Most artworks displayed by museums, particularly those with permanent collections, are on view because they’ve gone through an institutional winnowing process and emerged with some sense of their importance intact. They’ve overcome whatever skepticism may have accompanied curators, directors and trustees’ initial exposure to the work.

Walter De Maria: Bel Air Trilogy (detail), 2000-2011 Stainless steel rod with 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air Two-tone hardtop Courtesy the artist and Gagosian Gallery Photo by Duane Zaloudek

Some of the pieces in Walter De Maria: Trilogies, which opens tonight at the Menil Collection, fall into that category. While De Maria, 75, is best known for his earthworks, such as The Lightning Field — a geometrically precise arrangement of 400 stainless-steel poles set in a one-mile-by-one-kilometer grid in western New Mexico — he has also made objects, a few of which the Menil owns.

But most of the works in Trilogies were created for the exhibition, which is De Maria’s first museum show because he usually works at a scale larger than museums can typically accommodate. The exhibit culminates a leap of faith by the Menil, which gambled not only that the works would be realized in time but also that they’d live up to the high standards on which its reputation is based.

As the title suggests, Trilogies consists of three series, each of which consists of three works. The first is a group of three monumental abstract monochrome paintings, one of which, the Menil-owned Yellow Painting/The Color Men Choose When They Attack the Earth, De Maria made for a 1968 group show of land artists. (He wanted the paint to match that on Caterpillar earth-moving equipment but had to settle for John Deere yellow.)

Earlier this year, De Maria made two new paintings to join it — Red Painting (NO WAR NO) and Blue Painting (YES PEACE YES) — completing what is now called The Statement Series, which is on view in the Menil’s foyer. Each painting’s statement is found both in the title and on a stainless-steel plaque that interrupts its otherwise uniform field.

The other two trilogies, both sculptural, occupy the 6,400-square-foot gallery that had its partitions removed for the recent Upside Down: Arctic Realities exhibit. The simple geometric shapes in Channel Series: Circle, Square, Triangle (1972), which the Menil owns, are outlined by lengths of metal with squared sides, forming a U-shaped channel that contains a solid stainless-steel sphere equal in width to the passageway. Theoretically, the spheres can be moved around, but viewers aren’t allowed to touch.

And they’re really not allowed to touch the works in Bel Air Trilogy, though classic-car lovers may have a hard time resisting.

De Maria has bought and restored three 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air automobiles, with a few alterations. Most noticeably, the front windshield of each is now seamlessly pierced by a 12-foot stainless-steel rod — again shaped either like a circle, a square or a triangle — that exits through the back window.

Why?

“He does not explain,” Menil director Josef Helfenstein says of the publicity-shy artist. “He has never done that. But there is a philosophical depth to this work, I find. You know, there’s history painting, and (Bel Air Trilogy) is almost like history sculpture, because it’s about American history, in a way.”

Starting tonight, the rest of us can ponder De Maria’s meanings for ourselves — along with the question of whether Helfenstein’s leap of faith paid off or fell flat.