The Goss-Michael Foundation’s zesty, celebrity-filled exhibition of Canadian pop star Bryan Adams’s photography embodies the essence of escapist entertainment that Dallas confuses with reality. I have a history of bashing this gallery for pandering to fame, but Adams is a sensational photographer, and I suspect his famous subjects—including Mick, Posh and Amy Winehouse—were all the [...]

Dallasites, if you enjoy the artistic equivalent of Gloria’s Super Special (back in the day it was the #9), have I got a show for you. It ain’t Salvadoran food, it is photography. Ro2 Art’s Elm Street location is wrapping up its third annual photography show, 5 photographers (though it’s actually six).  Since the work of [...]

Ernesto Neto (pronounced NEH-toh) may have created the world’s cleverest aphrodisiac: it takes a while to realize Cuddle on the Tightrope is a journey into a vagina, but as soon as you’re done, you know you want to keep entering. By that standard, the Nasher’s new game of mounting sensual, experiential installations, started last year [...]

ArtSlam is an auction benefiting WordSpace, a Dallas writers organization that hosts regular readings and events around town. The auction will be Sunday, June 24th, at Steve Paul Productions, a media production studio on Main that has hosted gallery shows before, including one curated by the likes of Greg Metz and John Pomara.  (There will [...]

A forgotten series called Impressions of Dallas, last exhibited almost 60 years ago in New York City and exactly 60 years ago in its namesake, has been resuscitated by the Dallas Museum of Art’s European Art curator, the terrific Heather MacDonald. Flower of the Prairie: George Grosz in Dallas conveys a prominent outsider’s dreamy Texas [...]

I tried X once; HARAKIRI is a lot like that but without the uncontrollable want of sex (okay, twice). The opening night of HARAKIRI was the first in a series of consecutive Saturday nights featuring two hours of simultaneous performances, its theoretical pillar being hara-kiri, a Japanese ritual suicide requiring eyewitnesses (a definition simplified for [...]

Intro: This year’s honoree for Two x Two for AIDS and Art will be Richard Phillips, who is loved by celebrities and name-brand clothing and makes glossy, highly artificial compositions from appropriated sources. He gave an artist talk last week at the Dallas Museum of Art. 1. MAC cosmetics named a line of makeup after him. 2. [...]

Weaving together the movie star and the rock star, Fame holds a place of honor in contemporary art.  The Goss-Michael Foundation’s retrospective of the work of Russell Young includes pieces owned by Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, President Obama, and the late Elizabeth Taylor, and its paintings find Mick Jagger, Sid Vicious, and Elvis in the [...]

Danielle Georgiou, Danseuse Privee, 2012 and Willie Baronet, Unseen, 2012. Photo by Alisa Levy.   Ro2 Art has two spaces in downtown Dallas within walking distance of each other and a third location a few miles away in West Village. In personality, these two neighborhoods are wildly, comically different. The Kardashians got press coverage while shopping [...]

“It’s Just Meant to Be” is remarkably barebones for a film nerd’s nirvana. It is also visual art for people who wanted Walter Isaacson’s biography Steve Jobs for Christmas and got it. And it’s a little like standing in the much-missed And/Or Gallery once again – smart new media-type stuff in a tiny space that [...]

The vertical lines of factories electrify the sparse mechanical sensibility of Mark Manders, even as the DMA’s gallery space is drained of color to fit this factory’s demand for the weird: sundry dog-creatures, a black cat split in half, mice in odd places, and limbless human figures frequently sliced into vertical planks. The dynamics of [...]

Welcome to the Creative Arts Center, hidden gem of East Dallas. You are visiting on the first Saturday of classes in the new year, so some of the most popular classes – and there are lots of popular classes – won’t start til later in the month. Some have waiting lists. You wander around Building [...]

One reason to be captivated by Laying the Foundation: UNT Art Faculty, 1890-1970 is that it takes you far away from the present while leaving you in familiar surroundings. Looking at “Portrait of Mrs. Turner,” an undated oil painting by Martha Simkins, you feel a grand sense of history belonging to both the Oak Cliff [...]

PDNB (Photographs Do Not Bend) Gallery isn’t letting a few decades sideline its taste in contemporary photography. Keith Carter: From Uncertain to Blue revisits Carter’s eye on the common folk of small town Texas in the 1980s. While Carter is certainly a respected name in the field, the exhibition lacks the improvisational spirit, potency, and range found in more recent [...]

Brooklyn artist KAWS hurls the onlooker into a cartoon’s daytime nightmare with effectively targeted film and television favorites, calling forth a sense of the unexpected that is fun and funny but also disturbing and super-creepy. You might call it macabre (which is a pretentious word, like pescetarian). KAWS (whose real name is Brian Donnelly) developed his style [...]

Merry Christmas! The holiday hoopla is drawing to a close and decorations will soon be coming down. This means I will soon drive down Gaston Avenue to discover that my favorite annual assault on visual culture will disappear for another eleven months. This, my friends, is the life-sized, plastic nativity on the front lawn of [...]

While others swoon over Vincent Falsetta’s distinctly abstract paintings, The Reading Room’s Karen Weiner swoons over his handwriting, archiving, and documentation. Her small, noncommercial Exposition Park gallery is devoted to the intersection of visual art and the written word, with a goal of good discussion rather than sales. The current exhibition The Index Cards: Vincent [...]

When I was little my nana had a picture of Jesus that looked directly at you no matter where you were standing in her bedroom. It was terrifying, a touch magical and very cool. Dornith Doherty’s Millenium Seed series glows at different intensities and sometimes totally different colors depending on where you are standing in [...]

Post Pop Punks proffers many stops in its pop culture parade/group program which, according to the press release, “incorporates popular cultural references, utilizes appropriation, co-opts historical icons, (and) exploits the annals of art history.” And then there’s Adult Swim. Behavior modification for cartoon characters emerges as the latest thing in thematic creativity. For Buzz Lightyear, [...]

In any new issue of Texas Monthly, the first item I turn to is “Object Lesson,” Kristie Ramirez’s regular piece on the trinkets and baubles that notable Texans keep on their personal furniture. What clutter will we find on Jaap van Zweden’s piano? How fussy are the contents of Dean Fearing’s shoe closet? That sort [...]