The Menil Collection commissions artist Jitish Kallat to create a site-specific wall drawing for the Menil Drawing Institute, exploring themes of history, science and the cosmic scale of time.
Jitish Kallat has a new site-specific wall drawing on view at the Menil Drawing Institute, part of The Menil Collection at 1412 West Main St. It opened September 10, 2026, and runs through August 8, 2027, so you've got plenty of time to catch it.
Kallat is a major figure in contemporary Indian art, born in 1974, and he works across drawing, painting, sculpture, photography and time-based media. His stuff usually sits at the intersection of the intimate and the immense, weaving together history, science, philosophy and the cosmic scale of time. This piece grows out of his engagement with Project A119, a partly declassified 190-page 1959 United States Air Force document that studied the feasibility of a lunar research flight involving a nuclear detonation on the Moon—a Cold War concept that never progressed beyond the study phase.
The text and diagrams from that document are printed directly onto the wall, then covered by a glass panel etched with images of the moon and astronomical diagrams. Hand-drawn trompe l'oeil cracks puncture the glass, creating a bleed-through effect. To get the glass just right, Kallat consulted Rice University's Ajayan Research Group; the panel had to be opaque in some spots and transparent in others, so the layers of text and image shift depending on where you're standing.
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The work sits alongside the institute's exhibition Fragility, which centers on the paradoxical frangibility of paper, tape and wool. Admission is free, and the drawing will be up through August 8, 2027.
