Inside the closed Menil, curators prepare for a major reboot Museum adds two curators to staff

By Molly Glentzer Updated 5:46 pm, Wednesday, March 28, 2018

Menil Collection curators Paul Davis, from left, Michelle White and Clare Elliott and exhibition designer Brooke Stroud on Feb. 28 in the museum's model room, where they are planning a major redesign of gallery spaces Photo: Molly Glentzer, Houston Chronicle

Photo: Molly Glentzer, Houston Chronicle Image 1 of 13 Menil Collection curators Paul Davis, from left, Michelle White and Clare Elliott and exhibition designer Brooke Stroud on Feb. 28 in the museum's model room, where they are planning a major redesign of ... more

The model room at the Menil Collection has never been such a dynamic dollhouse.

The full-scale reproduction of the museum gives curators a birds-eye view of each gallery, allowing them to place and tinker with the location of objects as they plan exhibitions. And right now, almost every square inch of exhibition space is in play.

While the museum is closed for a long list of repairs much of the year, every interior gallery wall is being removed to allow for new configurations of the display spaces. The model reflects that, and the lead curators have been shifting miniature maquettes of paintings and sculptures from the collection through the new rooms.

This is Menil 2.0, or maybe 3.0 if one considers how the museum looked when it opened in 1987; a complete reboot in the design of all but one of the galleries. The famous "Witnesses" room of Surrealist objects will not change, and the long corridors aren't moving. Recommended Video: Now Playing: Museum of failure starts 1st US tour in Los Angeles

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The big challenge, said exhibition designer Brooke Stroud, "is be different but somehow maintain our design language that everybody knows and comments on."

Why alter such a hallowed space at all?

Director Rebecca Rabinow and the curators decided to rethink the museum's displays when they learned that temporary walls across the first floor would have to be removed to accommodate the refinishing of the pine floors and installation of a new fire suppression system this year. It became a perfect time to explore the permanent collection.

So much of what the Menil owns is stored — in its upstairs treasure rooms, basement and an off-site storage facility. Many works in the collection rarely get shown or have never been exhibited, squeezed out by temporary shows featuring borrowed works from other institutions. Also as a result of those popular temporary shows, thousands of visitors tend to bypass the permanent rooms of antiquities, ethnographic objects, and modern and contemporary artworks.

"In 30 years there's never been a moment when only things from our collection are on view," said senior curator Michelle White. "This becomes an opportunity for us to really shed light on what we have, to point out how we've grown and are growing it, and to point out that there's a bunch of things in storage that have never been out on the floor."

The museum's collection has doubled since founder Dominique de Menil died 20 years ago, now numbering more than 17,000 objects. The acquisitions committee meets five times a year, so things are always coming in, including promised gifts and acquisitions.

White has organized two eclectic series of small shows to highlight individual artists and recently-acquired or promised works — including sculptures by Leslie Hewitt, drawings by Trenton Doyle Hancock, objects from Claes Oldenburg's "Maus Museum" project and prints by Dorothea Tanning.

One of the biggest shifts in the museum's displays might not be immediately apparent to casual visitors, but it acknowledges a significant matter of art history: The modern and contemporary eras are different.

Modernism — encompassing art made in the late 19th through mid-20th centuries, includes early Picasso, Matisse and Cezanne as well as the abstract expressionist works of artists such as Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. The museum will display all of its Newmans and all but one of its Rothkos in two "really big rooms," White said.

Contemporary art (made from the post-war period to present) will fill the reconfigured galleries at the museum's other end. Because the Menil is not a so-called "encyclopedic" museum, that attempts to tell the whole narrative of art history, the curators had to figure out what stories they could tell best.

Few other American museums have the riches of the Menil's post-war European collection, for example. She is thrilled to be installing Klein's "Blue Rain," made of wooden dowels that hang from the ceiling above a "pool" of blue pigment. "This is one of the most important artists in our collection," she said.

Other highlights will be hard to miss. The museum is reinstalling Richard Serra's "Two Corner Cut: High Low," the monumental, site-specific piece Serra created in Houston for his drawing retrospective at the Menil in 2012. "We're reconfiguring this gallery to fit the exact proportions he conceived for this work, so it's one big canvas, from wall to wall," White said.

Also coming out is Cy Twombly's 33-foot long "Treatise on the Veil," his largest work, which the Menil hasn't shown for almost a decade. And it has never displayed Frank Bowling's epic painting "Texas Louise," which it has owned since 1971. ("Texas Louise is currently touring the world in the critically-acclaimed show "Soul of a Nation.")

White will get some help for all of this: The museum has hired two new curators to fill what was previously a single post held by Toby Kamps, who now directs the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston. Irene Mei Zhi Shum, the new associate curator of contemporary art, and Natalie Dupêcher, the new assistant curator of modern art, are due to arrive this summer.

Shum is coming from the National Trust for Historic Preservation's Philip Johnson Glass House in New Canaan, Conn., where she was the inaugural curator and collections manager. Dupêcher is a doctoral candidate at Princeton University whose resume includes a fellowship at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Paul Davis, the curator of collections, and Clare Elliott, associate curator for modern art, are essentially starting from scratch, too.

"We have some real strengths in the ancient area, but there are others where we're not as strong," Daivs said. He is re-organizing those displays by period and geography.

"What's really special is this new room," he said, pointing to an area of the model showing an intimate space that will be dark and chapel-like, for Byzantine icons. "This will be a completely new experience, and there will be works that haven't been on view in a long time. We're also opening another door to create better movement through the galleries. We'll have new walls in the African galleries, so there are areas devoted to coastal west and central Africa."

Another gallery will draw from the de Menil's "Image of the Black" project "to talk about the history between Africa and Europe," Davis said. Also emerging will be rarely-seen tapestries and paintings of the 17th and 18th centuries - what he calls "early modern Europe." The galleries he oversees also will have new lighting systems and display technology.

Elliott is rearranging and expanding the beloved surrealism galleries, reclaiming some of the space that has been devoted to temporary exhibitions for two decades.

"The surrealism collection has always been sort of teased apart from the rest of the modern and contemporary, because it's such a strength of the collection," Elliott said. "It thrives in this different kind of gallery design...smaller, more labyrinthine and intimate. It's got gray walls to evoke that feeling of night and the unconsciousness – those spooky, dreamy surrealist themes."

She has "rethought" displays featuring the collection's bedrocks; arranging Max Ernst's works thematically and doubling the size of the René Magritte gallery to unite early and later works.

The redesign is unfolding on a "sliding schedule," along with the building refurbishment, White said. "It's extremely complicated... a tiered system to allow us to keep the art moving back and forth from storage and to start installing while repairs are going on. That's the only way to make this work."

All three curators sounded upbeat.

"I feel like I know the collection in much greater depth," White said. "I've been so exhibition-driven for so many years." She and her colleagues have brainstormed a "wonderful list of future exhibitions" during the process.

"We want people to be surprised," she said. "We want people to encounter old friends, but we also want them to see entirely new things – and they will."

The main building will reopen sometime this fall. In the meantime, Menil visitors can explore other art spaces across the campus, including the Cy Twombly Gallery, Richmond Hall, the Byzantine Fresco Chapel and the nearby Rothko Chapel; and Bistro Menil is open for business as usual.