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Archives Holdings
Overview of the MFAH Archives
The Archives of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston maintains the permanent institutional records of the museum.
The collection is organized into thirty-eight record groups reflecting the museum's departmental structure.
The holdings provide historical context for past and present museum policies, decisions and activities.
Documentation of the MFAH permanent collection resides in the Registrar's Office.
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Nearly sixty manuscript collections from private individuals or organizations have been deposited with the MFAH Archives. These collections either document MFAH's history or complement its holdings
Archival materials date from 1900 when the Houston Art League, predecessor to the MFAH, began to meet.
The collection includes approximately four million items and features a wide variety of materials,
from T-shirts to hard hats. The bulk of the collection consists of textual records, but there is a large number of special format items.
More than 90,000 photographs documenting exhibition installations, buildings on the MFAH campus, special events, and individuals and organizations associated with the MFAH are held in the collection. Art object photography is maintained by the Rights and Reproductions Department and the Frank and Eleanor Freed Image Library.
The collection also includes 6,900 architectural drawings. These include pencil
drawings of the original museum building by William Ward Watkin, John Staub's plans for Bayou Bend
and Rienzi, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's additions to the MFAH, and the CAD drawings for the Beck Building.
The Archives maintains 3,100 items in its audio-visual collection. These are primarily audiocassettes of oral histories and lectures sponsored by the MFAH.
The Archives serves as the official repository for the records of the Contemporary Arts Museum and the ARLIS/Texas-Mexico Chapter. It also houses a micrographic copy of the Texas Art Project, a segment of the Archives of American Art compiled by the Smithsonian Institution. The Texas Art Project is comprised of Texas artists' papers and galleries’ records dating approximately from 1875 through 1985.
The Archives Department was established in 1984 with a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, a division of NARA. In 1991 it moved to the off-site facility, located approximately three miles from the Caroline Wiess Law Building, that it occupies today. In addition to maintaining the archival collection, the department administers the MFAH records management program. Under the auspices of the Hirsch Library, the MFAH Archives became a member of the Research Libraries Group (RLG), a national consortium that maintains a database of archival and library holdings throughout the country.
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