Tacita Dean Draws Her Way Into the Menil

In the artist’s first major U.S. museum survey, she bonds with Cy Twombly through works on paper, films and photographs.

During a residency at the Menil Collection in Houston last February, the British artist and filmmaker Tacita Dean spent the night in the Cy Twombly Gallery.

She wanted to be surrounded by Twombly’s work, having long felt connected to the so-called Blackboard artist, who died in 2011, and in particular to his collage-drawings and preoccupation with the passage of time.

“He connects to the classical world in a way that is deeply emotive,” Dean said. “I’m interested in where your mind goes when you look at one of his works. It can go to memory, it can go to envy — you think, ‘God, that’s so perfect.’”

Now Dean is bringing her own monumental blackboard drawings and her rarely shown drawings on paper, found postcards, and albumen photographs to the Menil, in a show that opens on Oct. 11. The exhibition, “Tacita Dean: Blind Folly,” is her first major museum survey in the United States.

“The presence of Cy Twombly in Houston really ignited the show and the conversation,” said Michelle White, senior curator at the Menil, who organized the exhibition. “It just became such a lovely point of connection.”

In a recent interview at her Los Angeles studio, Dean, 58, said a focus on her drawings “is quite unusual for me,” given that shows typically focus on her films. And the artist said it is meaningful to be presenting her work in a place where Twombly’s presence is felt.