Connecting Currents: Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Ongoing

view slideshow

• Included with general admission. Get tickets here.

The Nancy and Rich Kinder Building is dedicated to the Museum’s international collections of modern and contemporary art. The soaring spaces feature displays that span media encompassing painting and sculpture, craft and design, video, and immersive installations.

The third-floor galleries are devoted to thematic exhibitions, and the Kinder Building opens with Connecting Currents—five inaugural installations of art from the 1960s onward.

• Border / Mapping / Witness considers maps and borders in geographic, social, and political terms. Among the ideas presented are works that survey and rationalize a terrain (Carlos Garaicoa, Guillermo Kuitca, Julie Mehretu, Fazal Sheikh, Rosemarie Trockel); that bear witness to social injustices (Richard Avedon, Christian Boltanski, Erika Diettes, Melvin Edwards, Carmela Gors, Glenn Ligon, César Augusto Martínez, Oscar Muñoz, Betye Saar, Doris Salcedo, Kara Walker); and that engage the notion of border as fraught with violence (Ramiro Gomez, Luis Jiménez, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Julio César Morales, Camilo Ontiveros, Miguel Ángel Rojas, David Taylor, Vincent Valdez).

• Color into Light showcases work by artists celebrated for their study of color dynamics, including Josef Albers, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Sam Gilliam, Hans Hofmann, Hélio Oiticica, Fanny Sanín, and Ettore Sottsass. Among the works on view are neon pieces by Gyula Kosice and Keith Sonnier; investigations of transparency by Fred Eversley and Shiro Kuramata; and cameraless photographs by Christopher Bucklow and Susan Deges.

• Collectivity explores artists’ use of diverse materials and techniques to activate a sense of community. Highlights include Beatriz Gonzalez’s Mutis por el foro, a metal bedframe depicting the death of Simón Bolivar; the work of Ellen Lesperance, who addresses the aesthetics of protest; Teresa Margolles’s Lote bravo, comprising 400 adobe bricks made by hand out of the soil where murdered women had been buried in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico; Do Ho Suh’s powerful drawing Karma Juggler; and the Kitchen Table Series photographs by Carrie Mae Weems.

• Line into Space examines how artists explore line in multiple dimensions and media, from works on paper to jewelry, three-dimensional constructions, and furniture. This installation features more than two dozen works by Gego, including drawings, sculptures, and watercolor, presented with selections such as Ruth Asawa’s wire sculpture Untitled (S. 562, Double Cone Form with Central Sphere); Joris Laarman’s stainless steel Dragon Bench; and Jean Tinguely’s kinetic sculpture Méta-Malevich.

• LOL! features art that uses humor as a strategy. Now-classic sculptures, photographs, and videos by Vik Muniz, Claes Oldenburg, Tony Oursler, Sandy Skoglund, and William Wegman are on view, along with surprising works such as Grupo Mondongo’s Calavera 4 (Skull 4), with its humorously re-contextualized sociopolitical, pop-culture, and art-historical references; Jesse Lott’s celebratory Basketball Players; and Yoshitomo Nara’s drawings of cute, mischievous girls.

Connecting Currents: Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston | Opened November 21, 2020