Menil Collection Sets Teresita Fernández for First Fresco Building Commission
The Menil Collection in Houston will reopen its Fresco Building in late 2027 with a new purpose: a venue for semi-permanent, site-specific commissions. The first artist invited into the renovated space is New York-based Teresita Fernández, whose installation is expected to remain on view for about five years.
Closed since 2018, the building is returning as part of the museum’s 40th anniversary programming. The Menil has said the space will host a sequence of commissions that respond directly to the architecture, history, and atmosphere of the building, extending the institution’s long interest in art that is inseparable from place.
Fernández is known for a multidisciplinary practice that moves between sculpture, drawing, and installation while probing the relationship between matter, landscape, and human experience. Her work often draws on underrecognized histories of the Caribbean and the Indigenous Americas, and she has completed large-scale commissions for institutions including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Pérez Art Museum Miami, and the Benesse Art Site, as well as Dallas Cowboy Stadium and the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle.
The commission grew out of Fernández’s visit to the Menil last year for the exhibition “What drawing can be: four responses.” Menil director Rebecca Rabinow then invited her to see the Fresco Building during renovations. According to the museum, Fernández responded immediately to the building’s material character, its architecture, and the history of the surrounding neighborhood as sources for the work.
The Fresco Building carries a layered past of its own. It was named for two 13th-century Byzantine frescoes that were housed there from 1997 to 2012 on extended loan from the Holy Archbishopric of Cyprus and stewarded by the Byzantine Fresco Foundation. After the frescoes left Houston, the building was deconsecrated from a chapel and transferred to the Menil Collection.
Rabinow said Fernández’s installation will join the Menil’s other single-artist buildings, the Cy Twombly Gallery and the Dan Flavin Installation at Richmond Hall. In that context, the new commission signals more than a reopening. It places the Fresco Building back into circulation as a site where contemporary art, spiritual memory, and the museum’s own history will meet in a single, sustained encounter.
