The Menil Collection in Houston will reopen its Fresco Building in late 2027, converting the space into a site for site-specific commissions. The first artist to take up the challenge will be New York–based Teresita Fernández.
Closed since 2018 and reopening as part of the institution’s 40th anniversary celebrations, the Fresco Building will be the new home to “semi-permanent, site-specific commissions” at the Menil, which each commission scheduled to be installed for around five years.
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Fernández is known for her expansive multidisciplinary practice that “unravels the intimacies between matter, human beings, and locations, poetically questioning ideas about land and landscape” and aims to rethink “what constitutes landscapes from the subterranean to the cosmic,” according to a press release. Her work typically engages with various underknown histories of the Caribbean and the Indigenous Americas.
She has also made a number of large-scale commissions for institutions like the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Pérez Art Museum Miami, and the Benesse Art Site, as well as the Dallas Cowboy Stadium and the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle.
“Creating an immersive, site-specific installation for this building is especially meaningful to me because of the Menil’s deep commitment to artists and the transformational power that contemplative art experiences can offer,” Fernández said in a statement. “For the last thirty years my practice has questioned how we construct notions of landscape and place; this project gives me a unique opportunity, on a monumental scale, to continue to unravel the intimacies between human beings and matter as well as the more numinous landscapes we carry within.”
The commission came about when Fernández came to the Menil last year for another site-specific commission, for the exhibition “What drawing can be: four responses.” Menil director Rebecca Rabinow invited Fernández to visit the Fresco Building as it was undergoing renovations. Per a release, Fernández “had an immediate sense of the possibilities for the refreshed space, connecting with the materiality, the architectural design of the structure, and the history of the building and its neighborhood as sources of inspiration.”
The Fresco Building takes its name from its history of having hosted two 13th-century Byzantine frescoes for 15 years, from 1997 to 2012. On an extended loan from the Holy Archbishopric of Cyprus, the frescoes were stewarded by Byzantine Fresco Foundation. Once the frescoes left Houston, the building was deconsecrated from a chapel and the Byzantine Fresco Foundation transferred ownership of the building to the Menil Collection.
“The Menil Collection has programmed its 40th anniversary year with strong exhibitions that explore the museum’s past, present and future,” Rabinow said in a statement. “As one of the highlights, Teresita Fernández’s extraordinary installation at the Fresco Building will join the Menil’s other single-artist buildings, the Cy Twombly Gallery and the Dan Flavin Installation at Richmond Hall. In recognition of the Fresco Building’s origins, her ambitious, site-specific artwork will address themes of spirituality and the human condition.”
