HOUSTON, TX.- The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston launches the fifth year of modern and contemporary art installations in the Nancy and Rich Kinder Building with a series of exhibitions showcasing the collections of modern and contemporary art, photography and design, while exploring themes of energy, car culture and materiality and celebrating a promised gift of work by a pioneering jewelry artist.

Energy will examine this phenomenon as a natural and metaphysical resource through photography, prints, drawings, paintings, sculptures, rare books, craft and design across three thematic sections. Photographs of oil refineries and electrical sites, and paintings by John Alexander and Rackstraw Downes, document and reinforce the romance of the Texas oil landscape; lighting devices by Ingo Maurer and Rody Graumans honor the lightbulb, all in a reinterpretation of form and challenge to the meaning of energy and industry. Teresita Fernandez’s Caribbean Cosmos (2022) and Richard Misrach’s Pink Lightning, Salton Sea (1985) illuminate the beauty and majesty of nature’s force, while David Regan’s darkly mottled porcelain sculpture, Hurricane Katrina Carousel (2006), memorializes its destructive power. Peter Shelton’s Black Hole (2002), with its commanding form, invites us to imagine the physicality of space and challenges the viewer to connect aesthetics with ideas about the wonder of energy’s invisible power. Opening August 16, 2025

Behind the Wheel explores the psychological place of the car in contemporary life. Millions of miles of roads criss-crossing the nation, shopping centers, road-side cafes, motels, drive-in movies and gas stations are all physical manifestations of our car centered culture. Artists, in turn, have embraced the visual elements of car culture utilizing the form and materials of cars and highways to represent varying degrees of leisure, belonging, independence and power. From Ishimoto Yasuhiro’s homage to the childhood and the station wagon, part of his iconic 1950s series capturing Chicago street life, to Chakaia Booker’s Mutual Concerns (2004), a signature piece by the artist, who tears apart rubber tires to reassemble and renew them as lyrical abstractions, the exhibition evokes car culture as an American touchstone. Opens August 16, 2025

Material Presence will feature artists from the United States, Latin America, Europe, and Asia who have rejected traditional media and genre boundaries. In their hands, the material support— be it plaster, plastic, canvas, or rice paper—has an active presence, transcending formalism to engage the viewer in the processes of creation and the phenomenology of perception, as well as enlarging the meaning of the work. Anchoring the first installment of this collection rotation are several works on view in Houston for the first time: Ai Weiwei’s Water Lilies #4, which uses LEGO® bricks to reinterpret Claude Monet’s most beloved series; Sam Gilliam’s sweeping Double Merge (Carousel I and Carousel II)(1968), which liberates painting from the wall; and James Turrell’s mural-scaled General Site Plan, Roden Crater (1986), an early rendering of the artist’s life-long project to expand our understanding of the universe around us. Also on view will be two of Carlos Cruz-Diez’s signature Physichromies (1974 and 2014), Los Carpinteros’s critical assessment of Cold War memorials made from LEGO® bricks, and Rachel Whiteread’s monumental Untitled (Fire Escape) (2002), among other works. Opening September 6, 2025

The Jewelry of Dorothea Prühl presents 26 necklaces and brooches created since the mid-1970s by the renowned German jewelry artist Dorothea Prühl, who is recognized worldwide for her sculptural forms rendered in wood and metal. Trained in the traditions of the Bauhaus, for the past 50 years Prühl has relied on nature for inspiration – its flora, fauna and animalia. Painstakingly formed or carved, the individual elements in Prühl’s necklaces come alive in expressive compositions. Their seemingly simple gestures – a butterfly’s wings or a bundle of flowers – belie a complexity and craftsmanship that is unmatched in contemporary practice. Comprised of an extraordinary promised gift to the MFAH by the Rotasa Foundation Trust, which has granted the museum the largest single holding of Prühl’s jewelry in the world, this is the first exhibition in the United States dedicated to the artist. Opening September 6, 2025