Everything you need to know about MFAHs new Kinder Building – Houston Chronicle

People move through Carlos Cruz-Diez's "Cromosaturacin MFAH," a new tunnel connecting The Museum of Fine Arts Houston's new Nancy and Rich Kinder Building to the rest of the campus, Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2020, in Houston.

The whole experience unfolds across three floors and then some. Its 13 spacious galleries line a central atrium with additional display walls. Theres big art below ground and outside, too.

The breadth of whats on view can astonish even a visitor who frequents the campus two older exhibition buildings. At least half of the artworks are recent acquisitions or have been stored so long they feel new. Many others have only appeared in a past show or two.

The museum needed the Kinder Building because it enjoys almost obscene resources that accelerated after 2004, when the late trustee Caroline Wiess Law bequeathed a $450 million endowment for acquiring modern and contemporary art. And the buying spree continues.

The late director Peter Marzio expanded the museums scope of modern and contemporary art to embrace Houstons growing diversity. On his watch, MFAH curators developed collections of photography and Latin American art from the 20th and 21st centuries that are now among the worlds finest.

There is of course the story of modernism as it was developed in Europe and the Americas in the early years of the 20th century. But weve made a point of insisting on the Americas and not just America, said Gary Tinterow, Marzios successor. Were very pleased to integrate works that have traditionally been segregated into the larger story of modernism as it unfolds in our galleries.

Tinterow arrived in 2012, just as trustees hired Holl to execute a campus master plan and two new buildings. He has gunned it leading up to the grand finale of the Kinder Building opening, commissioning eight high profile, site specific works and acquiring a mother lode of other statement art to boost the MFAHs depth of up-to-the-moment works by living artists.

Veteran curator Alison de Lima Greene oversees whats still called the modern and contemporary department. That now means European and American art of the 20th and 21st centuries, ranging from a foundation of signature masterpieces collected during the museums early decades to the brand-spanking newest piece a large, untitled canvas Rick Lowe painted for his recent show at Art League Houston.

You have layer upon layer of history, Greene said, and you realize that while there are new departments that have come into this story its all part of a single history.

The new art commissions grace the Kinder Building entrances, expressing the diversity of the collections.

Most spectacular are two eye-tricking tunnels. Carlos Cruz-Diezs Cromosaturacin MFAH feels like a brother to James Turrells The Light Inside under Fannin Street. Connecting the Law and Kinder Buildings under Bissonnet, Cromosaturacin bathes visitors in blue, pink and green air. lafur Elassons Sometimes an underground movement is an illuminated bridge glows bright yellow but actually subtracts color, rendering everything black, white and gray. It ties the Kinder to the Glassell School of Arts parking garage.

Ai Weiweis lighted, loose, kite-like sculpture Dragon Reflection makes a whimsical welcome at that entrance, where children will disembark school buses (one of these days). Meanwhile, at the Main Street door, Cristina Iglesias earth-bound bas-relief reflection pool breaks audaciously through a new plaza. Her Inner Landscape: The lithosphere, the roots, the water is a masterpiece of jagged bronze boulders and tangled roots that holds a 50-minute water show.

The three abstract, vertical forms of Byung Hoon Chois black basalt Scholars Way rise elegantly above a reflecting pool at the west door. Just inside the building there, Trenton Doyle Hancocks lush tapestry of colorful, bare-limbed trees enlivens a wall of a future restaurant that overlooks the Cullen Sculpture Garden and Aristide Maillols voluptuous nude bronze The River. A constellation of small lights by Spencer Finch hangs in the planned faster-fare cafe.

On HoustonChronicle.com: A reflective tidepool springs up on Main Street

When: 12:30-6 p.m. Sundays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesdays, 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Thursdays, 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Fridaysc 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturdays

Where: 5500 Main

Details: Free admission with timed entries through Nov. 25; then $12-$19; children 12 and younger free; free to all on Thursdays; masks required; 713-639-7300, mfah.org

Getting there: Three entrances into the Kinder Building are open, all with temperature checks: The east-side door off Main has a car drop-off. A south-side street-level door lets you in at Main and Bissonnet. Or find the lower-level arrivals court from the Beck Building through the Cruz-Diez tunnel, from the Glassell Garage through the ?"lafur Elasson tunnel or from the Kinder Garage.

Holls architecture creates its own drawings, in a way, especially in the street-level galleries fronting Main Street. On sunny mornings, shadows dance from a reflection pond onto ceilings there, and the lines of the translucent tubes that create the buildings skin mimic draperies on the windows and walls.

Flimsy sculpture could be, forgive the pun, overshadowed. But these bright galleries exhilarate the eyes instead, right-sized for an opening display of nine spectacular, large-scale mechanical works by Jean Tinguely that the museum has been hiding from us for decades. Simpatico kinetic pieces by Niki de Saint Phalle and Jess Rafael Soto make this a very fine room indeed. Next door, the copper hair of Tungas massive Lezart I slinks ominously across the floor, in sight of Anthony Caros playful Orangerie a cool yin-yang moment.

