Art Conspiracy, the coolest art party in Dallas, started a decade ago as a way to raise money for people displaced by Hurricane Katrina. The brainchild of two Dallas culture-philes, Jason Roberts and Sarah Jane Semrad, that first year a small team cleaned up the then-vacant Texas Theatre, hung the…
Left Hand First In daily life, pretty is quite the compliment. Sure, it may rank lower than beautiful or stunning. But every good flatterer knows the power of telling a woman she’s pretty. In art, pretty is perjorative. You want to insult a serious painter? Tell her that her life’s…
Teenaged girls are a peculiar species. And Twitter is an even weirder place. Put those two together and you have today’s No. 1 trending topic that is #alexfromtarget. Yes, a young girl tweeted a picture of a long-haired boy, who could be plucked out of any current chart-topping boy band,…
Draftsmen of the Apocalypse CentralTrak opens a group exhibition that explores violence and “mankind’s eventual doom.” All the artists in this exhibition use their work to pinpoint or illuminate aspects of violence in either history or the present day. While seemingly apropos for Halloween weekend, it seems the thread that…
Patricia Reed’s “The Two” greets visitors to Zhulong Gallery’s international group show, Systema. A pair of bright red megaphones frozen in french kiss, any amplified messages lost in the other, in what you can imagine as an echo chamber of yelling instructions. When used appropriately, megaphones can relay instruction to…
Sometimes ink is given to the artists showing at the Nasher Sculpture Center simply due to its reputation. Which is not unexpected: It’s the norm in the art world to approach a venerated institution’s offerings as more noteworthy than less high-profile spaces. Plus, with bigger marketing budgets, the Dallas Museum…
Fill October’s final full weekend with art. As fall trickles into town in fits and starts, decorate your life at these galleries. And for once, Friday is the stronger night to hit the galleries, although there will be compelling work to see Saturday as well. Ella Kruglyanskaya’s Grafika Much of…
Dallas can be a difficult city to be proud of. I’m sure that statement brings with it numerous detractors who will verbally punt me back to wherever I’m from. I grew up here, just to be clear, and even moved back after very quickly falling out of love with New…
Liliana Bloch might run the smallest gallery in town. With just a few white walls cordoning off her art inside Brian Gibb’s The Public Trust, she’s proving with each exhibition she programs that in the art world, it’s not size that matters…
Digital-Distraction at Barry Whistler Gallery Put down your cellphone and see some art this weekend. For his latest work, John Pomara found himself interested in the way digital technology simultaneously connects us and disconnects us. Everyone has that friend who’s in constant communication with everyone except the people in front…
Everyone’s seen a Renoir, most people know about Degas’ dancers, or recognize Manet’s Balcony. The ubiquity of Impressionism inspires films, fiction, and even credit card embellishment. “Two Girls at a Piano” reminds a father of his two daughters, so he finds a knock off online; an art student stares endlessly…
Saturday night, the Stafford sisters open their final art exhibition on Dragon Street. Aptly titled, Always and Forever, it’s a show revolving around memento mori – or objects that warn or remind of death. But their gallery isn’t dying; it’s growing. “We had two options, we could close or we…
Much of the art on display in The Modern’s newest exhibition doesn’t belong in a museum. The very title, Urban Theater: New York Art in the 1980s, implies the art’s original presence in the streets. Even today, after decades of moving the risky stuff off the streets and onto the…
From the foyer, you can hear the squeals of delight echoing from the garden of the Nasher Sculpture Center where visitors have climbed into the spool-like creations known as spun chairs. They are on display as part of Provocations: The Architecture and Design of Heatherwick Studio, an exhibition that surveys…
I’m not for dessert after dinner. Honestly, I’m not much for sugar. I don’t put it in my coffee; I don’t crave pumpkin pie in the fall; and icing gives me a headache. But when it comes to art, my personal taste would manifest as an 11-year-old girl – all…
The walls of the Dallas Contemporary’s main gallery wear unfamiliarly dark shades of black and maroon. When it’s empty, the space seems more reverent, more immersive. All you hear is the click of your heel meeting the floor, and all you see are the rich, vibrant colors of Peruvian costumes…
This weekend, the gallery scene expanded in two divergent directions with the opening of both Erin Cluley Gallery and Cydonia. Over the big, white bridge Erin Cluley Gallery became the first commercial art space in Trinity Groves – although not in the area’s conventional strip mall of restaurants. Tucked into…
By Justin Hunt The storybook nostalgia of South Dallas’ RE Gallery is the perfect milieu for the exhibition of Benjamin Terry’s latest works, the unconscious mind. While Terry’s previous ventures focused principally on large, technically adept, two-dimensional works, the current series is a breakthrough of shape and color in much…
The visual art season starts this month with lots of exciting exhibitions.
Being an artist can be a tough gig, especially if your heart is set on living indoors and enjoying the occasional meal. Naturally most artists find themselves working more than a few odd jobs to keep the lights on. So when California native Gary Sweeney was given the chance to…
The first time I met Kenny Goss, he wanted to show me his art collection. We were meeting for an article about the annual fundraiser, MTV:ReDefine, but first, would I like to see his Damien Hirst? While famously associated with the pop singer George Michael, the Goss-Michael Foundation is more…
In much of Casey Gray’s art, there’s a humorous tension between message and medium. Imagine if the 17th century Flemish painters had worked in spray paint. Conversely, picture Peter Paul Rubens on a skateboard. See? Funny. This was the crux of much of San Francisco-based Gray’s early work, in which…
