VISUAL ARTS + MUSEUMS

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), presents Beauty, Humor and Social Justice: Gifts from Joan Morgenstern, opening Sunday, May 22, 2011, in the Cameron Gallery of the Audrey Jones Beck Building. The exhibition showcases just over 50 photographs of over 1,000 images given to the museum from the preeminent collection of Houston collector and philanthropist Joan Morgenstern. Morgenstern is the founding president of the MFAH Photo Forum and chair of the MFAH subcommittee for Photography Accessions. The title of the exhibition identifies the themes that dominate Morgenstern’s collecting: beauty, humor and social justice. The exhibition primarily focuses on photographs created from the 1980s to today, while also highlighting some of the classic masters that informed Morgenstern’s early collecting. The works will be on view through August 21, 2011.

"Joan Morgenstern is an untiring champion of the field of photography and has a distinctive eye for recognizing emergent talent,” said Gwendolyn H. Goffe, MFAH interim director. “MFAH has been privileged to work with her for over 20 years and are pleased to showcase 52 of the finest photographs that she has given to the museum.”

“Joan Morgenstern is a community-minded person and works with many institutions to support the groups of people that she is dedicated to,” said Anne Wilkes Tucker, The MFAH Gus and Lyndall Wortham curator of photography. “Beauty, Humor and Social Justice illustrates the depth and breadth of her collecting and is also a testament to her generosity.”

Over the years Morgenstern has helped bring some 1,100 photographs into the MFAH collection by either acting as sole or partial funder, and has instigated an ongoing gift program. Her major gifts to the museum predominantly feature the works of early- and mid-career photographers. By committing to key artists early on in their careers, the MFAH often receives later gifts from the photographers themselves, including the recent gift of eleven pictures by renowned photojournalist Simon Norfolk. Additional contemporary photographers that Morgenstern collects in depth include Keith Carter, Vincent Cianni, Earlie Hudnall, Ray K. Metzker and Frank Yamus.

About the Exhibition - The exhibition is loosely organized around the themes central to Morgenstern’s collecting. The “Social Justice” theme runs throughout a number of the photographs, such as Israeli photographer Natan Dvir’s 2006 Amona. The image shows armed, uniformed Israeli border police on horseback, sent to destroy “illegal” homes, clashing with a mob of young Jewish settlers. A stark black-and-white photograph of a line of poplars in the snow, by Simon Norfolk, is seemingly innocent but marks the route by which millions of Armenians were forced to march to their death by Ottoman armies in 1915. And Jonothan C. Torgovnik’s 2006 Justine with her daughter Alice, Gahini, Rwanda, shows a Rwandan woman with a child she bore after being raped (just one of an estimated 20,000 children resulting from sexual crimes during the genocide).

The darkness in the exhibition is countered by humor—much of it centered on pet owners. George S. Zimbel’s Dog and Cat, Bona Fide Farm (1976) pictures a small kitten scrambling up a screen door and a much larger dog, standing against the door and looking up at its escaped prey. A whimsical photograph by Karl Biden depicts a dog with two black spots, one of which is a graphic circle floating half on the dog and half in space. And in Robert and His Watchdogs, Beford Avenue Tire Shop (1996), by Vincent Cianni, two dogs defy gravity by hanging from a man’s back.

Finally, in “Beauty,” Keith Carter’s enigmatic Fireflies (1992) is imbued with the magic of childhood and shows two young boys in a creek, leaning over a jar aglow with light from fireflies. Wonder Wheel, Brooklyn (2001), by Beth Block, is a colorful, light-filled photograph of the iconic Coney Island Ferris wheel, shot against the murky night sky and framed by light-dappled tree branches.

Pictured above:
Karl Baden, Untitled (dog with black spots), 1983, gelatin silver print, Gift of Joan Morgenstern.

Pictured below:
Richard Misrach, Desert Fire 249, 1985, chromogenic print, Gift of Joan Morgenstern in honor of Clinton T. Willour.

Julie Blackmon, Floatie, 2006, inkjet print, ed. #1/25, Gift of Joan Morgenstern in honor of Alex and Sophie Daily.