Alexander Calders organic-looking, white International Mobile has found a gorgeous forever home hanging in the central atrium, surrounded by Holls boomerang-shaped stairwell.

A somewhat hidden back gallery holds three of the museums immersive installations that evoke stepping off the edge of the world. One might look for signs of life in the dangling lucite galaxies of Gyula Kosices The Hydrospatial City again, aim for heaven or hell in James Turrells Caper, Salmon to White: Wedgework or sense infinity in the gazillion tiny lights of Yayoi Kusamas Aftermath of the Obliteration of Eternity.

Galleries devoted to specific histories and mediums fill the second floor. They are organized by department: Decorative arts, craft and design; prints and drawings; photography; modern and contemporary art (really European-American art) and Latin American art.

The strengths of the decorative arts and prints and drawings departments are a revelation. With works dating from the late 19th century to the present, the decorative arts, craft and design displays are spaciously arrayed by type, material or era. A rare Josef Hoffmann dining chair from 1904, jewelry from the Helen Williams Drutt Collection and a superb display of of Italian design from 1960-1985 are highlights. The more intimate and dark prints and drawings galleries hold thematic displays of innovative, experimental art made from 1905 to the present. A nearly spiritual display of works inspired by the earths fragile and shifting environment is a standout.

The photography galleries feel dynamic with a mix of salon-style hangings, large-scale contemporary images and a dark, padded video room, amounting to about 150 works covering every period and major movement from 1840 to the present.

A confab of monumental, creme-de-la-creme works around the second floors atrium puts the modern/contemporary and Latin American departments into a vibrant conversation. For starters, Louise Nevelsons matte black Mirror Image I, Magdalena Abakanowitzs sexy red Abakan Rouge III and Lee Bontecous engine-inspired wall relief stand resolutely across the hall from rowdy, highly-textural paintings and assemblages by Thornton Dial, Sr.; Antonio Berni, Jorge de la Vega and others.

Smaller works tell other compelling stories in those galleries. The Latin American rooms emphasize that departments famous strengths, focused on modern masters from Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Venezuela. The long-unseen and boldly meditative works of the Adolpho Leirner Collection of Brazilian Constructive Art are especially magnetic.

The modern and contemporary galleries hold legacy paintings, drawings and sculptures that are like family now, made fresh alongside recent acquisitions and long-stored gems that jazz up the conversation.

The third floor feels like a stand-alone museum of contemporary art, with five terrific, themed galleries of works acquired in the past decade. These rooms mash up works from across the museums departments, illustrating the free-wheeling, global and border-neutral nature of art today. Im not aware of another museum in this country that has given over such important space to art made after 2000, almost all of it by living artists, Tinterow said.

Line into Space, based on formal aesthetics, delivers a sublime experience. Its organized around the delicate works of the Venezuelan Gego, who gave tangible shape to invisible space through wire constructions and drawings. The Color into Light gallery also has exciting moments, and three subject-based galleries consider social justice issues with provocative works that can be raw or insanely perfect, made with an anything-goes mix of techniques and materials. A few literally electrifying, involving lights.

In the Collectivity gallery, Carrie Mae Weems black and whiteKitchen Table Series photographs, a monumental painted collage by Mark Bradford and Teresa Margolles somber installation of 400 adobe bricks handmade from soil in Ciudad Juarez are in the mix with one of Nick Caves jaunty, quilted sound suits. LOL! offers relief with works based on humor, while the art in the dramatic Border/Mapping/Witness galleries is like a force field. You cant ignore any of it, including Guillermo Kuitcas dirty mattress sculpture Le Sacre, Kara Walkers silhouette-based Slaughter of the Innocents (They Might be Guilty of Something) and Vincent Valdezs near life-size painting of a hanging victim.

Some of the third floors atrium displays might help quiet the brain. The battered orange squares of Gerhard Richters Abstract Pictures (Rhombus Cycle) are religiously spaced, and Frank Stellas Damascus Gate could be seen as a giant wing.

Or theres the deliberate poetry of the buildings ceiling, which literally aims to take heads into the clouds.

molly.glentzer@chron.com

Molly Glentzer, a staff arts critic since 1998, writes mostly about dance and visual arts but can go anywhere a good story leads. Through covering public art in parks, she developed a beat focused on Houston's emergence as one of the nation's leading "green renaissance" cities.

During about 30 years as a journalist Molly has also written for periodicals, including Texas Monthly, Saveur, Food & Wine, Dance Magazine and Dance International. She collaborated with her husband, photographer Don Glentzer, to create "Pink Ladies & Crimson Gents: Portraits and Legends of 50 Roses" (2008, Clarkson Potter), a book about the human culture behind rose horticulture. This explains the occasional gardening story byline and her broken fingernails.

A Texas native, Molly grew up in Houston and has lived not too far away in the bucolic town of Brenham since 2012.

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Everything you need to know about MFAHs new Kinder Building - Houston Chronicle