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, with installations of art from the 1960s onward.

Behind the Wheel evokes car culture as an American touchstone of contemporary life. Artists have embraced the form and materials of cars and highways to represent varying degrees of leisure, belonging, independence, and power. Shopping centers, roadside cafes, motels, drive-in movies, and gas stations are all physical manifestations. Examples range from Ishimoto Yasuhiro’s homage to childhood and the station wagon to Mutual Concerns by Chakaia Booker, who tears apart rubber tires to reassemble and renew them as lyrical abstractions. 

Energy illustrates this phenomenon as a natural and metaphysical resource through photography, prints, drawings, paintings, sculptures, rare books, craft, and design. Photographs of oil refineries and electrical sites, and paintings by John Alexander and Rackstraw Downes, document the romance of the Texas oil landscape. Lighting devices by Rody Graumans and Ingo Maurer honor the light bulb in a reinterpretation of form and challenge to the meaning of energy and industry. Works by Teresita Fernandez, Richard Misrach, and David Regan illuminate the beauty, majesty, and destructive power of nature’s force.

Color into Light showcases work by artists celebrated for their study of color dynamics, including Josef Albers, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Sam Gilliam, Hans Hofmann, Ellsworth Kelly, Hélio Oiticica, Fanny Sanín, and Ettore Sottsass. Additional works on view include neon reliefs by Gyula Kosice and Keith Sonnier; investigations of transparency by Marta Chilindron, Fred Eversley, and Shiro Kuramata; and photographs by John Mark Hall and Gerhard Richter.

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 works by Gego, including drawings, sculptures, and watercolor, presented with selections by artists including Ruth Asawa, Georg Dobler, Naum Gabo, Joris Laarman, Agnes Martin, and Tone Vigeland.

Material Presence features artists who have rejected traditional media and genre boundaries. In their hands, the material support—be it plaster, plastic, canvas, or stone—has an active presence. Ai Weiwei’s Water Lilies #4 uses LEGO® bricks to reinterpret Claude Monet’s most beloved series, and Sam Gilliam’s sweeping Double Merge (Carousel I and Carousel II) liberates painting from the wall. Among the other works on view are Los Carpinteros’s Podgaric Toy, a critical assessment of Cold War memorials made from LEGO® bricks; and Rachel Whiteread’s monumental Untitled (Fire Escape).