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Open Now
Wed–Sun 11am–7pm
Free Admission
1533 Sul Ross St.
Houston, TX 77006
713-525-9400
Open Now
Wed–Sun 11am–7pm
Free Admission
1533 Sul Ross St.
Houston, TX 77006
713-525-9400

Menil

Menil Library

The Menil Collection Library is open by appointment to qualified scholars and researchers.

Qualified researchers include graduate students, university and college faculty, museum professionals, professional artists and designers, art historians, arts professionals, and arts writers.

Researchers are encouraged to consult the Library Catalogue before scheduling an appointment.

Looking for basic research regarding works in or the history of the Menil Collection? You can start at local university and public libraries: look for these resources.

  • The Menil Collection: A Selection from the Paleolithic to the Modern Era

  • Ten Centuries that Shaped the West: Greek and Roman Art in Texas Collections, by Herbert Hoffmann

  • Imprinting the Divine: Byzantine and Russian Icons from The Menil Collection, edited by Annemarie Weyl Carr

  • A Byzantine Masterpiece Recovered: The Thirteenth-Century Murals of Lysi, Cyprus, by Annemarie Weyl Carr and Laurence J. Morrocco

  • The Menil Collection: Art Spaces, by Clare Elliott, with Miranda Lash

  • African Art from The Menil Collection, edited by Kristina Van Dyke

  • Art and Activism: Projects of John and Dominique de Menil, edited by Josef Helfenstein and Laureen Schipsi

Mission Statement

The Library of the Menil Collection is the curatorial library of the museum. It supports the reference, research, and scholarly needs of the director’s office and the curatorial, conservation, registration, archives, and publishing departments of the Menil Collection. Other museum staff and outside scholars are an important secondary constituency. Museum members and visitors form a third constituency that the library serves on a more limited basis. To support these groups, the library collects in media ranging from printed monographs, exhibition, auction, and collection catalogues to periodicals to electronic resources with a focus on the art and artists represented in the Menil Collection, as well as general and fundamental works on the movements in the arts and allied disciplines that contextualize them. Like the Menil Collection itself, the Library does not aspire to be encyclopedic; rather the Library’s goal is depth in the areas of strength of the museum’s art collection.

For broader coverage, the Library endeavors to coordinate its holdings with other local art libraries, as it is a highly specialized component in the larger universe of Houston area art research resources. The Library strives to centralize access to scholarly information, generated both internally and externally, to the Menil community in the building and also through the museum’s computer network and the Internet.

The Menil Library is a non-circulating research collection; use of materials is confined to the library reading rooms. A self-service photocopier (black and white) is available.

The library is located in the west wing of the museum building, just off the main corridor.

Contact: library@menil.org, 713-525-9400

William F. Stern Artists’ Books Collection. Bequest of William F. Stern in memory of his father, Joseph S. Stern

Getty Research Portal

The Menil Collection Library is a proud contributor to the Getty Research Portal. This collaborative scholarly platform brings to together important digitized content and makes it freely available to the world. Our first contributions are the 1875 French and English edition of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven, illustrated by Edouard Manet and all of our gallery guides from 2010 to the present. See the Menil’s contributions here.

Artists’ Books

In 2014 the Menil Collection Library received 84 artists’ books highlighting modernist book arts from Édouard Manet through Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. The slideshow below contains images of some representative works from this collection.
https://www.menil.org/research/menil-library
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