Blaffer Art Museum is a non-collecting contemporary art museum located in the Arts District of the
University of Houston
The University of Houston (UH) is a Public university, public research university in Houston, Texas. Founded in 1927, UH is a member of the University of Houston System and the List of universities in Texas by enrollment, university in Texas ...
campus. Housed in the university’s Fine Arts Building, it is part of the Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts. It was founded in 1973 and has won several awards, including the Coming Up Taller Award as part of the
President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities
The President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities (PCAH) was an advisory committee to the White House on cultural issues. It worked directly with the Administration and the three primary cultural agencies: the National Endowment for the Art ...
.
The museum presents focus and major monographic and group exhibitions of national and international contemporary artists as well as artwork by University of Houston School of Art students.
History
The Sarah Campbell Blaffer Gallery was founded in 1973, named in honor of the late
Sarah Campbell Blaffer
Sarah Campbell Blaffer (née Campbell; August 27, 1885 May 13, 1975) was an American philanthropist and contributor to the art collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She inherited two fortunes based on oil money – one from her fathe ...
, who during her lifetime made available to the University a collection of major artworks dating from the 15th century to modern day. This collection was purchased in 1979 by the
Blaffer Foundation, an independent organization which is unrelated to the museum and the University, and has been housed at
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), is an art museum located in the Houston Museum District of Houston, Texas. With the recent completion of an eight-year campus redevelopment project, including the opening of the Nancy and Rich Kinder Buil ...
since that time. The income from the investment of the sale proceeds provides a portion of Blaffer Gallery's program budget. The Blaffer Art Museum has presented over 250 exhibitions. The current exhibition policy, adopted by the Advisory Board and University Regents in 1986, focuses upon art of the past 100 years and its artistic, cultural and intellectual antecedents. In 1999, the museum expanded.
![View down from ceiling within the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Gallery](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bd/View_down_from_ceiling_within_the_Sarah_Campbell_Blaffer_Gallery.jpeg)
The museum created and hosts education and outreach programs. In 1988, UHReach was founded and in 1998 Young Artists Apprenticeship Program (YAAP) was founded.
The Blaffer Art Museum was honored by the
Institute of Museum and Library Services
The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) is an independent agency of the United States federal government established in 1996. It is the main source of federal support for libraries and museums within the United States, having the mis ...
on November 4, 2009 when first lady
Michelle Obama
Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama (born January 17, 1964) is an American attorney and author who served as first lady of the United States from 2009 to 2017. She was the first African-American woman to serve in this position. She is married t ...
awarded the museum with the Coming Up Taller Award.
The award gives $10,000 to art programs that help underprivileged youth.
In 2010, Blaffer Gallery was renamed to Blaffer Art Museum in the context of a major capital campaign for the museum's redesign. The newly-renovated museum facility designed by the New York-based firm Work Architecture Co. opened on October 12, 2012.
Exhibitions
The museum presents and originates between six and eight exhibitions annually. The annual schedule may include major traveling exhibitions that have a particular relevance to
Houston
Houston (; ) is the most populous city in Texas, the most populous city in the Southern United States, the fourth-most populous city in the United States, and the sixth-most populous city in North America, with a population of 2,304,580 in ...
audiences; mid-sized retrospectives of national and international artists; exhibitions of regional artists; thematic surveys which place artists' work into new contexts; student exhibitions; and special projects and performances by local artists. Blaffer Art Museum is dedicated to conducting original scholarship and research in contemporary art history. The museum frequently forges collaborative partnerships from among Houston's wealth of cultural organizations and educational institutions. Exhibition-related public programs and activities complement and elucidate each exhibition, from casual Brown Bag Lunch Tours to lively audience interaction during their "Contemporary Salons."
Recent major exhibitions of artists include
Radcliffe Bailey
Radcliffe Bailey (born 1968) is a contemporary American artist noted for mixed-media, paint, and sculpture works that explore African-American history. He is currently based in Atlanta, Georgia.
Early life and education
Radcliffe Bailey was born ...
(2001);
Fred Wilson: Objects & Installations, 1979-2000 (2003);
Chuck Close
Charles Thomas Close (July 5, 1940 – August 19, 2021) was an American painter, visual artist, and photographer who made massive-scale photorealist and abstract portraits of himself and others. Close also created photo portraits using a very l ...
(2003);
Jessica Stockholder
Jessica Stockholder (born 1959) is a Canadian-American artist known for site-specific installation works and sculptures that are often described as "paintings in space."Kino, Carol"Go Ahead, Play With (And On) the Art,"''The New York Times'', ...
: Kissing the Wall, 1988-2003 (2004);
Urs Fischer
Urs Fischer (born 2 May 1973) is a Swiss-born contemporary visual artist living in New York City. Fischer’s practice includes sculpture, installation and photography.
Education and early career
Born to two doctors as the second of two children ...
: Mary Poppins (2006);
Amy Sillman
Amy Sillman (born 1955) is a New York-based artist, known for process-based paintings that move between abstraction and figuration, and engage nontraditional media including animation, zines and installation.Farago, Jason''The New York Times'', ...
(2007); Jean-Luc Mylayne (2007);
Chantal Akerman
Chantal Anne Akerman (; 6 June 19505 October 2015) was a Belgian film director, screenwriter, artist, and Film studies, film professor at the City College of New York. She is best known for films such as ''Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 108 ...
: Moving Through Time and Space (2008); Existed:
Leonardo Drew
Leonardo Drew is a contemporary artist based in Brooklyn, New York. He creates sculptures from natural materials and through processes of Redox, oxidation, burning, and decay, Drew transforms these objects into massive sculptures that critique so ...
(2009);
Jon Pylypchuk (2009);
Josephine Meckseper
Josephine Meckseper (born 1964) is a German artist, active mainly in New York City. Her large-scale installations and films have been exhibited in various international biennials and museum shows worldwide.
