The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, has announced a group of new acquisitions, both gifts and purchases, across its curatorial departments. The artworks range from a 17th-century wall hanging depicting courtly life in India to recent animatronic sculptures by contemporary artist Anicka Yi.
In statement, MFAH director Gary Tinterow said of this round of acquisitions include “two works that constitute astounding rediscoveries in their respective fields: Ladies of the Court belongs to a series of 17th-century hangings that have been hailed as the most important Indian textile discovery of the century, while Fernand Khnopff’s evocative triptych has reappeared for the first time since 1912. These purchases and gifts have been made possible by the continuing generosity of Houston’s philanthropists and through the perspicacity of our team of curators.”
As well as the Yi sculptures, additions to the MFA’s holdings of contemporary art include works by Hew Locke, Tatsuo Miyajima, Satoru Ozaki, and Raqib Shaw. The museum also acquired three pieces from the early 20th century by pioneering Symbolist artists: the aforementioned trio of drawings by Khnopff, which are set in a frame designed by the artist; a lithograph by Edvard Munch; and a painting by Ferdinand Hodler.
Notable gifts to the museum include a Mary Cassatt pastel and a Peter Bradley painting, as well as works from the collection of the late architect Hugo V. Neuhaus, Jr., among them paintings by postwar abstractionists such as Hans Hoffmann, Helen Frankenthaler, and Morris Louis. The museum also received gifts from Houston collectors Frank and Michelle Hevrdijs, including works by 19th-century artists Jean-Léon Gérôme and Christian Adolf Schreyer.
Below, a look at seven artworks newly acquired by the MFAH.
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Anicka Yi, Mineral Fin, 2023–24
Image Credit: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Artwork copyright © 2026 Anicka Yi/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Known for sculptures and installations that interweave biology, technology, and spirituality, Anicka Yi has said, “My mission as an artist is to create possibilities of other worlds, and other ways of living and being, even if just for a moment.” Mineral Fin is part of a series of works inspired by single-celled marine organisms known as radiolaria. Incorporating PMMA optical fiber, LEDs, silicone, acrylic, epoxy, aluminum, stainless steel, brass, motors, and microcontrollers, this piece shimmers and pulses as if with life, conjuring a speculative—perhaps post-human—world of hybrid organic and synthetic beings.
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Ferdinand Hodler, Joyful Woman, c. 1911
Image Credit: Museum of Fine Arts,
Houston.This late work by Swiss Symbolist Ferdinand Hodler is one of a series of images he made of his mistress, the dancer Valentine Godé-Darel. Between 1908, when she entered his studio as a model, and 1915, when she died of ovarian cancer at 41, Hodler made more than 200 sketches and paintings of Godé-Darel’s arresting figure. Here, captured before her diagnosis, she appears as Hodler once described her, “like a Byzantine empress on the mosaics of Ravenna.”
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Ladies of the Court, India, Tamil Nadu, c. 1635
Image Credit: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. More than 22 feet in length, this hand-painted Indian textile depicts a scene of Hindu court life in 17th-century South India. In a series of vignettes, men and women engage in conversation, flirtation, and lovemaking within a royal enclosure. Beyond the palace walls, monkeys and birds of all kinds disport themselves among palms and flowering trees. This textile, one of a set of hangings, is believed to have been brought to France in the late 18th century; the set was only recently rediscovered.
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Hew Locke, Where Lies the Land? 2, 2019
Image Credit: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Artwork copyright © 2019 Hew Locke; photo courtesy of the artist and Hales London and New York, © Angus Mills Photography. The multivalent oeuvre of Guyanese-British artist Hew Locke encompasses many styles and mediums; a constant, however, is an interest in colonialism, nationhood, migration, and trade as they manifest in history and in the present. Encapsulating these interests are Locke’s many sculptures of boats, about which he once told Forbes magazine, “If I hadn’t made a boat sculpture for a few years, I would feel disconnected and distracted. It’s like part of my identity.”
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Peter Bradley, Milkwood, 1973
Image Credit: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Artwork copyright © Peter A.
Bradley.Painter, sculptor, educator, friend to jazz musicians, and onetime art dealer, Peter Bradley is equally known for his Color Field painting and his curation of the 1971 “The De Luxe Show” in Houston, which was supported by collectors John and Dominique de Menil. An exhibition of works by Black abstract artists, including Bradley himself, and a selection of their white cohorts, it was among the first racially integrated shows mounted in the United States. This large-scale painting showcases Bradley’s signature use of acrylic gels to create roiling atmospheric effects.
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Helen Frankenthaler, Venetian Story, 1974
Image Credit: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Artwork copyright © 2026 Helen Frankenthaler/Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York.In the 1950s, expanding on the work of Abstract Expressionists such as Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler created innovative abstract art by pouring thinned-down oil paint onto unprimed canvas. By the 1970s, she had modified her approach to include a variety of painterly modes, as in this work, whose hand-painted lines and horizontal stains conjure a Venetian cityscape.
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Katsushika Hokusai, Rainstorm Below the Summit (Black Fuji), 1831
Image Credit: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. An ukiyo-e artist of the Edo period in Japan, Katsushika Hokusai was a painter and printmaker whose flattening of space, planes of solid or gradient color, and dynamic compositions had a significant influence on Post-Impressionist painters such as Edgar Degas, Vincent van Gogh, and Claude Monet. In this woodblock print from Hokusai’s “36 Views of Mount Fuji’” (which also includes his most famous work The Great Wave off Kanagawa), a stylized bolt of red lightning separates the titular mountain’s sunlit heights from the raging thunderstorm below.
