WWF legend The Ultimate Warrior stands in front of a U.W. branded background, shirtless and in full guise. His chest is wet with sweat, muscles flexed to full suspension and nipples sharp enough to gouge the canvas mat. What was probably a reactionary response to an interviewer’s mention of arch-nemesis…
Last week’s Not Waiting For Permission, the 2nd Annual State of the Emerging Arts at UTD’s CentralTrak, continued the out-in-the-open conversation that’s forcing people to take notice, and perhaps sides, in their support of local art. For too long it seemed the conversations dictating the fate of independent galleries and…
We indulge the word memory in a utilitarian way, as though it were a physical space, crammed full of ancient locker combinations and emotional residue, a kind of messy junk drawer full of neural sparks that you’ll sort through, someday. In Cassandra Emswiler’s new solo show Canticles of Praise, on…
The most visually stimulating thing at the new Love Field terminal is the Cinnabon sign. There’s been a lot of hoohah this week over seven new commissioned “public” artworks at the terminal. Dixie Friend Gay’s “North Texas Sunrise” (2013) is a wall of mosaic tile at the entrance. It’s a…
We’ve raised some questions about the mayor’s #DallasArtWeek, but we also made sure to check out the annual Dallas Art Fair at the Fashion Industry Gallery, where artists and galleries displayed their work in one easy-to-peruse space. There was a lot of thoughtful gazing going on over the weekend, and…
At City Performance Hall last night, Mayor Mike Rawlings led a panel discussion about the future of the arts in Dallas, part of his #DallasArtsWeek initiative. All the panelists – Dallas Museum of Art director Maxwell L. Anderson, Dallas Theater Center artistic director Kevin Moriarty, filmmaker and Oak Cliff Film…
I remember a few years ago my car ran out of gas on I-35. I hopped down the bridge and started walking, in the dead of night, on Colorado toward Beckley. I’d left Oak Cliff a few years before, but the corner boys and gang bangers were right where I…
If the Dallas curator scene had a cypher, Kevin Rubén Jacobs would be Riff Raff, refusing to stay on beat, dropping obscure references, making meta-mash potatoes out of the other MCs and showcasing his deep knowledge of the pop culture and art world. His Oliver Francis Gallery has already kicked…
“Deep Ellum’s back” has been vomited out and up ad nauseum. The truth is it never left. Changed perhaps. Got its face kicked in a few times, then touched up with a lil plastic surgery, and now exists as an amalgamation of its roots and reanimations, with a strong neighborhood…
Named for Stephen King’s 1986 film, Maximum Overdrive the exhibition, which opens today at UT Dallas, picks up where the apocalyptic survival movie leaves off, with humor, gore and machismo. The movie is a cult classic for its depiction of electronic devices taking over the world, accompanied by a totally…
After stops in Fort Worth and Denton, British artist, culture critic and broadcaster Matthew Collings ends his North Texas tour at the Nasher Sculpture Center tonight. Not sure whether he’s worth your mind’s precious time? Here are five reasons. 1. He’s a tastemaker And even though he surely finds that…
At one point or another, it happens to all of us: We look at art and we just don’t “see it.” For Stephen Lapthisophon, artist and art history professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, it’s these moments he enjoys most. “There are works of art that I love…
Houston-based artist and activist Rick Lowe was in downtown Dallas last night, delivering a sort-of inaugural address for a new series of design-focused lectures for the buildingcommunityWORKSHOP, a non-profit that works to remake struggling communities through design. To which you might say, “Great, another week-night lecture by a dude I’ve…
Anyone casually familiar with American art of the past half-century will recognize the eerie, erotically menacing, character-driven photographs that Cindy Sherman began producing in the late 1970s. See also: – At the Nasher, Ken Price’s Ceramics Are Big and Bold and, Lord Reltny, a Little Dirty – At the Amon…
“It takes a village,” goes the saying. But what if the village is under-developed, infested with violence and depleted of resources from years of neglect and misappropriation? That’s the question Rick Lowe has been addressing since he founded Project Row Houses in Third Ward, a neighborhood that’s been pondering those…
Jeremy Turner, founder of the Vintage Mobile store and purveyor of 3,000 holiday sweaters last Christmas, is taking on another sector of the mobile economy: art. Turner says he has purchased a 1955 Spartan trailer and plans to convert it into an art gallery. “I want to show art by…
Much of Big Pictures, the Amon Carter’s large-format photography show, is about drama. It’s approached from an oblique perspective and covers lots of historical ground, and it would have you believe (if you read the little essays posted on the exhibition walls) that the camera-recorded moment — the still shot…
Early 90s in Dallas, you could creep to the train yard in Oak Cliff and see tags from Kaws and Barry McGee, a ghetto gallery-on-wheels for street art. For the Donjuan boys — three broke brothers from the hood — it was the seed to survival. Before the brothers became…
We don’t see too many artists from China in Dallas, but Galleri Urbane likes to gather from underutilized sources. Currently, they’re showing an exhibition by Florida-from-China artist Kirk Ke Wang, who turns wall-sized canvases into politically supercharged paintings. He does it through lovely subversion, shape-shifting the images from representational symbolism…
Just up the street from Lee Harvey’s in the Cedars neighborhood of South Dallas is the home of a young couple that doubles as an art gallery called Homeland Security. An exhibit there, Windows, Walls and Screens: New Paintings by Brendan Carroll, sees the work of the smart young Atlanta…
In the diverse exhibition Chagall: Beyond Color, the Dallas Museum of Art offers enticing works of art among less noted pieces by one of the 20th century’s most famous artists. Marc Chagall, like the Coen brothers today, proudly deployed his Jewishness in his art. As with the Coen brothers’ body…
It’s hard to do justice to the freewheeling radiance of Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective at the Nasher Sculpture Center. Suffice it to say that you should see the work of the late Mr. Price for its combination of cheeky razzmatazz and idiosyncratic imagination. As the second stop on a…
