11 October 2024–20 April 2025
Tacita Dean: Blind Folly is the artist's first major museum survey in the United States. The exhibition, organised in close collaboration with Dean, spotlights her career-defining approach to creating art through unmediated and chance-based drawing processes across a variety of mediums, from film to printmaking.
The show's title reflects Dean's desire to let the behaviour of her mediums dictate the results of her work. For the artist, the playful British phrase connoting foolishness, "blind folly," represents her trust in the role chance and fate play in the creative act. She has said that her process is about "how to find by not looking."
Tacita Dean: Blind Folly will include monumental blackboard drawings, large-scale "portraits" of trees, drawings of lighting made with carbon paper, cloud formations on Victorian-era slates, and groups of rarely shown drawings on paper from the artist’s studio, found postcards, and albumen photographs. A separate gallery presents a rotating group of Dean’s 16mm films, showcasing how she conceives the analogue medium as "drawing with light." Together, the selection spans the artist’s more than three-decade-long career.
Tacita Dean: Blind Folly is curated by Michelle White, Senior Curator, The Menil Collection.
Public Programme
Friday 1 November 2024, 7–8pm | Main Building, The Menil Collection
Lecture by George Baker: Drawing According to Tacita Dean
Saturday 9 November 2024, 3–4pm | Main Building, The Menil Collection
DACAMERA Stop, Look, and Listen! In Response to "Tacita Dean: Blind Folly"
Sunday 8 December 2024, 3–3.30pm | Main Building, The Menil Collection
Curator Talk: Michelle White on "Tacita Dean: Blind Folly"
Monday 10 February 2025, 7.30–8pm | Main Building, The Menil Collection
Artist Talk: Tacita Dean in conversation with Thomas Adès and Sarah Rothenberg
