“Tacita Dean: Blind Folly” at The Menil Collection

Tacita Dean, Beauty, 2006. Gouache on black and white fibre-based photograph mounted on paper, 141 × 147 in. (358.1 × 373.4 cm). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Purchase through a gift of Raoul Kennedy in memory of Patricia A. Kennedy. © Tacita Dean. Photo: Tenari Tuatagaloa

Love it when those sweetie pies at The Menil Collection invite us to their previews. They serve coffee and pastries, and a curator guides us through the exhibition, often with the artist present. And we get to hang with Houston’s important writers.

In this way, Intown previewed “Tacita Dean: Blind Folly.” Our purpose here is to make a few brief comments, then share the Menil’s announcement. At the preview, Dean described her artistic practice as “chance-based.” Elsewhere she said she works “just beneath the conscious level,” a quote pulled from Menil curator Michelle White’s extensive research. Dean’s chance-based process, which she likens to working “blindly,” lacks premeditation, and incorporates screwups and surprises because technical mishaps often reveal themselves to be meaningful coincidences. This state of consciousness arguably ties to intuition, dreams and myth.

You’ll justifiably be bowled over by Dean’s superbly rendered large scale chalk drawings of mountains and icebergs on blackboard. They do however hold contradictions. Dean merged elevated drawing skills gained from formal art training with messy cheap materials. By aligning acumen and refinement and surprising 24 foot scale with tacky blackboard and chalk destined to fade or disintegrate, despite the ole broad’s aging body, she’s essentially demonstrating dominion over the enterprise.

Lastly, don’t feel like a doofus if you’re ignorant of “Blind Folly’s” associations and art-world insider references. Even those unfamiliar with Homer’s “Illiad” or the lauded Twombly will probably ooh and ah over this art.

Here’s what the Menil’s wants you to know:

“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) who lives and works in Berlin and Los Angeles. 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. “Tacita Dean: Blind Folly” will be on view through April 19, 2025.

The show will include new works inspired by the artist’s time in Houston, some following her residency at the Menil’s Cy Twombly Gallery, alongside Dean’s monumental blackboard drawings and groups of rarely shown drawings from her studio on paper, found postcards, and albumen photographs. A separate gallery will present a rotating group of her 16mm films.

Rebecca Rabinow, Director, The Menil Collection, said, “The Menil is proud to present this exhibition of work by Tacita Dean, an artist we deeply admire. Over the past seven years, during multiple visits to the Menil, Tacita and curator Michelle White have developed an extraordinarily beautiful and thought-provoking exhibition. I am particularly intrigued by the many ways in which Tacita has drawn inspiration from the Menil’s permanent collection and green spaces, as well as from Houston more generally.”

Michelle White, Senior Curator, The Menil Collection, said, “Weaving together an array of subjects, from classical mythological narratives to natural phenomena, Tacita Dean’s work presents a poignant and urgent reflection on experience in an increasingly virtual and ecologically volatile world. In this moment, she shows us the power of analogue through the act of drawing.”

“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. The artist’s process, a route without a predetermined end, results in a work of art that brings this journey to the fore.

The show opens with the artist’s new chalk drawings on found pieces of worn green slates: “Blind Folly,” “Blind and dusty,” “Green Folly,” “Wind-worms,” and “Hooker’s Green.” The snaking, spiraling forms, some she made by pulling her finger through the dust, reference her time in Texas in early 2024 – her engagement with Cy Twombly’s works and her experience of the total solar eclipse.

The Menil’s exhibition continues with Dean’s large-scale “portraits” of trees. Dean has photographed trees since 2006, and in these drawings on photographic prints, she surrounds images of blossoming cherry trees, jacarandas, and ancient oaks with hand-drawn marks. Drawn with a brush or pencil, these isolate the powerful, ancient, or fragile trees. According to Dean, the small lines connect her to the past. As she worked, she was delighted by her “proximity to even the tiniest and most inaccessible of branches on these mighty trees.”

The second gallery presents monumental chalk drawings on blackboards, with subjects highlighting the flux of the natural world. Through a virtuosic application of chalk lines and erasures, Dean draws mountains, icebergs, clouds, and other geological and celestial formations that are constantly evolving. “The Montafon Letter,” 2017, and “The Wreck of Hope,” 2022, each twenty-four feet across, show geological forms that are in a perpetual state of change, and like Dean’s unfixed chalk lines, they teeter on the brink of erasure.

