Visitors are invited to enjoy a number of works in the Menil’s parks and green spaces throughout the neighborhood.
Houston artist Jim Love (1927-2005) made a series of sculpture in varying sizes in the shape of a toy jack. The largest, ten-foot version greets visitors to the Menil as they approach the museum from the main parking lot. The exuberant red surface of the work reinforces the playful nature of the subject matter.
Reaching over twenty-five feet into the air and nearly thirty-two feet across, the Menil’s Bygones has been installed in a park adjacent to the museum since its opening in 1987. Constructed of two steel girders and a rectangular steel plate, Bygones exemplifies the I-beam construction for which the artist became known. The diagonals of the three elements lend an energetic dynamism to the work, tempered by the stabilizing triangle formed at its base. Artist Mark di Suvero (b. 1933) chose to use weathered steel, still bearing the stamps and scars of its manufacturing. As a material, it gradually develops a protective patina when exposed to the outdoor climate’s wet and dry cycles. Dynamic yet poised, monumental in scale yet elegant in proportion, Bygones embodies di Suvero’s command of materials, engineering, and geometry. As Dominique de Menil herself noted in a letter of 1984, “Mark di Suvero’s Bygones is one of the great sculptures of its time.“
Michael Heizer, Isolated Mass/Circumflex (#2), Dissipate, Rift, 1968/1978; and Charmstone, 1991
A pioneer of Land Art, Michael Heizer (b. 1944) began creating immense earthworks in the 1960s. In 1968, for Nine Nevada Depressions, the artist dug nine large scale trenches into a dry Nevada lake bed, which were then left to erode away. Several of these designs were later re-created in weathering steel; Dissipate, Isolated Mass/Circumflex (#2), and Rift are three of the resulting works. Isolated Mass/Circumflex (#2) was sited and installed by the artist on the Menil Collection’s front lawn just before the museum’s opening in 1987. Heizer interrupted one of its sections with the central walkway in order to reinforce its identity as sculpture rather than a linear design element framed by the surrounding sidewalks. Dissipate is based on the chance composition of dropped matches and Rift consists of a line that sharply turns along its course. The two works are located in a gravel courtyard designed by the artist east of the Menil Drawing Institute.
Max Neuhaus, Sound Figure, 2007
At the Menil’s main building entrance, visitors may become aware of a quiet yet distinct sound occupying the walkway about twenty feet in front of the door. This "sound shape” is a spatially contained, aural field by Max Neuhaus (1939-2009) called Sound Figure. Following a career as a concert percussionist, Neuhaus began to use sound as a continuous material to engage the perception of physical space. Employing specialized software, Neuhaus could generate a range of sonorities, which he then chose from, combined, and blended in a way similar to a painter mixing colors on a palette. This work was commissioned by the Menil in 2006 for the space.
Ellsworth Kelly, Menil Curve, 2015
Ellsworth Kelly’s Menil Curve, one of the artist’s last public sculptures, is located at the Menil Drawing Institute entrance. The juxtaposition of the glossy white sculpture and the building’s exterior courtyard wall behind it creates the effect of a white-on-white relief. The subtle interplay between the two shades of white resonates with a long-standing line of inquiry in Kelly’s practice. Over several decades, the artist explored the varied effects of folded white paper and white-on-white collages.
