Art and Activism:
Projects of John and Dominique de Menil
Book Release
Wednesday, November 3, 7PM
Location: The Menil Collection, 1515 Sul Ross
FREE ADMISSION

In collaboration with The Menil Collection, Aurora Picture Show will present still and moving images inspired by the book release of "Art and Activism: Projects of John and Dominique de Menil". Edited by Josef Helfenstein and Laureen Schipsi, the book is first to examine the Houston philanthropists' contributions to art, architecture, film, and the civil and human rights movements.

The lavishly illustrated Art and Activism: Projects of John and Dominique de Menil is the first book to examine the couple's wide-ranging interests over half a century -- from art and architecture to philanthropy and politics. The de Menils established university art and media-studies departments; gave early architectural commissions to Philip Johnson and Renzo Piano; sponsored individual scholarships and funded civil-rights campaigns; built an ecumenical chapel with the painter Mark Rothko; presented one of the nation's first exhibitions of racially integrated contemporary artists; took the Surrealist master René Magritte to a rodeo; and introduced Andy Warhol to an awed Houston. All the while they were building the art collection that would one day be housed in the world-renowned Houston museum that bears the family name -- the Menil Collection.

Art and Activism: Projects of John and Dominique de Menil is a book of many voices -- artists, activists, students, scholars, and family. Illustrated throughout with works of art from the Menil Collection and rarely seen archival photographs, the large-format book also includes private correspondence and reminiscences from artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, Man Ray, Barnett Newman, Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Rothko, and Niki de Saint Phalle.