Scholarship

The pandemic led to many cancelled and postponed international exhibitions. Ultimately, during Fiscal Year 2021, the Menil Collection loaned 18 objects to the following six institutions in three countries:

Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany Madison Museum of Contemporary Art Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, Houston Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, France The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Since 1990, the Artists Documentation Program (ADP) has recorded interviews between artists and conservators. The artists are asked about the materials and techniques used, as well as their wishes for the preservation and presentation of their art. In January 2021, artist Daniel Lind-Ramos discussed his work with ADP Fellow, Irene EstevesAmador, Ph.D. The conversation focused on the materials and methods that Lind-Ramos uses to create his found object assemblage sculptures.

All ADP interviews are accessible online at adp.menil.org.

Artists Documentation Program

Video still of Artist Documentation Program Fellow Irene Esteve-Amador interviewing the artist Daniel LindRamos in his studio in Loíza, Puerto Rico on January 29, 2021

Photo: Menil Archives The Menil Archives was founded in 2000 to collect, organize, preserve, and provide access to the history of the Menil Foundation, the Menil Collection, and the de Menil family. To commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the Archives, the Menil launched a new oral history initiative in 2020. A series of recordings captured peer-to-peer conversations with current and former Menil staff and individuals with strong personal or professional connections to the Menil. During Fiscal Year 2021, the Archives accessioned 95 linear feet of documents and 323 gigabytes of digital records from 11 Menil departments. In addition, the Archives fielded 350 internal and external inquiries, ranging from documentary film projects to exhibition research. Prior to March 2020, when in-person appointments were suspended, the Archives hosted 124 onsite research visits. Following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Archives staff continued to facilitate remote research, duplication, and permissions requests, ensuring vital access to archival collections.

Menil Librarian Lauren Gottlieb-Miller with Hiddenness by Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, a large, illustrated book with original prints by Richard Tuttle. This special acquisition was purchased with generous funds provided by Louisa Sarofim in memory of Karl Kilian.

Library

The library of the Menil Collection supports the reference, research, and scholarly needs of the museum and outside scholars. The library added over 1,500 new books, periodicals, and digital resources to its collection during Fiscal Year 2021. Materials from the Menil Library’s Special Collections were featured throughout the Menil’s permanent collection galleries. In December 2020, the Menil received a generous gift of more than 800 books on the history of art, with emphasis on Dada, Surrealism, and Modernism, from the library of Dr. William A. Camfield, Joseph and Joanna N. Mullen Professor of Art History Emeritus at Rice University.

Photo: Menil Archives

Photo: Susan Slepka Anderson The Menil’s Collection Management Department consists of Registration, Art Services, Collection Database Administration, and Imaging Services. Registration oversees all documentation related to the acquisition, exhibition, and storage of the more than 19,000 artworks in the permanent collection. The team coordinates all exhibitions and gallery rotations, as well as incoming and outgoing loans. Registrars manage contract negotiations, fine art insurance, packing and crating, shipping, couriers, and electronic and physical file management for all projects. In Fiscal Year 2021, Registration arranged 112 shipments containing 868 objects. Art Services professionally installs and dismantles all Menil exhibitions and rotations. The team is responsible for packing and crating incoming and outgoing loans, monitoring storage areas, tracking location moves, and couriering outgoing loans with complex installation requirements. In Fiscal Year 2021, 6,028 moves of objects were completed by Art Services. The Collection Database team continually uploads data on artworks from the permanent collection to the Menil’s internal database and website (menil.org). More than a thousand entries are currently available to the public, 242 of which were added in Fiscal Year 2021. Imaging Services supervises all new photography of collection objects, archival materials, and rare books for the Menil. Imaging staff manage analog object photography and digital imaging collections, license images to outside scholars and publishers, and secure reproduction rights for publications. In Fiscal Year 2021, 82 objects from the permanent collection were photographed.

