Drawing on the Past

The Menil Collection recently opened a provocative exhibit entitled Fragments of Memory, curated by Kelly Montana, Associate Curator, Menil Drawing Institute. Available to view through January, the exhibition explores how 20th- and 21st-century artists have placed pieces of personal experiences and historic events at the heart of their work.

“The exhibition brings together drawings from our collections that think about how [the past informs] present experiences,” Montana says. “It looks to the letters, the memoria, the scrapbooks, and stuff of everyday life. Artists bring these into their work to think about the past, to think about historical memory, and to imagine new possibilities and new futures.”

Part of what makes the exhibition unique is that it is drawn exclusively from works in the museum’s permanent collection.

“These are works that the Menil proudly owns, stewards, and makes available to our public,” she adds. “It’s a really interesting dialogue that’s happening between the artists in the show. There are some names that will be very familiar to our audiences—people like Cy Twombly. And then there are also rising rock stars of art today like Wardell Milan.”

Milan’s work is one of the centerpieces of the Institute’s programming surrounding the collection. He will offer an artist’s talk that spotlights how his identity as a member of the LGBTQ community has influenced his art, specifically his work titled Pulse. The event takes place Thursday, November 14, 7–8 p.m. at the Menil Drawing Institute.

Milan’s website biography provides insight into his artistic process: “Through cut-paper and collage techniques, he constructs striking human subjects with reclaimed photographic elements, contending with the medium’s visual lineage and its claims to representation. These composite, fragmented figures inhabit ambiguous landscapes of painted abstraction, navigating themselves through recontextualized historical and contemporary environments.”

The title, Pulse, is a direct reference to the deadly mass shooting at an Orlando nightclub that targeted the city’s queer and Latin American communities. The incident occurred in the early morning hours of June 12, 2016, and left 49 people dead and more than 50 wounded. It was the deadliest mass shooting in US history up to that time.

One particularly striking decision made by the artist in Pulse was to depict the nightclub’s patrons dancing, rather than the aftermath of the evening’s devastation, which is sure to spark thought and conversation during Milan’s event in Houston.

The Fragments of Memory exhibit also underscores the overarching mission of the Menil Drawing Institute.

“It’s to show how important drawing is to artists,” Montana says. “It’s to show the diversity of drawing practice and also to connect drawing and paper and the materials that artists use for us to see that they’re really different ways of looking at the world around us.”

Other artists featured in the exhibit are Houston artist James Lee Byars, Sari Dienes, Jacob El Hanani, Joe Goode, Jasper Johns, Mark Lombardi, Jim Love, Gael Stack, Walter Tandy Murch, Denyse Thomasos, Luc Tuymans, and Danh Vo.

“I hope what people take away from the exhibition is that there are so many of us who want to know more about the past, to understand it, and to see if there’s something new that we can learn from it,” says Montana. “Artists feel that way, too, and this is a diverse group of artists that are also looking at the past, looking at history, looking at their memories and trying to bring them forth in ways that are relevant to us today.”

WHAT: Fragments of Memory Exhibition
WHEN:  September 20, 2024 –January 26, 2025; Wardell Milan Artist Talk, November 14, 7 p.m.
WHERE: Menil Drawing Institute
INFO: tinyurl.com/5n8zzc3e