Life and education
Meckseper studied ...
(2009); Gabriel Kuri (2010);
Tony Feher (2012); Andy Coolquitt (2013); Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art (2013); Zineb Sedira (2013);
Candice Breitz
Candice Breitz (born 1972) is a South African white artist who works primarily in video and photography.[Mel Chin
Mel Chin (born 1951 in Houston, Texas, USA) is a conceptual art, conceptual visual artist. Motivated largely by political, cultural, and social circumstances, Chin works in a variety of art media to calculate meaning in modern life. Chin places art ...](_blank)
(2015);
Janet Biggs
Janet Biggs is an American artist, known for her work in video, photography and performance art. Biggs lives and works in New York City.
Biggs' work focuses on individuals in extreme landscapes or situations and often navigates territory between ...
(2015);
Hubbard/Birchler (2015);
Zina Saro-Wiwa
Zina Saro-Wiwa (born 1976, Port Harcourt, Nigeria) is a Brooklyn-based video artist and filmmaker. She makes video installations, documentaries, music videos and experimental films.
Saro-Wiwa is the founding filmmaker of the alt-Nollywood mo ...
(2015); Matthew Ronay (2016);
Hilary Lloyd (2016);
Slavs and Tatars Slavs and Tatars is an art collective and "a faction of polemics and intimacies devoted to an area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia". Founded in 2006 as a collaboration between artists and designers ...
: Mirrors for Princes (2016);
Analia Saban (2017); Blake Rayne (2017);
The Propeller Group
The Propeller Group is a cross-disciplinary structure for creating art projects. The collective is headquartered in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and works in conjunction with creative individuals in Los Angeles, California, United States.[Anton Vidokle
Anton Vidokle is an artist and founder of e-flux. Born 1965, Vidokle lives in New York and Berlin.
Work
In 2004 Vidokle co-organized e-flux video rental with Julieta Aranda, which traveled to Berlin, Frankfurt; Extra City, Antwerp; Carpenter Cent ...]
(2018); Richard Rezac (2018);
Alfred Leslie
Alfred Leslie (born October 29, 1927) is an American artist and filmmaker. He first achieved success as an Abstract Expressionist painter, but changed course in the early 1960s and became a painter of realistic figurative paintings.
Biography
...
(2018–19);
Rebecca Morris (2019);
Amie Siegel (2019);
Paul Mpagi Sepuya
Paul Mpagi Sepuya (born 1982) is an American photographer and artist. His photographs focus heavily on the relationship between artist and subject. He often explores the nude in relation to the intimacy of studio photography. The foundation of Sepu ...
(2019-20);
Mariam Ghani
Mariam Ghani (Pashto/Dari: مریم غنی; born 1978) is an Afghan-American visual artist, photographer, filmmaker and social activist.
Biography
Mariam Ghani was born in 1978 in Brooklyn, New York, of Afghan and Lebanese descent. Her father, Mo ...
(2020);
Rodney McMillian (2020);
Simon Fujiwara
Simon Fujiwara (born 10 September 1982 in Harrow, United Kingdom) is a British/Japanese artist.
His works range from paintings and photographs to installations, film and sculptures. They are shown all around the world, for example in the Tate Mo ...
(2020);
Stephanie Syjuco (2020);
Martine Gutierrez (2021); Jamal Cyrus (2021); and
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung (born 1975) is an American painter from Olympia, Washington. Since 2015 she has been faculty in Painting and Printmaking at the Yale School of Art.
Early life and education
Zuckerman-Hartung was born in Los Gatos, Calif ...
(2021).
Blaffer Art Museum is free to the public and attracts over 30,000 visitors annually.
Programs
In 1988, Blaffer Gallery began a unique educational program for school children, UHReach. This program is now recognized nationally as an exemplary, multi-faceted outreach initiative. Blaffer has built intensive relationships with 18 elementary, middle and high schools in the neighborhoods surrounding the museum and UHReach serves schools from 24 area districts. Students from University of Houston and
Texas Southern University
Texas Southern University (Texas Southern or TSU) is a public historically black university in Houston, Texas. The university is one of the largest and most comprehensive historically black college or universities in the USA with nearly 10,000 ...
are extensively trained and employed as docents for UHReach. They lead dialogue-based tours of the exhibitions and also visit school classrooms to conduct pre- and post-tour activities.
In 1998 the Blaffer Gallery founded the Young Artists Apprenticeship Program (YAAP), which provides a free after-school arts program to at-risk and special needs high school students. It is a six-week, after-school workshop and provides an in-depth exploration of an artistic medium, such as
printmaking
Printmaking is the process of creating artworks by printing, normally on paper, but also on fabric, wood, metal, and other surfaces. "Traditional printmaking" normally covers only the process of creating prints using a hand processed techniq ...
or
videography
Videography is the process of capturing moving images on electronic media (e.g., videotape, direct to disk recording, or solid state storage) and even streaming media. The term includes methods of video production and post-production. It used ...
. Students work with Blaffer staff and University of Houston students to create art, study current exhibitions and take field trips to local museums and galleries. The program finishes with a final project which is displayed in a museum exhibition and the top two students in the program win college scholarships.
Education
Education programs are central to Blaffer Art Museum's mission to serve as a resource for the study of art, art history and other related disciplines. By extending the educational and scholarly programs of the University to the community, the museum promotes learning as a continuous process, linking contemporary ideas and people. Through a broad range of programs, Blaffer presents enriching museum experiences while providing arts education opportunities for audiences of all ages and backgrounds.
References
External links
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University of Houston campus
Art museums established in 1973
Museums in Houston
Art museums and galleries in Texas
University museums in Texas
1973 establishments in Texas