SEPTEMBER:

Nancy and Rich Kinder Building Reinstallations: Three shows curated from the MFAH modern and contemporary collections comprise this exhibition series for the third-floor galleries in the Kinder Building, which opened in November 2020.

Contested Landscapes, September 2, 2023 – September 8, 2023, brings together a selection of contemporary artworks that reexamine the traditional genre of landscape through an ecological lens. By using diverse materials and innovative techniques, the featured artists, including Teresita Fernández, Richard Long, Radcliffe Bailey, Johanna Calle, Edward Burtynsky, Kent Dorn, Harry Geffert, Soledad Salamé, Jennifer Trask, Zana Briski, Studio DRIFT, and Dawoud Bey, reshape representations of geography, topography, and the environment to critically examine humans’ interaction with the natural world. In their works, landscapes become contested sites of power, acting as indices of larger cultural concerns, movements, and residual traumas, specifically as issues such as climate change and environmental justice stem from the social, political, and economic motivations of establishing control over geographic territories.

Hidden Histories, September 2, 2023 – September 27, 2025, explores the notion of anti- monuments through the work of several generations of artists from Europe, the United States, Asia, Africa, and Latin America who use innovative artistic practices memorialize aspects of the lives of ordinary citizens or places that have been ignored, sidelined, or deliberately obscured by official accounts. Unlike traditional monuments, they do not rely on fixed narratives, celebratory gestures, or grandiose materials. Instead, they employ a variety of unconventional means and strategies aimed at encouraging viewers to think critically about the past and its relevance for the present and future. Featured artists include Allora & Calzadilla, Michael Armitage, Paul Briggs, Jamal Cyrus, Gilbert and George, Zhang Huan, Tom Huck, Kahlil Joseph, Anselm Kiefer, Julie Mehretu, Camilo Ontiveros, Vincent Valdez and Adriana Corral, Kukuli Velarde, and Marie Watt.

Love Languages, September 2, 2023 – July 27, 2025, considers how artmaking itself is a type of love language, exploring conceptual concerns and narratives beyond reductive perspectives that center eros as the ultimate form of attachment. Works by artists including Dawoud Bey, Francesco Clemente, Nicole Eisenman, Louis Fratino, Ron Nagle, Anna Park, Joyce J. Scott, and Billie Zangewa are brought together to engage the question, "How do we prioritize tenderness against debilitating social conditions?"

OCTOBER

Robert Frank and Todd Webb: Across America, 1955 October 8, 2023 – January 7, 2024

In 1955, two photographers were awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, both for U.S. survey projects. One was Robert Frank, whose cross-country trip by car would result in the celebrated book The Americans. The second was Todd Webb, who at the age of 49, was awarded the grant to walk across the United States in order to depict “vanishing Americana, and the way of life that is taking its place.” Though neither had knowledge of the other during the application process, both men secured a recommendation from famed photographer Walker Evans, and both completed their cross-country surveys, though in radically different ways. While Frank’s resulting work became a landmark text in the history of photography, Webb’s project remains almost entirely unknown. For the first time, this exhibition brings together both 1955 projects. This exhibition is organized by the MFAH, where it will debut before traveling to the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, and the Brandywine Museum of Art, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.

Rembrandt to Van Gogh: Masterpieces from the Armand Hammer Collection

October 15, 2023 – January 21, 2024

Nearly 50 paintings and works on paper from the collection of the Armand Hammer Museum in Los Angeles will tour to the MFAH. The Armand Hammer Collection encompasses the major movements of 19th-century French art, along with exceptional 17th- and 18th-century European and 19th-century American painting, as well as focused holdings of the work of Honoré Daumier. Presented in Houston will be significant examples of Realism, Orientalism, the Barbizon School, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Pointillism and Symbolism by artists including Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, Gustave Moreau, Camille Pissarro and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. In addition, the selection from the Hammer will include singular portraits by Rembrandt, Peter Paul Rubens, Titian, and Thomas Eakins, and a selection of Daumier paintings. The MFAH is the only venue for this exhibition.

NOVEMBER

Kehinde Wiley: An Archaeology of Silence

November 19, 2023 – June 19, 2024

Inaugurated at the 59th Venice Biennale, in 2022, Kehinde Wiley: An Archaeology of Silence, now on view at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, will tour to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. For this new body of work, Wiley sheds light on systemic violence enacted against Black subjects using the language of the fallen hero while simultaneously critiquing the concept of martyrdom and the spectacularization of Black death. The exhibition features more than 20 works, including monumental paintings and sculptures that expand upon his series DOWN (2008). Initially inspired by Holbein’s painting The Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521), as well as historical paintings and sculptures of fallen warriors and figures in states of repose, in An Archaeology of Silence Wiley creates an unsettling series of prone Black figures, which re-conceptualizes classical pictorial forms to create a contemporary version of monumental portraiture. This exhibition and the U.S. tour are organized by the Fine Arts Museums, San Francisco.

DECEMBER

The Albert and Ethel Herzstein Gallery for Judaica December 3, 2023 - ongoing

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston will open a new gallery for the presentation of Judaica on December 3, 2023. The new space, which has been endowed by the Albert and Ethel Herzstein Foundation, allows for a permanent presence at the MFAH for the cultural and artistic history of Judaism. About two dozen objects will be displayed in the inaugural installation of the Albert and Ethel Herzstein Gallery, including recent acquisitions that have established the foundation for this new collecting initiative.