Terry Winters Gifts Works to Menil in Lead-Up to Solo Exhibition

Terry Winters Gifts Works to Menil in Lead-Up to Solo Exhibition

Houston, Texas’sMenil Collectionhas announced the acquisition of more than seventy works of art made by American painter and printmakerTerry Winters, a New York City-based chronicler of botanical eccentricities and mathematical patterns who’s been exhibited at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Over forty of the newly-acquired works by Winters will be shown to the public in an upcoming exhibition titled “Terry Winters: Vitalized Geometry,”which will be on view from September 25, 2026 to April 4 of next year.

The Menil Collection was given the Winters artworks in two groups of gifts. The latest gift, which consists of seven works, came from Winters himself in 2026. His offering includes more recently-produced creations such as Azimuth, 2024 and Red Stone, 2019.  Related Teresita Fernández Installation Will Grace The Reopening Of The Menil’s Fresco Building In Houston Columbus Museum of Art Will Offer Free Admission for Visitors Aged 25 and Under as Part of New Initiative

In 2024, the museum also received a gift of Winters’s work from the estate of painter and sculptor Ellsworth Kelly and Jack Shear. Shear, a photographer and collector, is the late Kelly’s husband; Kelly passed away in 2015. The gift from Kelly and Shear consists of fifty-one works by Winters that represent almost three-quarters of all prints made by the artist in the 1980s. 

The breadth of the acquisition represented by the two gifts establishes the Menil Collection as one of the most substantial repositories of Winters’ work in the United States, the museum said. They now have 76 works by Winters in their collection. 

In addition to displaying the Morula prints (1983–84) and the aforementioned print portfolio Azimuth, 2024, the “Terry Winters: Vitalized Geometry” exhibition will showcase the versatility of Winters’s talents with woodcut, silkscreen and lithography methods. 

The exhibition—curated by Sophie Asakura, a curatorial associate at the Menil Collection—“is a celebration of the Menil Collection’s longstanding admiration for and relationship with [Winters],” Rebecca Rabinow, the museum’s director, said in a statement. 

“The artist’s commitment to exploring abstraction and his inventive approach to material makes his work a vital touchstone of contemporary printmaking,” Asakura said in a statement. “The Menil has been working closely with Winters on every aspect of the exhibition to present a focused yet encompassing presentation.”