Membership Luncheon at Hilton Americas
Monday, April 4, 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM
"Houston, James Johnson Sweeney, and Modernism at Mid-Century"
Alison de Lima Greene, curator of modern and contemporary art at the
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Dr. Marcia Brennan, Assistant
Professor of modern and contemporary art at Rice University, will
present a two-part lecture focusing on James Johnson Sweeney, director
of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston from 1961 to 1968.
Alison de Lima Greene will offer an introduction to the history of
modernism in Houston, starting with the drive among Houston's art
patrons to first construct a museum for the city, and then to create a
museum dedicated to contemporary art. She will focus on the
commissioning of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Cullinan Hall at the Museum
of Fine Arts, Houston, which was inaugurated in 1958, the only museum
structure Mies realized during his lifetime. How this space reflected
the ambitions for modernism found in America at mid-century, and how it
became a stage for James Johnson Sweeney's collection and exhibition
programs will also be considered.
Marcia Brennan will focus on the curatorial and artistic collaboration
that took place between James Johnson Sweeney and the Swiss kinetic
artist Jean Tinguely during the 1960s. The "Tinguely Sculptures"
exhibition, which was held at the museum during the spring of 1965,
exemplifies Sweeney's unprecedented-and often quite spectacular-efforts
and activities to bring advanced modern art to the city of Houston. In
particular, this exhibition sheds important light on the ways in which
patterns of self-creation and creative destruction informed both the
production and reception of Sweeney's and Tinguely's enterprise, as well
as of the larger experimental modernist program that Sweeney so publicly
and prominently advanced during the sixties.
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