LISTSERV 16.5 - ARLIS-L Archives

As much as you'll love the rich and rewarding conference program amid the gorgeous setting of the Hilton Americas conference hotel, no ARLIS member should conclude their visit to Houston without sampling the city's impressive cultural institutions. Fortunately for the visitor, most of these are situated within the single area of the Houston Museum District that is now serviced by the city's new light rail line (the closest stop is just a mere six blocks from the conference hotel, connected via a low-cost trolley during daytime hours).

The Houston Museum District, http://www.houstonmuseumdistrict.org, is comprised of sixteen cultural institutions whose collections range from the broadly historical to the narrowly focused, nearly all of which enjoy great acclaim.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston is the largest of these, with its original Neoclassical structure and two strikingly Modern additions by the legendary Mies van der Rohe, the new building by Rafael Moneo, and the Noguchi-designed sculpture garden. Other structures of the MFAH main campus include buildings for the administration and the art school. Noteworthy holdings include the Beck Collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art, the Modern and contemporary art collections, the photography collections, and the site-specific light installation by James Turrell that comprises the tunnel passageway under Main Street.

The Houston Museum of Natural Science is often overlooked due its non-art historical collections, but in fact the HMNS is Texas' most visited museum and will feature an exhibit of the nature photographs of Andreas Feininger in addition to the major exhibition, Gold! Natural Treasure, Cultural Obsession, which provides visitors the chance to explore the role of gold in history, art, and culture. HMNS permanent collections include a planetarium, three-story butterfly house, and the world's finest display-quality collection of gems and minerals.

The non-collecting Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston is housed in an award-winning, all-metal structure by Gunnar Birkets & Associates (with metal rooftop palm tree by Mel Chin) and boasts daring and unique exhibits such as the current Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art Since 1970, which examines the influence of a number of the critical art movements of the late 1960s on African-American art of the past three decades.

The Menil Collection is slightly away from the Main Street axis of the Museum District, but will prove well worth the added effort to get to its campus, which consists of the supremely elegant main building by Renzo Piano, the Rothko Chapel (with Barnett Newman's "Broken Obelisk" in its reflecting pool), the Byzantine Fresco Chapel Museum (the only intact Byzantine frescos in the Western hemisphere), the Cy Twombly Gallery, and Richmond Hall (one of only two permanent site installations by Dan Flavin).

Other highlights of the Museum District include the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, the Houston Center for Photography, Lawndale Art Center, and the Holocaust Museum Houston (the first of its kind in the southwest).

Conference tours offer the opportunity to visit cultural institutions away from the Museum District, such as the folk-art Orange Show and the MFAH's decorative arts collections at the formerly private residences of Rienzi and Bayou Bend in the upscale neighborhood of River Oaks. Several tours also offer the chance to visit Museum District collections in a professionally guided manner, such as the photographic collections tour of the Houston Center for Photography and the MFAH, and a tour of the Menil campus. Please see the online conference program for full tour descriptions.