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    Road to Peace

    Monumental Menil exhibit looks at the hard and dangerous road to peace for nonviolence advocates

    Tarra Gaines
    Oct 6, 2014 | 1:13 pm

    Violence is sexy, at least that’s how it’s often depicted in pop culture and even art. Nonviolence, though, that’s a bit tougher to picture.

    Could nonviolence take the form of a pair of sandals, glasses, a bowl and book, the last possessions of one India man on Jan 30, 1948? Is it found in the image of an older man looking again through the bars of a cell that had imprisoned him for almost two decades? Perhaps it’s a small figure in white and black standing in the path of four tanks.

    “What does peace look like?” is the question the Menil Collection asks in its monumental exhibition organized by Josef Helfenstein.

    “What does peace look like?” is the question the Menil Collection asks in its monumental exhibition Experiments with Truth: Gandhi and Images of Nonviolence, organized by Menil director Josef Helfenstein. These photographs of Gandhi’s last possession, Nelson Mandela’s revisit to Robben Island and Tank Man of Tiananmen Square are some of the answers to this question.

    In an early walk through the exhibition before it opened on Oct 2, Gandhi’s birthday, Helfenstein explained the problem with trying to depict nonviolence.

    “It’s so much more sexy to document violence,” Helfenstein admitted. “That’s what TV is interested in or the media. It’s just the way we are. It’s quite complicated to visualize nonviolence.”

    Beyond Gandhi

    While it might be easy to summarize the exhibition as the Gandhi show, and the life and work of Gandhi are its inspiration, the exhibition sets out to chronicle those complicated ways we have imagined and on rare occasioned, after much struggle have achieved peace.

    “Even if they attack you, even if they kill you, you don’t fight back. It’s a very noble attitude, and in a way it’s a very spiritual thing too. It’s kind of scary to do.”

    Once inside the first gallery the exhibition begins with photographs of Gandhi’s last days taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson. On other walls, we find portraits of those advocates for justice and peace who came before, like Henry David Thoreau, Sojourner Truth and Leo Tolstoy.

    Going deeper into the exhibition, viewers move back and forth through time, place, art and artifact, to explore the struggle against violence, spotting along the journey Rembrandt’s Christ Teaching, a 8th century Folio from a Qur’an, Ai Weiwei’s arrangement of 10 Buddha feet from sculptures of the Northern Wei period and Dan Flavin’s untitled fluorescent sculpture dedicated to the students killed at Kent State and Jackson State University.

    The exhibition illustrates the path to peace is a hard, dangerous road.

    “There’s nothing easy about nonviolence. Many people think that nonviolence is sitting back and being afraid and not doing anything, but of course it’s exactly the opposite, said Helfenstein and went on to describe the some of the core beliefs of many nonviolent action campaigns: “Even if they attack you, even if they kill you, you don’t fight back. It’s a very noble attitude, and in a way it’s a very spiritual thing too. It’s kind of scary to do.”

    The dialogue

    Some of these images and works are well known, others rare, but by showing them together Helfenstein wishes to create a dialog between the pieces and viewer, which seems quite appropriate since many of these artists, advocates and philosophers were influenced by each other. Perhaps this is most crystallized in the photo, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the SCLC Office, where King stands in front of a portrait of Gandhi.

    Some of these images and works are well known, others rare, but by showing them together Helfenstein wishes to create a dialog between the pieces and viewer.

    The works are powerful by themselves, but their juxtaposition with each other is what halted me in my walk, and forced me to pause and see. The arrangement of works within each gallery or on a single wall are particularly striking. For example, Warhol’s Little Race Riot is placed besides Theaster Gates’s recent work, Hose for Fire and Other Tragic Encounters, created from decommissioned fire hoses.

    Art and artifact even seem to call to each other from across galleries and perhaps time. My favorite moment of this call and response came when I wandered around a wooden sculpture of Saint Martin and the Beggar (ca. 1500-10) and then looked back into the previous gallery to find when viewing it from that exact angle it almost appeared that both Saint Martin and the beggar were giving comfort to the blue figures of Yves Klein’s Hiroshima.

    “That is, of course, an attempt to create a kind of dialogue between the pieces without having to explain them,” Helfenstein told me when I mentioned this angle of sight and insight I had found. “The idea would be to not do too much pedagogy but to allow this kind of discovery. The whole relationship between the galleries and between these different types of material is very important. . .the hope is that there is a kind of associated dialogue.”

