digital homecoming
In video conversations, new MFAH director Gary Tinterow recalls his "wild andwoolly" Houston past
Newly-appointed Museum of Fine Arts, Houston director Gary Tinterow recently introduced himself online by way of a series of video conversations posted on the museum's website.
After three decades as a distinguished curator with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tinterow has spent the past several months relocating from New York to Texas. As he settles into the directorship, the native Houstonian has taken time to film his thoughts on his new position, his childhood in Braeswood and the role of the 21st-century museum.
"The spark of what I later came to know and care about occurred right here in Houston," he tells viewers. "I'm very excited and truly satisfied to be returning home."
"So much of my life and career seems like a preparation for this moment," he tells viewers in the introductory video posted above. The Bellaire High School graduate talks about how he "grew up" in some the city's greatest arts institutions, remembering a time when he sneaked into the newly-built Rothko Chapel right before it opened.
"The spark of what I later came to know and care about occurred right here in Houston," he continues. "I'm very excited and truly satisfied to be returning home."
"I am humbled and deeply touched to begin my tenure as director and I will strive to embellish this glorious temple and help it grow to new heights."
Other videos follow, detailing his vision and ambitions for the museum as it looks ahead to a high-profile architectural project to house its contemporary art galleries. Last week, the museum announced that Steven Holl Architects had been chosen to design the new building that will be located adjacent to the Cullen Sculpture Garden.
Tinterow's filmed recollections about growing up in Houston are sure to get plenty of hits, with memories of a "wild and woolly" Bellaire High during the height of student activism in the late 1960s and early '70s. He recalls a radical school newspaper, a strong theater arts department and an influential teacher named Mrs. Glass, who taught French with a New Jersey accent.
He still remembers Dominique de Menil's trailers set up in the parking lot of Rice University and later at the University of St. Thomas — the temporary galleries that would evolve into the Renzo Piano-designed museum by the late 1980s.
"[Dominique de Menil] would put on exhibitions there in these air-conditioned trailers and they were just fundamental to me to open up a new universe of possibility. I remember a surrealist exhibition with Magritte. I remember a work on cubist papier collé and collage, an exhibition she mounted that absolutely fascinated me as a teenager."
Tinterow went on to study Picasso at Harvard's Department of Fine Arts, curating the university museum's acclaimed 1981 exhibition on the master cubist that would foreshadow his internationally-recognized work with the Metropolitan.
