Jan 24 – Jul 13, 2025

Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight is the first major museum exhibition in thirty years devoted to the work of this pioneering abstract painter. Renowned for his innovative approach to non-representational painting, American artist Joe Overstreet (1933–2019) consistently sought to intertwine abstraction and social politics.

This presentation will include his landmark Flight Pattern series of radially suspended paintings from the early 1970s, as well as related bodies of work from the 1960s and 1990s. Overstreet made a significant contribution to postwar art, positioning abstraction as an expansive tool for exploring the idea of freedom and the Black experience in the United States.

Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight is organized by Natalie Dupêcher, Associate Curator of Modern Art, The Menil Collection, in collaboration with the artist’s estate.

On View Through August 2025

Wall Drawing Series: Ronny Quevedo features a site-specific work by New York-based artist Ronny Quevedo (b. 1981). The 36-foot triptych, C A R A A C A R A, 2024, explores the relationship between origin, transfer, and translation, with each panel of the composition indicating a different step in the artist’s process. Quevedo uses drawing, particularly schematic renderings, in his practice to explore the visual languages of abstraction, cartography, cosmology, and sport from across the Americas. The artist builds upon these interests with interconnected diagrams and markings spread across his works to express the complex relationships between body, home, field, globe, and celestial spaces.

Oct 11, 2024 – Apr 19, 2025

Tacita Dean: Blind Folly is the first major museum survey in the United States of work by British European visual artist Tacita Dean (b. 1965). The exhibition, organized in close collaboration with Dean, spotlights her career-defining approach to creating art through unmediated and chance-based drawing processes across a variety of mediums, from film to printmaking.

Blind Folly, the show’s title, reflects Dean’s desire to let the behavior of her mediums dictate the results of her work. For the artist, the playful and old-fashioned phrase connoting foolishness, “blind folly,” represents the role chance and fate play in the creative act.

Main Building

A Surrealist Wunderkammer is an ongoing project space devoted to the nature of humanity and the natural world from the perspectives of Surrealism, an international art and literary movement started by André Breton, Paul Éluard, and others in France during the 1920s. Included are more than 200 works from the museum’s collection or on long-term loan from the de Menil family and the Rock Foundation.

The exhibition features masks, figural sculptures, musical instruments, outmoded photographic and moving-image technologies, paintings, photographs, prints, found objects, tourist curios, fakes, and other objects that informed the imagination, political aesthetic, and varied artistic practices of Surrealism.