Kristina Van DykeKristina Van Dyke, the Menil Collection’s curator of collections and research, is leaving to direct the St. Louis-based Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, presenting the Menil with the question of how to fill the distinctive niche she occupies.

A Malian-art specialist with an uncanny knack for showcasing art from a vast range of periods and cultures, Van Dyke has proved adroit at working with the museum’s Renzo Piano-designed building. Those qualities should serve her well at the similarly eclectic Pulitzer, a noncollecting museum known for changing exhibits that present art in contemplative dialogue with its architecture.

In a statement released Thursday by the foundation, founder and board chairwoman Emily Rauh Pulitzer cited Van Dyke’s Menil installations for their “sensitivity to the works of art and how they relate to the space in which they are viewed, which is integral to the experience of the Pulitzer’s installations of art in the Tadao Ando-designed building.”

Van Dyke, who praised the Pulitzer’s “dual role as an art sanctuary and a laboratory of innovative thinking,” was wrapping up her Harvard University doctoral dissertation on representation in the oral cultures of Mali when she joined the Menil in 2005 as associate curator of collections. The job marked both Van Dyke’s first curatorial post and the Menil’s first position to emphasize indigenous art, an important part of its collection but one that was overdue for attention.

Her first large-scale exhibition, Chance Encounters: The Formation of the de Menils’ African Collection (2006), established Van Dyke as an astute and sensitive interpreter of John and Dominique de Menil’s collecting sensibility.

It presented their African art collection in lively dialogue with artworks from the museum’s 20th-century American and European holdings. Each sight line suggested visual parallels between art from various parts of Africa and Surrealism, abstract expressionism and minimalism.

Van Dyke expressed a de Menil-like respect for intuitive, highly personal responses to artworks in African Art From the Menil Collection, the 2008 catalog she produced in conjunction with her reinstallation of the African galleries — the first since the museum opened in 1987.

“John and Dominique de Menil believed that artworks have lives of their own, shaped by the changing demands of the individuals with whom they come into contact,” Van Dyke wrote. “While the original context of an object’s creation was of great interest to them, the de Menils did not insist on the primacy of this moment, but appreciated equally all aspects of an object’s history, including the point at which they themselves discovered its existence. In the case of African art, the couple felt that they could enter into a meaningful exchange with the sculptures and masks they collected, even if that dialogue were one never intended by the object’s maker.”

At times grouping concentrations of related works together, such as the Menil’s Malian headdresses and terra-cotta figures, in other parts of the redesigned gallery Van Dyke encouraged visual associations between artworks from different cultures. For example, a figure from the middle Benue River in northeastern Nigeria pulls his shoulders back in the same anxious posture as the figure in a Bongo grave effigy from Sudan.

“All people and all times and places make art in part as an attempt to communicate something about their own struggle for meaning,” Van Dyke told the Houston Chronicle in 2008. “When you put all this into dialogue, it’s possible that these objects have something to say to us in our own time and place.”

Van Dyke showed an affinity for the Menil’s eclectic, eccentric side in Body in Fragments (2009), a whirlwind funhouse tour through art history focusing on objects in the collection that portray the human body in an incomplete state — a torso here, a leg there — whether because of an artist’s intent or the ravages of time, erosion or looters.

The exhibit united pieces from the museum’s various concentrations — ancient Rome, medieval Europe, 19th- and 20th-century Africa, Surrealism, Pop and 1960s “Happenings,” among others — in a dense, dramatic and often humorous installation.

Van Dyke’s redesign of the Menil’s Pacific Islands gallery — also the first in the museum’s history — opened in the spring.
Slated to join the Pulitzer Nov. 7, Van Dyke’s current projects include a study of Malian antiquities and an exhibition focusing on contemporary African art that will result in simultaneous exhibits in Houston and Lagos, Nigeria.

“What Kristina has accomplished for the Menil — including the new design and installation of the museum’s African and Pacific Islands galleries ... is truly extraordinary,” Menil director Josef Helfenstein, who plans to search for another specialist in non-Western art to replace Van Dyke, said in a statement. “All of us at the Menil wish Kristina well as she moves on to the outstanding Pulitzer Foundation, where she will continue her brilliant work.”