Tucked away next to a parking lot, a remarkable collection of majestic sculptures by internationally famed artists is on display behind attractive stone walls in an open-air park. It's the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston's Lillie and Hugh Roy Cullen Sculpture Garden, designed and created by Isamu Noguchi, himself a world-famous sculptor, landscape architect and pioneer of modern interior design.
The Lillie and Hugh Roy Cullen Sculpture Garden first opened to the public in 1986 -- Noguchi had submitted his initial design in 1979, and refined it over the next five years. MFAH reports that, working with Houston landscape architect Johnny Steele, Noguchi himself selected the plants and trees for the garden, favoring native species when possible.
The garden covers slightly more than one acre and is carved into a series of outdoor pavilions, separated sometimes by walls, that permit semi--enclosures around some of the sculptures. The exhibition at present includes more than 25 works from the MFAH collection, as well as selected loans. The sculptures are deliberately eclectic, demonstrating a range of artistic approaches, so there is no theme, unless the theme is diversity itself.
With such a rich array to choose from, you will find your own favorites as you traverse the park, open daily from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. I will suggest some favorites of mine; one is Alexander Calder's giant red metal The Crab, so filled with dynamic energy that, viewed from the right position, it seems the work might be moving threateningly. At the moment, it's just outside MFAH's main building, guarding the entrance.
Other sculptures are subtle, such as Linda Ridgeway's The Dance, in which bronze tendrils on a wall masquerade as a grapevine.
Joseph Havel's Exhaling Pearls is made of patinated bronze, cast from a rope and two paper lanterns, one of them at the bottom and the other balanced at the top, and, as with much else in the garden, its exotic nature astonishes. It comes across as sturdy and powerful -- the alchemy of art has transformed the delicate into the strong.
Jim Love's Can Johnny Come Out and Play? is a huge bronze ball, roughly finished, 107 inches in diameter. While it's not inherently dramatic, its strength comes from the viewer imagining the size of Johnny if he is in scale with the ball.
Triangular Solid with Circular Inserts, Variation F, by Dan Graham, is a complex work with a two-way mirror glass, mirror, stainless steel and aluminum. It seems like a cube, but is instead a triangular edifice approximately 6.5 feet in diameter. It has round glass panels on two sides, so that the viewer can see through to the wall beyond, and the third side has a round mirror. It is modernistic, perhaps hinting at a time machine, unexpected in itself and even more so ensconced in a garden. I am still puzzling it out, but remain intrigued.
