Menil Collection

No, Alexa, my girlfriend, now fiance, we were very excited.

We did it at the Menil, another great art center to Houston.

We love that area.

She said yes, and we are excited.

I did one of St. Stephen not terribly long ago, and it's based on this 14th century icon.

It's down in Houston, if you ever go down to the Menil Collection.

He's just so cute.

He looks like he comes out of the Beatles or something.

This week, Jitish Kallat.

The Menil Drawing Institute in Houston is presenting Wall Drawing Series: Jitish Kallat through August 8th, 2027.

For the exhibition, Kallat has produced a site-specific wall drawing that grows out of his years-long engagement with Project A119, a partly declassified 1958 US Air Force plan to detonate a nuclear bomb on the moon.

The drawing Kallat has made for the MDI, Wall Drawing Redux A119, presents enlarged images derived from Kallat's 2025 accordion of drawings, Project A119: Early Intuitions, in which watercolors evoke an unrealized Cold War story of ambition, secrecy, and the exporting of terrestrial violence to the moon.

And I, for a while lived with, you know, multiple images of all these moons until at some point I felt that beyond a simple autobiographical impulse, there was something more happening in the work and I want to find out.

So the only way was to make epilogue, you know, something that one can actually move through, you know.

That brings us to the wall drawing you're making at the Menil, which is one of a group of recent works over the last couple years that considers the United States Air Force's ludicrous, ludicrous doesn't really begin to cover it, does it? But it's, it's, it's a, a 1958 project known as Project A119, a project, and I'm, again, I emphasize I'm not making this up, which proposed to detonate a nuclear bomb on the surface of the moon.

Project A119 was, as I understand it, classified until the 1990s.

Yeah, yeah.

And that image in the book is from a show from 2015, Experiments with Truth, Gandhi, and Images of Nonviolence, which was curated by a former director of the Menil, Josef Helfenstein.

And it was an incredible show in itself.

And it did... condense or distill some of the essential elements of the Menil as an institution.

It was founded by two French expatriates who were wealthy collectors in Houston, active in civil rights in the 60s and 70s, and active and liberal Catholics in their community of a very 1950s, 60s variety.

So they collected extensively in modern contemporary, but also in medieval and ancient often with a spiritual thread running through their collecting energies.

And so it has, if one is wired in such a way that the spiritual, the religious is something that you're looking for, seeking in art of any kind.

It's really an incredible place to go for that reason.