Cloud Column

Houston has a Kapoor bean of its own. Cloud Column, an oblong of polished stainless steel on the Brown Foundation Plaza outside the Glassell School of Art, is what the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston calls a precursor to Kapoor’s Cloud Gate in Chicago.

The museum says the work was conceived in the late 1990s and realised in 2006. According to Hyperallergic in 2018, it was first commissioned for the British Museum, the project fell through, and the unfinished sculpture sat in Kapoor’s London studio for years before benefactors helped fund its completion and the MFAH acquired it. The museum says the concave front faces the Glassell School, inverting the building, its surroundings and the viewer in its reflection, and that, unlike nearly all of Kapoor’s related sculptures, its surface was hand-worked. Director Gary Tinterow told Hyperallergic that it “has traces of the human hand throughout it.”