So it’s a mad-crazy art weekend here in Dallas, let me tell you, if the droves of sleek black cars and idle chauffeurs loitering outside art institutions, hotels and private homes didn’t give it away. Both the DMA and Nasher launched new shows this weekend, both by remarkable female artists that hail from the UK, Karla Black and Eva Rothschild. [...]
Allison V. Smith, Godbolt, March 2007 Marfa Contemporary, a brand-new West Texas outpost of the Oklahoma City-based City Arts Center, which bills itself as “a nonprofit organization dedicated to encouraging creative expression in all its forms through education and exhibitions,” opens its inaugural show this weekend out in, er, Marfa, with a photography exhibit called Pilgrimage [...]
Despite all that’s wrong in this society it’s the responsibility of the new artists to occur. The explanation that the times and the society are bad is pointless. Probably they’ve always been and the issue is whether too bad or a little better. The reason for doing nothing is always wrong. There is also the [...]
I had 24 hours in NY last month and spent most of it going in and out of the enormous, heavy glass doors of Chelsea galleries (and the confusingly center-hinged door of Comme Des Garçons, in which dear husband nearly got stuck). Even with a firm commitment to see everything in the neighborhood, I still [...]
This past weekend CADD hosted another effort to get people into galleries, called Design District Gallery Day. I did not, I’ll admit, spend the day participating in Gallery Day, though it wouldn’t have been a bad way to spend the infernally hot daytime hours. I went in the evening, and only to two galleries, so I can [...]
In a little carved out space of the Hoffman Galleries at the DMA, there are three pieces by Japanese artist Nobuo Sekine, founder of the Mono-ha Movement (mono-ha translates to “school of things”) that are wonderful, on view through September 2. I had heard that the Rachofskys were amassing work by post-war Japanese artists, and here’s a bit [...]
Amos Vogel, founder of Cinema 16, courtesy Northwest Chicago Film Society I’m not sure when the guys that run the Texas Theater sleep, they keep that theater so freaking packed with kick-ass programming. And these guys have now, on top of everything else, launched the Oak Cliff Film Festival, a loaded little fest which [...]
I’d seen Bret Slater’s work before, in his studio, just prior to all of it getting zipped into a big duffle bag and schlepped across the Atlantic for Art Brussels by his Belgian dealer, Elaine Levy, where all of it promptly sold, apparently some of it to a French supermodel, but I can’t back that up. [...]
Mishka Henner, Dutch Landscapes, 2011 So, it’s been about a month since the Dallas Art Fair weekend and all the very good independent shows and events that surrounded it. That was an incredible weekend, if I may lend my opinion on it – a game changing, finally-Dallas-is-getting-it’s-shit together, high-five-worthy weekend of friction and art [...]
The group show up at Brand 10 Art Space in Fort Worth through April 28, called Showmen, with work by artists Tim Best, Titus O’Brien, Tom Orr and Cameron Schoepp, walks an elegant line between merriment and confusion, with political undertones masked in saccharine sweetness. Loaded metaphors strut boldly through the show like brave men in tights. Tom Orr’s installation on [...]
Last week, a little crowd gathered in Marty Walker’s small gallery space to look at artist Wayne White’s new show there called I Say A Lot of Things. We were fresh from watching a new documentary made by Neil Berkeley about White called Beauty is Embarrassing in which White said a lot of things about [...]
Here are some brief thoughts on the Virginia Overton show, called Deluxe, at the Power Station — my sort of parenthetical reading to Overton’s larger themes here of memory, labor and spectacle. I was at first, as many were I suspect, a little underwhelmed by Overton’s installation in the space. I guess I was sort of expecting some [...]
My husband and I were invited to CADD’s (Contemporary Art Dealers of Dallas) latest event this weekend — The CADD Mystery Dinner: Eat Your Art Out, and I have to say, I was a little trepidatious about how the evening would go. The premise of the evening was to connect people with a mutual interest in contemporary [...]
Last night, the DMA hosted its latest State of the Arts panel, on the topic of contemporary art in Dallas. The panel was made up of a brotherhood of institutional leaders and curators: Jeffrey Grove, the DMA’s Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art; Dr. Michael Corris, Chair of Studio Art at SMU; Peter Doroshenko, [...]
Lawrence Lee and Jonathan Cross are art dopplegangers. While they look nothing alike, the trajectories of their art careers have played out in very similar ways, in no small part due to Barry Whistler’s good nose about the two of them. The two artists had never met until the opening reception of their shows at BWG [...]
Walking through the first floor of Matias Faldbakken’s exhibit, Oslo, Texas, at the Power Station is an exhilarating hazard — spent bullets are strewn all over the floor like a Wiley Coyote trap or perilous Marx Brothers bait. One half expects to go reeling, arms windmilling, up into the air and then flat on your back, defeated. [...]
William Lamson, Action for the Paiva (video still), 2010, Courtesy Marty Walker Gallery “Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.” — Jean Jacques Rousseau Last week, I spent a wholly enraptured twenty-five minutes at Marty Walker Gallery watching the figure of artist Will Lamson eek his way across the surface of Portugal’s Paiva River, like Jesus [...]
If you were to go into the Hawn Gallery in the Hamon Arts Library at SMU right now, you’d think you’d entered an exhibit of some of the University’s collections of old documents – papers pulled out of a file to air out a bit and make us remember something we’d forgotten or teach something we never knew. It’s a very proper-seeming [...]
When I wrote about the show of Qui Anxiong’s animated films at the Crow Collection for a kids’ blog yesterday, I began with a disclaimer about the sometimes mature themes in the films and how some parents may not be jazzed about their littles watching allegorical warfare and the toxins of contemporary consumption play out in [...]
So, I grew up on this tiny liberal arts college campus that was on an old 18th century farm in almost-rural New Hampshire. There was a legendary ghost, Emma, that would stalk about the place, showing up naked at odd hours of the night asking for shelter; plus, the house had also been a stop on the [...]
