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.