    The exhibition begins and end in the Menil’s West Gallery, but the spirit of the show moves out throughout the collection and, it is Helfenstein’s hope, into our city.

    Running simultaneously and next to Experiments with Truth is Amar Kanwar’s mixed media installation The Sovereign Forest. The east wing of the collection will showcase a concurrent exhibition the Menil is calling “Modern and Contemporary Experiments with Truth” that includes South Korean born, New York based artist Kimsooja’s video installation A Needle Woman; animated films by William Kentridge; and a very rare treat, a gallery of Mark Rothko alternate panels painted for the Rothko Chapel but not used in the final display.

    The staff of the Menil have also reached out to other institutions and organizations in Houston to present Gandhi's Legacy: Houston Perspectives, four months of programs, exhibitions, films and lectures. Rice, UH, the MFAH, the Asia Society and many more will be pondering the question “What does peace look like?” and they’ll all be looking for individual Houstonians to voice their own answers.

    ------------------

    Experiments with Truth: Gandhi and Images of Nonviolence runs through Feb. 1, 2015.

    Jeff Widener, Tank Man (Tiananmen Square, Beijing), June 5, 1989.

    Tarra Gaines The Menil Gandhi exhibition October 2014 Tank_Man_Jeff_Widener
      
    Photo by © Jeff Widener AP
    Jeff Widener, Tank Man (Tiananmen Square, Beijing), June 5, 1989.
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    A Roman Holiday (Season)

    All roads lead to Houston museum's blockbuster exhibit of Imperial Rome

    Tarra Gaines
    Jun 11, 2025 | 3:15 pm
    ​The Museum of Fine Arts Houston presents "Art and Life in Imperial Rome: Trajan and His Times"
    Photo courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
    The Museum of Fine Arts Houston presents "Art and Life in Imperial Rome: Trajan and His Times" ("Statue of Trajan" Minturno, Italy, 2nd century, marble, National Archaeological Museum, Naples)

    Houston's holiday season will have a distinctly Roman feeling this year, as the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston is bringing the glory of the Gladiator era to Texas. On November 2, 2025 through January 25, 2026 the MFAH presents the monumental new exhibition “Art and Life in Imperial Rome: Trajan and His Times.”

    Featuring 160 objects of antiquity, including marble sculptures, frescoes, mosaics, delicate glass vessels, and exquisite bronze artifacts, the exhibition will transport visitors back in time to the Roman Empire during a flowering of art and architecture. The MFAH partnered with the Saint Louis Art Museum to organize the exhibition, which will showcase many pieces that have never been on view in the U.S.

    While Emperor Trajan might not be the most famous — or in some cases, most infamous — of the Roman emperors, he ruled between 98 and 117 C.E. during the empire’s height and was the second of the so-called “Five Good Emperors” of the Nerva-Antonine dynasty. He was also the first emperor born outside of present-day Italy, in what is now Andalusia, Spain. During his reign, he granted citizenship and rights to some peoples from conquered lands. The exhibition will explore how this time period expanded what it meant to be a Roman and how art reflected Rome’s power and promoted the empire’s values and ideals.

    \u200bThe Museum of Fine Arts Houston presents "Art and Life in Imperial Rome: Trajan and His Times"
      

    Photo courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

    The Museum of Fine Arts Houston presents "Art and Life in Imperial Rome: Trajan and His Times" ("Statue of Trajan" Minturno, Italy, 2nd century, marble, National Archaeological Museum, Naples)

    From statues of prominent men and women of the era, including Trajan, to vivid frescoes and furnishing from the villas of Pompeii, the objects in the exhibition will tell fascinating cultural and political stories of life in imperial Rome. To add context to the artworks and objects of antiquity, the MFAH will recreate a section of Trajan’s Column, which was a towering pillar with a spiraling narrative frieze, one of the few monumental sculptures to have survived the fall of Rome.

    “Art and Life in Imperial Rome: Trajan and His Times” brings such a wealth of objects to Houston thanks to unprecedented loans from the renowned antiquities collections of Italian museums including Museo Nazionale Romano, the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, the Parco Archeologico di Ostia, and the Musei Vaticani. It would would likely take months of travel across Italy to see this much art.

    “This is truly a rare opportunity for U.S. audiences to experience spectacular objects from this glorious era of the Roman Empire,” said Gary Tinterow, director and Margaret Alkek Williams chair of the MFAH, in a statement. “We are enormously grateful to our colleagues in Rome, Naples, and Vatican City for lending these treasures to us and broadening the appreciation of Italy’s cultural heritage.”

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