Photo: Susan Slepka Anderson

168 pages 79 color + b/w illustrations Hardcover

296 pages 92 color + b/w illustrations Hardcover Combining an artist book and exhibition documentation, this volume is filled with stunning full-page photographs of the Menil exhibition, new texts on the individual artworks, and reprints of some of the artists’ research materials. Essays by Senior Curator Michelle White and art historian Roberto Tejada capture the spirit of Allora & Calzadilla’s deeply thoughtful and multifaceted practice. Excerpted writings by literary critic Roger Caillois (1913–1978), French poet Aimé Césaire (1913–2008), and others, as well as drawings and photographs made in the 1940s, provide context for the artists’ Caribbean perspective on political and environmental instability. Commissioned texts are by Julie Ault, Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Daniel Immerwahr, Gerardo Mosquera, Molly Nesbit, Mari Carmen Ramírez, Maria Stavrinaki, and composer David Lang.

Object Biographies: Collaborative Approaches to Ancient Mediterranean Art

An object biography may be considered a portrait of an artwork, synthesizing research into the origin, creation, purpose, and history of its life in the world, and often including its collection history. The eight essays on Menil Collection artifacts in Object Biographies: Collaborative Approaches to Ancient Mediterranean Art are the first such in-depth studies published on the museum’s ancient world collection. Featured works include a Mesopotamian votive figure, a group of Greek bronze horses and a bronze Menil fawn (a subspecies of fallow deer coincidentally sharing the museum founders’ name), and a number of small Egyptian perfume or oil bottles in the shape of heads. This innovative anthology grew out of Curator of Collections Paul R. Davis’s Collections Analysis Collaborative, a multi-year educational and research initiative with Rice University and the University of Houston. Essays by 14 authors employ a creative mixture of iconography, technical studies, and modern provenance research to shed light on the meaning of the objects themselves and what they can teach us more broadly about archaeology, art history, and collecting practices. Essays by curators at three other U.S. museums frame ancient art and provenance studies at their institutions. Even as it takes on complex issues of cultural heritage, legality, and collecting taste, this book revivifies works often consigned to either a conceptual limbo or an obscure imperial past. Edited by John North Hopkins, Sarah Kielt Costello, and Paul R. Davis.

Photo: Sara Beck A significant year-end gift from Suzanne Deal Booth has enabled the department to acquire a new computed radiography system to replace the previous system. The machine permits greater flexibility in adjusting the image without requiring multiple exposures or extra object handling. As a result, Conservation staff will be able to use x-radiography far more extensively than before. In May 2021, the Conservation Department was awarded a grant from the Bank of America Art Conservation Project to complete a comprehensive scientific study and conservation of a rare 14th-century double panel section from an artwork known as the “Prisoner Textile.” As part of the project, Objects Conservator Kari Dodson worked with visiting Textile Conservator Kathleen Kiefer to mount and frame the large textile, enabling its first ever installation in the museum. Assistant Objects Conservator Joy Bloser worked with Conservator Reinhard Bek to clean, treat, and restore movement to the kinetic sculpture M.O.N.S.T.R.E., 1964, by Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely. Papier mâché elements were stabilized and a rubber toy alligator, which had deteriorated significantly, was replaced. Bloum Cardenas, trustee of the Niki de Saint Phalle Charitable Art Foundation and granddaughter of the artist, visited the museum during the treatment to review the condition and history of this work and others in the collection.

Photo: Sarah Hobson

Photo: Sara Beck The fellowship program is a key component of the Menil Drawing Institute. It fosters the highest level of scholarship and makes possible rich, interdisciplinary, object-based conversations on the history, theory, criticism, and practice of modern and contemporary drawing. Saskia Verlaan was the inaugural Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the Menil Drawing Institute. A Ph.D. candidate in Art History at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York, Verlaan’s dissertation examines drawings by artists working in Italy during the 1960s and 1970s.

Installation view of Spatial Awareness Drawings from the Permanent Collection, curated by Saskia Verlaan. Photo: Paul Hester