A trip to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston could help provide some variety for downtime activities, here’s a guide for students. | Santiago Martinez/The Cougar
If you’ve enjoyed art like films, novels, or perhaps even the exhibits at the Blaffer Museum on campus throughout the semester, you may be itching for something different.
As the semester winds down and you have more downtime, a trip to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston could scratch this very itch and provide a much needed breath of fresh air.
Whether it’s for stress relief, or exploring the museum should prove to be no less invigorating and the MFAH can still provide an evening’s delight, whether solo or with friends.
Hours and Permanent Collection
The museum’s hours are Wednesday through Sunday, typically from around 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., and offers a permanent collection of almost 70,000 works of art.
The works span from antiquity to present-day, and range from historical artifacts to humorous vignettes to sublime depictions of personal emotion.
As a visitor you might not like everything you see, but it’s impossible to walk out without having seen something you love with the variety.
Price for general admission is $19 for adults, or $12 for college students with a valid ID. These tickets include access to the permanent collection and some of the smaller temporary exhibits. On Thursdays, general admission is free for everyone.
Exhibitions
In addition to their permanent collection, the MFAH is constantly curating new exhibitions.
Just last month, they opened their “Incomparable Impressionism” exhibit, which showcases around 100 of the most significant works from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s renowned Impressionist collection.
This selection includes several masterful paintings by the likes of Monet, Renoir as well as Van Gogh.
Tickets for “Incomparable Impressionism” cost $27 and include access to everything under general admission. The exhibit will be available through March 27, 2022.
Their other current major exhibit is “Calder-Picasso” and features sketches, sculptures and paintings from the two prominent 20th-century artists.
The museum is also currently hosting “Afro-Atlantic Histories” and “Georgia O’Keeffe, Photographer,” both accessible with general admission and available through Jan. 17, 2022.
Films
Another hidden gem of MFAH is its frequent film screenings.
The Brown Auditorium Theater in their Caroline Wiess Law Building has long featured classic, foreign and arthouse cinema, having recently shown several films by Italian master Federico Fellini as well as Jean-Luc Godard’s French-New-Wave-trailblazing “Breathless,” among other titles.
This month, they will be opening their new Lynn Wyatt theater in the barely-year-old Nancy and Rich Kinder Building.
As one of the films chosen to inaugurate the theater, they will be screening Alfred Hitchcock’s thrilling voyeuristic classic, “Rear Window,” projected on 35mm film this December 18-19.
Among the rest of December’s showtimes for these two theaters, you can catch last year’s lauded “Minari,” the new and promising “Drive My Car,” or Otto Preminger’s noir-classic “Laura.”
With the River Oaks Theater now gone, the MFAH Films are probably the closest thing Houston has got to an art house theater that still projects film.
Tickets for MFAH film screenings are $9 regular price or $7 with a student discount.
