VISUAL ARTS + MUSEUMS

The Menil Collection and Aurora Picture Show present a Publication Party and Booksigning for the new book Art & Activism: Projects of John and Dominique de Menil.  Wednesday, November 3, 2010, 7:00 - 8:00 p.m.

In collaboration with The Menil Collection, Aurora Picture Show will present still and moving images inspired by the book release of "Art and Activism: Projects of John and Dominique de Menil". Edited by Josef Helfenstein and Laureen Schipsi, the book is first to examine the Houston philanthropists' contributions to art, architecture, film, and the civil and human rights movements.

The lavishly illustrated Art and Activism: Projects of John and Dominique de Menil is the first book to examine the couple's wide-ranging interests over half a century -- from art and architecture to philanthropy and politics. The de Menils established university art and media-studies departments; gave early architectural commissions to Philip Johnson and Renzo Piano; sponsored individual scholarships and funded civil-rights campaigns; built an ecumenical chapel with the painter Mark Rothko; presented one of the nation's first exhibitions of racially integrated contemporary artists; took the Surrealist master René Magritte to a rodeo; and introduced Andy Warhol to an awed Houston. All the while they were building the art collection that would one day be housed in the world-renowned Houston museum that bears the family name -- the Menil Collection.

Art and Activism: Projects of John and Dominique de Menil is a book of many voices -- artists, activists, students, scholars, and family. Illustrated throughout with works of art from the Menil Collection and rarely seen archival photographs, the large-format book also includes private correspondence and reminiscences from artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, Man Ray, Barnett Newman, Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Rothko, and Niki de Saint Phalle.

The 22 essays gathered here show that when the de Menils were building their collection of art, they were also making significant contributions to architecture and film, to education, and to civil and human rights on a local and international level. The public is invited to the Menil collection to help celebrate the publication of Art and Activism.

Among scheduled events: brief readings from the essays; a filmed conversation with John and Dominique de Menil about the origin of the Rothko Chapel; a show of images from the book (with Henri Cartier-Bresson, Adelaide de Menil, and Eve Arnold among the photographers.)

Copies of Art and Activism will be available for purchase and for signing by those who contributed essays.