New SpaceDecember 17, 2019
MFAH will open the Kinder Building next fall
The Houston Museum of Fine Arts announced that the Susan and Fayez S. Sarofim campus will be completed in the fall of 2020 with the opening of the Nancy and Rich Kinder Building. To exhibit works of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that the museum has acquired in recent decades, the addition of 183,528 square feet will increase the exhibition space of the MFAH by 75% and make the Houston museum the fourth largest in the country in terms of space. Only the Metropolitan Museum in New York, Nashville’s Frist Art Museum (located in an old postal house) and the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., have a larger art space.
The exterior of the building, designed by Steven Holl is finished. Its façade is lined with vertical glass tubes that will be illuminated at night and a canopy roof inspired by the clouds of Texas, designed to allow natural light to enter. The building will include 15 rooms, two restaurants, an auditorium, two conference rooms and meeting areas such as the large atrium on the ground floor, where a central zigzag staircase leads to the open second and third floors.
A series of commissioned site-specific installations will also be open. The invited artists are El Anatsui, Byung Hoon Choi, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Olafur Eliasson, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Cristina Iglesias, and Ai Weiwei.
In front of the main entrance of the Kinder building, Cristina Iglesias is building a sculptural pool of cast bronze. At another entrance, Byung Hoon Choi will present a trio of sculptures made of Indonesian basalt. Inside the building, El Anatsui is planning one of his metal curtains.
Two of the new works will take the form of tunnels, connecting the new Kinder building with existing campus structures. An underground chromatic passage from Cruz-Diez, designed before his death in June, will bring visitors into the Caroline Wiess Law Building across the street.
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.
Inside the Glassell, a kite-like dragon sculpture by Ai Weiwei will hang from the ceiling. Elsewhere on the campus, local artist Trenton Doyle Hancock is creating a tapestry for the museum's new restaurant.
The exterior of the building, designed by Steven Holl is finished. Its façade is lined with vertical glass tubes that will be illuminated at night and a canopy roof inspired by the clouds of Texas, designed to allow natural light to enter. The building will include 15 rooms, two restaurants, an auditorium, two conference rooms and meeting areas such as the large atrium on the ground floor, where a central zigzag staircase leads to the open second and third floors.
A series of commissioned site-specific installations will also be open. The invited artists are El Anatsui, Byung Hoon Choi, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Olafur Eliasson, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Cristina Iglesias, and Ai Weiwei.
In front of the main entrance of the Kinder building, Cristina Iglesias is building a sculptural pool of cast bronze. At another entrance, Byung Hoon Choi will present a trio of sculptures made of Indonesian basalt. Inside the building, El Anatsui is planning one of his metal curtains.
Two of the new works will take the form of tunnels, connecting the new Kinder building with existing campus structures. An underground chromatic passage from Cruz-Diez, designed before his death in June, will bring visitors into the Caroline Wiess Law Building across the street.
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.
Inside the Glassell, a kite-like dragon sculpture by Ai Weiwei will hang from the ceiling. Elsewhere on the campus, local artist Trenton Doyle Hancock is creating a tapestry for the museum's new restaurant.
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