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.