Publishing - Menil
Publishing
The Menil Collection’s publishing program supports scholarship and produces books, gallery guides, and digital essays that bring context to the museum’s exhibitions and collections. The books contribute to larger dialogues in art criticism and history. Menil publications are enduring records of exhibitions, explorations of research questions put forth by curators and conservators, enduring records of exhibitions, and opportunities for deeper consideration and close looking.
The publishing department produces two to three books annually. Recent publications include the first museum monograph of Joe Overstreet, an artist book by Tacita Dean, and a catalogue of a retrospective of Ruth Asawa’s drawings. The Menil has also sponsored several large-scale, multivolume publishing projects, three commissioned by John and Dominique de Menil, and in 2018, a six-volume catalogue raisonné of the drawings of Jasper Johns.
Whether an exhibition catalogue or a take-away gallery guide, the publishing program aims to foster readers’ intellectual curiosity and personal connection to art.
Menil Drawing Institute Publications
Menil Drawing Institute publications showcase the exhibitions, collections, and research projects of the Drawing Institute. Titles feature in-depth texts on drawing subjects that highlight critical research on an artist or an exhibition theme. Foremost is the Menil Drawing Institute series, designed to reveal subject matter through incisive short texts, large-scale artwork details that promote close looking, and concise source lists for further exploration. The books within this series are a standard format, with each title dedicated to different subject matter—from single-artist studies to detailed analysis on the materiality of drawing. The sixth title in the series,
Lines of Resolution: Drawing at the Advent of Television and Video,
debuted in October 2025.
Research Publications
The Menil has sponsored several large-scale, multivolume publishing projects, three commissioned by John and Dominique de Menil, and more recently, a catalogue raisonné of the drawings of Jasper Johns. The multivolume compilation of six decades of Johns’s drawings (1954–2014), took seven years to complete. A team of scholars located, examined, and researched more than 800 works of art. Photographs were commissioned or acquired, complete documentation was assembled and rechecked, and after a year and a half of design and proofing, the books were printed using a state-of-the-art, custom six-color process.
History
The Menil publishing program is older than the museum itself. In the 1950s, as John and Dominique de Menil developed their personal collection, they began to foster the arts scene in Houston. They began a teaching collection and funded an art history program at the University of St. Thomas and what was then the Institute of the Arts at Rice University. These initiatives spurred the need for related publications, which included wide-ranging titles such as
The Visage of Culture: A Telescopic Survey of Art
from the
Cave Man to the Present,
1959;
René Magritte in America
, 1961; and
Form and Freedom: A Dialogue on Northwest Coast Indian Art
, 1975. Since opening in 1987, the museum has continued to produce exhibition- and collection-focused books, catalogues raisonné of artists’ entire bodies of work, and extensive research projects, such as The Image of the Black in Western Art, a 54-year research project initiated by Dominique de Menil, and later transferred to Harvard University, that tracks pictorial representations of Africans and their diasporic descendants.
Menil Publications
Robert Rauschenberg: Fabric Works of the 1970s
65.00
Lines of Resolution: Drawing at the Advent of Television and Video
40.00
Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight
50.00
Menil Bookstore
Browse a selection of Menil publications and special merchandise. Every purchase supports the museum.
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Featured Digital Publications
Wolf and Caribou: Two Yup’ik Masks by Sean Mooney
ReCollecting Dogon, ed. Paul R. Davis
Enchanted: Visual Histories of the Central Andes, ed. Paul R. Davis
Research Resources
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