Company Profile
The Menil Collection
Company Overview
The Menil is located in central Houston and receives extensive local, national, and international recognition for its innovative exhibitions, conservation research, publications, scholarship, and unique architecture. The landmark Renzo Piano-designed main building houses much of the permanent collection, which focuses on Greco-Roman and Near East antiquities; Byzantine and medieval art; the cultures of Africa, the Pacific Islands, and the American Pacific Northwest; and twentieth-century and contemporary painting, sculpture, film, works on paper, books, and installations. The thirty-acre residential neighborhood features several dedicated arts pavilions, including the Cy Twombly Gallery, the Dan Flavin Installation at Richmond Hall, and the former Byzantine Fresco Chapel, which now houses long-term contemporary installations, and the Menil Drawing Institute, which opened in 2019.
In 2009, David Chipperfield Architects was engaged to envision a new master plan for the Menil campus. The plan recognizes as fundamental principles the meandering green spaces and dialogue between arts buildings and residences. Resulting projects include the new Energy House, Stern and Bucek’s Bistro Menil, and Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates’ gateway landscape and parking lot, all of which were funded through the Menil’s first ever capital campaign (2012-17), which raised $121 million. The most extraordinary of these additions is the most recent, Johnston Marklee’s Menil Drawing Institute, a vibrant yet peaceful space designed to foster the acquisition, study, teaching, conservation, exhibition, and storage of drawings.
The Menil Collections’s many green spaces and varied outdoor sculptures contribute to the unique vitality of what English architectural critic and writer Reyner Banham has referred to as a “neighborhood of art.” Admission to the museum buildings, green spaces, and public programs is always free of charge to visitors.
"The Menil is widely regarded as the gold standard in institutional concept and design. And admiration for it tends to shade into devotion. Its 30-acre campus of low-slung buildings in a leafy park in this city has become as much pilgrimage site as cultural destination."
Holland Cotter, The New York Times
November 29, 2018
Company History
Houston-based philanthropists and art patrons John and Dominique de Menil established the Menil Foundation in 1954 to foster greater public understanding and appreciation of art, architecture, culture, religion, and philosophy. In 1987, the Menil Collection’s main building opened to the public. A major art museum with a growing collection of more than 17,000 objects, the Menil embodies the ideals and values of its founders, in particular, that art is vital to human life and should be readily accessible to all persons.
Benefits
The Menil Collection offers a wide range of benefits to all regular, full-time employees. Benefits include medical and dental coverage, life, AD&D, and LTD insurance.
All regular, full-time positions included paid vacation and sick days, as well as twelve paid holidays.
Fidelity Investments provides retirement administrative services for the Menil. Employees may choose from the mutual funds offered through Fidelity and may make tax-deferred contributions up to the annual limits set by the federal government. Employees become eligible
to receive employer contributions (Safe Harbor and discretionary) immediately upon completing one year of active service.