popular here. Kids will love the masks, figures, hats, and knives in the museum’s African collection from Nigeria’s early Nok culture which spans some 2,500 years. I really wanted to photograph more there, but they have what appears to be a “no photo, except in one or two galleries of European paintings” policy. As I noted before, though, they have an incredible lack of attentive docents - I was able to photograph pretty freely in a few areas, which worked out OK.
Tags: American Masters, Art Collections, Art Museums, Audrey Jones Beck, Book Collections, Frederic Remington, Georgia O Keefe, Glassell School Of Art, Municipal Art, Museum Of Fine Arts, Museum Of Fine Arts Houston, Southwestern Flavor, Texas Artists, Underground Tunnel, Western Textiles
By Marc Michel Add comment