You’ve by now heard tell of how this year’s TWO x TWO guest of honor, the artist Mark Grotjahn, got all perschnickered on art-party libations, stumbled off scene just before his painting went on the auction block to sell for a cool one million, as a golden-robed Patti LaBelle belted out “Voulez-vous couchez avec moi.” He swaggered [...]
So, remember how a few weeks ago I wrote about how Dallas galleries need to mount more shows with: ”contemporary work by a handful of emerging and established artists under the umbrella of a theme, in relation to older works of art or some other object(s), also on view.” Well, Liliana Bloch from Kirk Hopper Fine [...]
Last week I made my way through a derelict neighborhood in East Dallas, down a busy one-way throughway, to the storefront space of Oliver Francis Gallery, an ambitious new alternative space run by a fellow named Kevin Jacobs. I’d been asked there by artist Jesse Morgan Barnett, whose work is on view there now in a show called Compensation Assembly [...]
It’s State Fair time again. I haven’t been in nearly a decade, but I’ve promised my small people I’ll go this year. I look forward to it with a kind of glee mixed with fear – a potent cocktail born of memories of sickness and stickiness and the smell of livestock. In honor of those [...]
Last week, a Facebook friend of mine — an artist living in Dallas whom I’ve never actually met – caught my attention when he posted this on Facebook after his recent visit to NY: Walking through the galleries in Chelsea… the work that we saw felt different than art here in Dallas. Part of the difference was presentation. [...]
Gaffes and Informations at Fort Worth Contemporary Arts features the singular and collaborative work of Kevin Todora and Jeff Zilm. Enter dim gallery. Startled by digital sound. Digital sound. Digital sound. Digital sound. Cranked loud and overwhelming. Video game sound effects. Sped up into madness. Grab a beer. Feel like you are rattled. Be rattled. Feel [...]
I recently learned that the gals who run the Nasher Sculpture Center’s store, Heidi Smith and Carolyn Spinelli, have been showing work by local artists in tandem with the museum’s major exhibitions. “We think there are talented artists in this city,” says Smith, “ and furthermore, customers are interested in something made in Dallas, from Dallas… [...]
This year, New Texas Talent at Craighead-Green Gallery, juried by Marcie Inman, Director of Exhibitions for the Irving Arts Center, has the odor of a world gone feral, or at least the world trying to remember what nature is and getting all tangled up in thorny (sometimes horny) metaphors in the process. The show is replete [...]
One of my favorite writers, the poet Donald Hall, speaks often of gardens and nature in his work, recounting his farmstock lineage, his beloved dead wife’s care of her New England garden, and his own poetic struggles with the tending of Nature. In his book Life Work Hall writes: My grandfather was the model for my adult [...]
For half of my life I’ve lived in Oak Cliff — a now hip and cool, but once bad-repped and socially misunderstood place that I’ve long prized for its rogue-ish solitude south of the Trinity. One of my favorite memories from living here is when, back in ’97, a gussied-up blonde girl came into a 7- Eleven where I [...]
I wrote awhile back about the need for more unsanctioned, free-thinking, button-pushing art to take place in Dallas — things out in the public that recall, maybe, Dallas’ renegade spirit, or at least incite one. So I was greatly pleased to hear of Centraltrak artist Tom Russotti’s little antic-ful operation called Aesthletics –a project that brings folks together to play sports with [...]
From the sea of summer group shows I trekked through the other night, two artists stood out: Benjamin Terry and Kerry Pacillio, both on view at Cohn Drennan in a show called 110˚. Why I liked their work more than anyone else’s isn’t entirely clear to me, except to say that it played more smartly than other [...]
I had an email correspondence about Dallas with a friend this week — I’ll call him Toojerstraap. You may know him. Dallas, and its particular insufficiencies – art-wise and all-wise, really — is a subject we hash out regularly, attempting to land on the sources of its problems mainly, and sometimes drafting could-be solutions to them. [...]
When we came back down to visit Texas a few years after moving to New England in a giant green Mercury Continental, I have the distinct memory of stepping out of the car and then climbing right back in, because the air outside was like jumping into hell itself — so freaking, searingly, take-your-breath-away hot. ”How do people survive here? How do they [...]
In honor of Memorial Day, here’s a round-up of some of my favorite war monuments, all politics and other contest-ables aside, and in no particular order. Ara Pacis Augustae, Rome, 13-9 BC Consecrated in January of 9 BC, the Ara Pacis celebrates the peace established in the Empire after Augustus’s victories at Gaul and Hispania. It’s an embellished, [...]
The other day I heard a montage of sound bites on NPR of the recent uprisings in the Middle East. The momentary inundation of frantic sounds from Libya, Syria, Egypt and all those other conflicted places, and the journalists voices that steadily and resolutely fed the world the information coming out of them, suddenly made me keenly aware [...]
Independent curator June Mattingly has put together a show at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary called Starry, Starry Nights: Five Light-Filled Installations with work by five artists – Adela Andea, Chris Lattanzio, JeremyMcKane, Susie Rosmarin, and Billy Zinser — that puzzled me and irked me more than a little. Nearly all five artists deal with light somehow in [...]
Child with Mother, White marble, 1972 (BH 544), Hepworth Estate Yesterday at the Glasstire panel discussion on regionalism at the Modern in Fort Worth, Art Guy Michael Galbreth repeated over and over that “artists care about the world” — that they are looking to the world and their experience of it, and not to other art [...]
Wife: So? How was it? Terrifying? Husband: No, it was amazing! Totally different than I expected. I got completely lost in there and had to feel my way out . Wife: Holy crap, that sounds like my worst nightmare. Husband: But it’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced — it made my whole body feel completely different, and blind, without [...]
Sterling Allen’s show up at Fort Worth Contemporary Arts, called Housing Edition, is a twenty-first century lesson in the old adage “You are what you eat.” Given the sure fact that our age consumes more, wastes more, and puts more crud into our brains and bellies than any other period in history, it follows that we’d [...]
