An international crowd of 100 museum trustees, exhibition funders, artists, and other art-world guests gathered in the Caroline Wiess Law Building at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston for a preview of the new exhibit, "HOME—So Different, So Appealing."
The evening began with a cocktail reception and a viewing of the exhibition, featuring 12 galleries made up of 100 works created by 39 U.S. Latino and Latin American artists, from the late 1950s to the present, who use the universal concept of “home” to view socioeconomic and political changes in the Americas over the past seven decades.
Several of the works, such as Los Angeles artist Carmen Agote’s “Household Mutations — Part B,” are built-to-scale. For the striking 720 square-foot piece, Agote removed the carpet from her childhood home as an expression of space and personal memory.
Of “HOME—So Different, So Appealing,” which first opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, MFAH Director Gary Tinterow told attendees during a buffet dinner, “It’s one of the most moving exhibitions that I saw in Los Angeles. I don’t think anyone can see this exhibition and think the same once you leave … it forces us to reconsider our own identity, our relationships to our neighbors, to reconsider what it is to be an American. It’s a tremendously provocative exhibition.”
City Kitchen Catering catered the dinner, which featured grilled beef tenderloin, coriander cured salmon with cucumber, radishes, green chile, a burrata bowl station, and sweets like lemon coconut bars with raspberries.
“HOME — So Different, So Appealing” will be on display through January 21, 2018.
Art lovers in the crowd included Sofia Adrogue, Leslie and Brad Bucher, Mary Cullen, Olive McCollum Jenney, Manolo Sánchez, Joanna and Rusty Wortham, Gail and Louis Adler, Mike Loya, Maria Ines Sicardi, Allison Ayers, Jailyn Marcel, Carlos Bacino, and Mark Troth.
Visiting artists and curators Chon Noriega, Pilar Thompkins Rivas, Carmen Argote, Johanna Calle, Gabriel de la Mora, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Juliana Laffitte, Miguel Angel Rojas,and Manuel Mendanha of Grupo Mondongo also celebrated the exhibition.
Gabriela Conde, Michele Leal, Marisol Valero.
