0.1 Introduction  (Page 2/5)

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston further raised its national profile under the leadership of James Johnson Sweeney, who became Museum director in 1961. In the MFAH 1965-66 Annual Report, Sweeney wrote, “A museum’s first responsibility is to bring art works of quality to its community and to familiarize the public with works of art of quality from which a lack of familiarity might otherwise cut it off. Its second responsibility is to accumulate a collection of works of art on which it can draw so as to be able to maintain these aims constantly and to spread by loans its influence and these services to sister communities.” Under his leadership, the museum expanded its collection of contemporary works and Mesoamerican pieces, and was continuously recognized for provocative and exhilarating installations. Sweeney also commissioned Mies van der Rohe to design an addition, the Brown Pavilion, which would wrap around a portion of Cullinan Hall.

The Museum’s next director, Philippe de Montebello, weary of losing major art pieces to better known and better endowed collections around the country, delivered a challenge to Houston in 1973. “This year,” he wrote in the Museum’s Bulletin, “we had to watch many a masterpiece escape our grasp and enter collections more privileged than our own—more privileged because of the substantially higher funds available for their perpetual growth….[W]e fervently hope that the Capital Campaign Fund Drive, initiated more than a year ago, will permit us to regain our earlier momentum.” The city met his challenge with an unprecedented outpouring of support: a $15 million fund raised for capital expenditures, overall operations, and acquisitions.

William C. Agee succeeded de Montebello as Museum director in 1974, and under his leadership the Museum continued to acquire 20th-century paintings and sculpture. Agee commenced a focused acquisition of photography by appointing Anne Wilkes Tucker as photography curator in 1976. That same year, he announced the first in a series of donations from the Dayton-Hudson Foundation, on behalf of Target Stores, Inc., to begin the Target Collection of American Photography.

Recognized during these years as a major arts venue, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston has since grown into a world-renowned institution. Under Peter C. Marzio, who became Museum director in 1982 and is now the longest-serving director in its history, the Museum has doubled its exhibition space, more than doubled the size of its permanent collection, and its endowment has enjoyed extraordinary growth. Today, the MFAH is famed for its provocative exhibitions, significant educational outreach, expansive growth, and comprehensive and growing collections.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston was not the only arts venue blossoming during those early years. Houston Colored Junior College, founded in 1927, renamed the Houston College for Negroes in 1935, and designated Texas State University for Negroes in 1947, brought John Biggers to Houston in 1949 to build an art department—one of four divisions in the university’s fine arts program. Working with very limited resources and only one full-time art instructor (Joseph L. Mack) in a city that was still segregated, Biggers engendered Houston’s rich African American art tradition, both in his own work and in his new department. In 1950, one of his pieces was awarded the purchase prize in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston local competition, but the Museum’s restrictions on black attendance precluded Biggers from entering and claiming his prize on the day the awards were made—an injustice righted a few months later by Museum director James Chillman.