With the recent completion of an eight-year campus redevelopment project, including the opening of the Nancy and Rich Kinder Building in 2020,[2] it is the 12th largest art museum in the world based on square feet of gallery space.

The MFAH's permanent collection totals nearly 70,000 pieces in over 300,000 square feet (28,000 m2) of exhibition space,[4] placing it among the larger art museums in the United States.

The original building, designed by Houston architect William Ward Watkin in the Greek Neoclassical style, is the first art museum built in Texas.

Prior to the opening of the permanent museum building in 1924, George M. Dickson bequeathed to the collection its first important American and European oil paintings.

In the 1930s, Houstonian Annette Finnigan began her donation of antiquities and Texas philanthropist Ima Hogg gave her collection of avant-garde European prints and drawings.

The same decade witnessed the 1944 bequest of eighty-three Renaissance paintings, sculptures and works on paper from renowned New York collectors Edith and Percy Straus.

Among these are the gifts of Life Trustees Sarah Campbell Blaffer, Dominique de Menil and Alice N. Hanzsen as well as that of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.

Through the ICAA, the MFAH brought a long-term transformation in the appreciation and understanding of Latin American and Latinx visual arts in the United States and abroad.

In the context of African American art, they have numerous pieces dedicated to telling the stories, heritage, and lifestyles of these artists and their community within their collection.

Work currently displayed in the galleries, such as Kehinde Wiley's Judith and Holofernes and Kara Walker's Slaughter of the Innocents (They Might Be Guilty of Something), educate on similar themes of oppression and its layers, as well as the impact on the African American community from multiple generations’ perspective.

[20] In 2021 the Monuments Men Foundation announced that it had located a painting from the collection of Max Emden in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH).

[24][25] The museum, which had rejected the Emden heirs’ claims since 2007, disagreed with the characterization of the painting as having been subject to a forced or duress sale due to Nazi persecution.