Diverse Museum of Fine Arts exhibitions offer a world view without leaving Houston

When the editors at CultureMap asked me to write about "The State of the Arts” in Houston, I settled on something I think about all the time: How the Museum of Fine Arts is an expression of the richness and vitality of the city, and how everything we do is underscored by a mission to fulfill the credo chiseled over its doors in 1924, “Erected by the people, for the use of the people.”

I took a look at our upcoming plans for the season, and I see how much of what we have planned relates organically to the MFAH’s permanent collection, and relates to how the museum, the city and its citizens have embraced the world’s cultures over the last hundred years.

The most important African art exhibition to appear in the United States since the 1970s opens on Sept. 19: Dynasty and Divinity: Ife Art in Ancient Nigeria, just in time for visitors to experience the museum’s thoroughly reinstalled galleries for African art and the unique perspective Houston’s collections can provide for this critically acclaimed, internationally traveling exhibition.

This is preceded a week earlier by the first major German Impressionist landscape painting exhibition ever held in America. I believe this exhibition will shed light on an entirely new chapter of art for American audiences.

It sets the stage for a stellar exhibition of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces from the collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, which once again brings to Houston one of the world’s great collections, like the Pushkin’s, MoMA’s and the Met’s before it. (The exhibit opens Feb. 20, 2011.)

In February, the long-awaited retrospective of one of Latin America’s greatest artists of all time, Carlos Cruz-Diez: Color in Space, the first ever organized, will fill the Brown Pavilion.

Finally, next summer, Titian and the Golden Age of Venetian Painting comes to Houston from the National Gallery of Scotland, and features two of Titian’s greatest works – his incomparable “Diana” paintings – which have never been shown in the U.S.

With our organizing partners in these endeavors among the greatest museums in the world -- the National Gallery of Art, Washington; The British Museum, London; the Louvre, Paris; the National Galleries of Scotland; the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud, Cologne, and the Albertina, Vienna – Houston once again places itself at the central crossroads for international culture.

And for the city and beyond, the educational opportunities have never been greater. Not only Houston-area public K-12 schools and universities but great institutions as far as Austin and College Station will use the museum, its exhibitions and its programs on class trips, tours and in special assignments right in their classrooms.

All of this is especially on the minds of those of us at the MFAH as we start to map out a third space for the museum and its collections. While the project will be primarily oriented toward modern and contemporary art, we’re taking on a much broader sweep, thinking of new ways not only to present these works to the public, but to capture the place of art created in recent decades and even the last few years within the history of the world and across the vast expanse contemporary cultures.