The exhibition spotlights another ongoing form in the artist’s work: clouds. “Delfern Tondo,” 2024, was inspired by the swift movement of clouds in the Houston sky. Dean laid on her back in the grass outside of the museum to photograph the action. In the chalk drawing, which maintains a distinctive looking-up vantage point, the moon sinks below a central cluster of billowing forms, ringed by wispy white marks that emulate the effect of beams of moonlight refracting off the clouds.

“Blind Folly” also includes many examples of drawings on found surfaces, such as vintage postcards, Victorian-era locomotive windows, and sepia-toned albumen prints that have a patina of age. Displayed alongside these works are Dean’s photographs of Cy Twombly’s studio in Gaeta, Italy, and the print series “More or Less,” 2022. The title comes from Twombly’s response to a question Dean asked him. After recalling his anxieties around making art as a young artist, he said that his concerned mother would ask why he continued to paint. Dean then asked, “Does painting make you happy now?” He responded: “more or less.”

Concluding the show is a small postcard titled “Found Cy, Houston,” 2024. The artist came across it while visiting an antique shop in Houston’s Heights neighborhood in a drawer of vintage postcard’s labeled “Interesting/Unusual – Foreign – Disaster.” At random, she pulled out an early 20th century example depicting rows of wooden beams on the dirt ground, a vanished house torn from its foundation by a strong Midwestern wind. The word “cyclone” was written in white pigment with a brush in neat cursive. The sender’s script looked quite like Dean’s handwriting and the word “cyclone” was written in such a way that the first two letters of the word stood out: “Cy.” The artist had “found Cy,” continuing this story of chance encounters that is told through Dean’s work in “Blind Folly.”

A separate gallery presents a selection of Dean’s 16mm films (schedule below). On rotation will be “The Green Ray,” 2001; “The Friar’s Doodle,” 2009; “Edwin Parker,” 2011; and her newest film, “Claes Oldenburg draws Blueberry Pie,” 2023. Film Schedule Below:

The Friar’s Doodle, December 1, 2024–January 12, 2025
Edwin Parker, January 15–March 9, 2025
The Green Ray, March 12–April 19, 2025

Published in conjunction with the exhibition’s opening is “Blind Folly or How Tacita Dean Draws” by Michelle White, Senior Curator, The Menil Collection. The book considers the unique and timely implications of how Dean draws. Covering more than three decades of work, White proposes that the way the artist approaches drawing is an indeterminate journey of fate and folly, chance and medium. The text, illustrated with more than forty images, is based on seven years of conversation between the author and the artist.

In early 2025, for the 30th anniversary of the opening of the Menil Collection’s Cy Twombly Gallery, the museum will publish an artist book by Dean. “Why Cy” will be filled with hypnotic and colorful images conceived by the artist following a residency at the gallery and in response to the gestural and linear exuberance of the paintings on view by the late American artist.

About the Artist

After completing a BA in art from the Falmouth School of Art, England, Tacita Dean received her postgraduate studies at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, in 1992. The Hugo Boss winner, primarily known for her work in film, has established a prolific body of work with a variety of analogue mediums. She has worked to preserve celluloid film and was a founding member of savefilm.org, following the production of her work FILM, shown in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, London, in 2011-12. In 2018, her career retrospective was shown concurrently in three venues in London: the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Royal Academy. Major exhibitions of her work have also been organized at the Schaulager, Basel, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, among many other institutions. Dean was commissioned to create the set design and costumes for the ballet, The Dante Project, which debuted at the Royal Opera House, London, and Opéra de Paris in 2021-22.

Related Programs

Mark Toscano, film preservationist, and Tish Stringer film scholar and curator. Screening of Tacita Dean’s film “Kodak,” 2006 January 16, 2025, 7–9:30 p.m.

Artist Talk: Tacita Dean in conversation with Thomas Adès and Sarah Rothenberg Thomas Adès, British composer, and Sarah Rothenberg, musical artist. Co-presented with DACAMERA February 10, 2025, 7:30–9 p.m.

Book Launch: “Why Cy” by Tacita Dean Signing with the artist February 9, 2025, 11 a.m.–1 p.m.

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