The Menil Collection of art in Houston is an enormously absorbing campus of galleries and chapels, with an emphasis on, among other areas, French surrealist and modern art of the mid-twentieth century, and African and European antiquities.

Inside the main gallery is a rather cluttered back room exhibiting objects owned or collected by the surrealist artists. Rene Magritte and perhaps Max Ernst among others. There were stuffed exotic birds, a faded astrolabe, masks, tribal ornaments from around the world, pipes, and other eclectic junk.

In that room, a small clear box contained perhaps a dozen arrowheads, intricately worked of glass. Different sizes and shapes, of clear and blue and green and amber glass. The carving and patterns delicate, lace-like. The points exquisite.

I assume a glass arrowhead would be of little practical use to a hunter, suggesting that they were created with some artistic impetus.

And who was the artist? An American Indian who died shortly after making the arrow heads. He was the last surviving member of his tribe. A skill once necessary to feed a people was applied in the end toward a fragile wordless statement.

There were many pieces of art in the galleries that moved or impressed me. Those pieces of carved glass communicated a weightier and more poignant message to me than the thousands of other exhibited paintings, murals and sculptures put together.