Issue link: http://papercitymagazine.uberflip.com/i/452972
DECORATION Houston, City of Museums. Just when we thought Dallas was stealing all the visual thunder with the Calatrava bridges and all the blockbusters at the Dallas Contemporary since Peter Doroshenko's arrival, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, has stepped forth with a bold announcement unveiling its $450 million capital campaign toward a transformation of the MFAH campus as we know it. An impressive $330 million has been raised, with $20 million more to go towards yielding a third building, a new Glassell School of Art and a center for conservation; the remaining $100 million builds the endowment. NYC- and Beijing-based Steven Holl Architects' green- focused plan begins with building three, which employs transparent and translucent glass as principal material, seven vertical gardens with reflecting pools, a luminous roof canopy and sculpture court as zone of arrival. Equally exciting is Holl's design for the future Glassell, which replaces the beloved glass-brick '80s-era structure with a new home for the MFAH school of art and its Core Fellows. Get ready for a dramatic sloping green roof, which promises sweeping vistas of the surrounding, re-imagined campus. Lead gifts come from big-hearted billionaires Fayez Sarofim and Nancy and Rich Kinder, to the tune of respectively $70 and $50 million, guaranteeing naming rights to the campus and third building, which going forward will be The Nancy and Rich Kinder Building — a 164,000-square-foot home for 20th- and 21st-century art that also will boast a tony restaurant looking out onto the Noguchi-designed Cullen Sculpture Garden, which dates to 1986 — on the now 14-acre Fayez S. Sarofim Campus of the MFAH. The final addition, atop the parking garage, will complete the ambitious architectural program: the state-of- the-art Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation Center for Conservation, designed by San Antonio's Lake|Flato Architects. The endeavor's other major gifts include $10 million or more from foundations as well as private donors the Glassell Family, Cornelia and Meredith Long and Lynn and Oscar Wyatt, the latter funding the Kinder Building's theater. While you'll have to wait until 2019 for the new Kinder, the Glassell adding to your photography collection (or starting one) is a New Year's rez, mark this date: Wednesday, February 18, at The Junior League of Houston, where approximately 70 photographic lots will be hammered down in a hotly contested live and silent auction benefitting Houston Center for Photography. On the block will be contemporary and historic works by masters of Texas photography as well as internationals, with an array of price points. PaperCity once again serves as media sponsor, while esteemed New York-based gallerist Rick Wester wields the gavel. Our top lots: a pair of vintage albumen prints by Giorgio Sommer showing the streets of Pompeii in 1860; Hiroshi Sugimoto's intensely calm seascapes, meditations on water, sky and mist; a classic street scene from the rediscovered Vivian Maier; a cover lot by Janet Russek of a 1950s-style femme wearing white gloves; and, from our own backyard, images by Peter Brown, Keith Carter, Cara Barer, new HCP director Sarah Sudhoff and Geoff Winningham (a '70s-era Astrodome shot). Offerings are on view at HCP through February 16; Anne Tucker and Clint Willour conduct a free public preview Monday, February 16. For auction dinner tickets (from $150) and advance bids (including buy-it-now silent auction lots), contact Caroline Docwra at 713.529.4755, ext. 15, or caroline@hcponline.org. Information hcponline.org. Catherine D. Anspon 2017 HERE COMES (AND 2019): Geoff Winningham's The Destruction Derby in the Astrodome, 1972, on the block at HCP Print Auction NOTABLE COLLECTING OP: LENSMEN BLOCK The west courtyard of the Menil Drawing Institute The Nancy and Rich Kinder Building sculpture garden entrance View of the Nancy and Rich Kinder Building entrance looking north on Main Street View of the campus from the rooftop of the Glassell School of Art COURTESY STEVEN HOLL ARCHITECTS COURTESY STEVEN HOLL ARCHITECTS COURTESY STEVEN HOLL ARCHITECTS COURTESY JOHNSTON MARKLEE/THE MENIL COLLECTION will unveil as soon as Fall 2017 — which is also close to the anticipated date for the opening of the Menil's new $40 million jewel-box Drawing Institute, designed by L.A.-based Johnston Marklee. The MDI will be sited east of the museum, south of the Twombly Gallery (demolition of the northern third of Richmont Square apartments has just been accomplished to clear the way for its March 27 groundbreaking). All this makes the final years of this decade the most exciting time in Houston's museum history since the early 1970s, a comparable period of visionary undertakings, which saw the completion of the Rothko Chapel (1971), the Upper Brown Pavilion of the MFAH (1974) and the CAMH (1972). Check papercitymag. com for unfolding updates. #FutureMFAH. Catherine D. Anspon If ON THE