Properties vol 1 2017 Rebecca Rabinow

Influential Women

of Houston

Dr. Rebecca Rabinow

Houston is poised to be a major culture capital and people who don’t see that haven’t been here for a while.

The Menil Collection

Director

Dr. Rebecca Rabinow Shepherding a new era of expansion and evolution for the Menil Collection

by Daniel Renfrow After completing her undergraduate degree at Smith College in 1988, a young Rebecca Rabinow spent the summer volunteering at the then newly opened Menil Collection helping to preserve the correspondence of John and Dominique de Menil by putting them into plastic sleeves. While perusing the letters she was helping preserve – she couldn’t help herself – the future curator had an eureka moment about art that forever changed the trajectory of her life.

“I was hooked,” she says of the work she was doing, which allowed her to read letters by famous artists about their works and get an inside look into how the Menil Collection was assembled. “That was perhaps my first realization that any work of art has a life larger than itself and larger than the people who collect it. For really great works of art – the masterpieces – whoever owns them now is just a chapter in their histories.”

Now, after 26 years in New York City at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she was curator of both Modern art and the nascent Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Art which she helped found, the curator-pro is back in her native Houston as the new director of the Menil Collection.

Rabinow takes over the museum at a pivotal point in its history. In addition to celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, the museum will also be celebrating the opening of the $40 million dollar Menil Drawing Institute this October. The institute, which will be housed in a sleek modern building designed by Los Angeles-based design firm Johnston Marklee, will be the first free-standing institution in the U.S. devoted solely to the exhibition, study, conservation and storage of works on paper. The institute’s inaugural exhibition will be composed of a collection of drawings by esteemed American abstract expressionist painter Jasper Johns that trace the chronology of his career and his recurrent use of images.

As she takes on the mantle of shepherding the museum through this new era of expansion and evolution, Rabinow says she wants to make sure she’s always guiding the museum by the principles of its founders.

Mark Rothko American, born in Russia, 1903 - 1970 Untitled, 1967 ©1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

“I came because the Menil is an incredibly special place,” she says, noting that she wasn’t even looking for a new job when she interviewed for the position – she was very happy at the Met and just wanted to speak to the search committee about what the Menil meant to her – but the allure of the position and her love for the museum’s core philosophy won her over in the end. “I can’t think of any other museum in the United States, or maybe even in Europe, where it is entirely free to the public. That’s an integral part of the Menil’s DNA, this idea that we all should have the right to live with art. That can change our lives in small ways or in big ways.”

“The guiding principle behind John and Dominique was that everyone should have the ability and luxury of having the arts be a part of their lives,” she says.

“And that’s a mission that we take very seriously.”

And in spite all of those years she spent away from home in New York City, Rabinow says she’s adjusting fast to being back in Houston and finds herself reveling in the city’s underappreciated, eclectic mystique.

“I love it here,” she says, noting that Houston has become quirkier and more art-focused than she remembered it to be.

“Houston is poised to be a major culture capital and people who don’t see that haven’t been here for a while.”