LOCAL Houston | The City Guide October 2017 | Page 36

MUSEUM DISTRICT
HIGHLIGHTS
HOUSTON CENTER FOR PHOTOGRAPHY
In Passing: Genevieve Gaignard THE MENIL COLLECTION
Thirty Works for Thirty Years MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, HOUSTON
David Levinthal: Photographs 1972–2016
1441 West Alabama | 713.529.4755 | www.hcponline.org 1533 Sul Ross | 713.525.9400 | www.menil.org 1001 Bissonnet | 713.639.7300 | www.mfah.org
HCP is pleased to present In Passing, a solo
exhibition of work by Los Angeles-based artist
Genevieve Gaignard, marking the artist’s
first solo exhibition outside California. This
exhibition brings together several bodies of
work made between 2015 and the present,
mapping the artist’s ever-evolving performance
of identity through large-format self-portraits
and vernacular installations. Through an array
of campy stereotypes that range from a
suspicious housewife peering out a window
to a Divine-esque drag queen, Gaignard
interrogates her own intersectional identity as
a biracial woman as well as the often murky,
difficult terrain of race, class and gender in
contemporary culture. At the heart of the museum’s permanent col-
lection are the 10,000 art works and objects
that the de Menils acquired beginning in the
1940s. Since the museum opened in 1987,
the collection has nearly doubled in size. To
pay tribute to the museum’s first 30 years, cura-
tors selected 30 works of art to tell a unique
story about the museum’s history by construct-
ing a narrative that walks visitors through the
past 30 years. The works from the permanent
collection represent the museum’s history, the
range and depth of its collection, and the
close relationships that the de Menils cultivated
with artists over many years New York-based photographer David Levinthal
uses staged photographs of toys and other
everyday objects to bring viewers face-to-
face with themes central to American history,
identity and consciousness. David Levinthal:
Photographs 1972–2016 provides a rich
overview of the artist’s work. Through the
iconography of mass-produced toys, dolls and
figurines, Levinthal’s photographs have probed
the myth of the American West, World War
II and the Holocaust, romantic and sexual
desire, racial stereotyping, the heroism of sport
and the futuristic fantasy of space exploration.
The images range from intimately scaled
prints, to large 20-by-24-inch Polaroids, to
monumental inkjet prints.
Through October 22.
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L O C A L
| 10 . 2017
Through January 28, 2018.
Through February 19, 2018.