Start date: Thursday, October 8, 2009
Event is ongoing: Until Sunday, March 21, 2010

In celebration of the opening of Dallas’s new AT&T Performing Arts Center, the Dallas Museum of Art is organizing an exhibition of the work of five international and American artists who have used the forms and ideas surrounding performance, including opera and theater works, as starting points for paintings, sculpture, films, and photographs.

Drawn primarily from the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art and with important loans, this extensive presentation will include British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare’s film A Masked Ball (Un ballo in maschera), which is based on Giuseppe Verdi’s opera of the same name and contains a brilliant reimagining of dance, costume, and narrative; Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s quietly intense and atmospheric evocation of an ill-at-ease mind, the three-screen film work Talo/The House; a new installation work by Dallas-based artists Frances Bagley and Tom Orr based on the spectacular sets and costumes they designed for a recent triumphant Dallas Opera production of Verdi’s Nabucco; and a selection of Argentine artist Guillermo Kuitca’s colorful and powerful paintings and drawings based on intricate seating charts and grand stages of the major theaters and opera houses around the world. In addition, a selection of works illustrating the fusion of performance and photography in the art of the last thirty years will be on view.

The museum is closed Mondays, Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day. On Late Night Fridays (third Friday of the month, excluding December), the museum is open until midnight.