Afternoon Delight is a daily diversion for when you’re just back from lunch, but not quite ready to get down to work. Check back weekdays at 1 p.m. for another one.
Cas Haley performs a CD release party at That Guy’s Coffee tonight in Paris, Texas. Which gives us an excuse to post one of KXT’s best On the Road videos. Enjoy.
Guest blogger Danielle Marie Georgiou is the artistic director and choreographer of DGDG: Danielle Georgiou Dance Group. She also serves as the Assistant Director of the UT Arlington’s Dance Ensemble. And she’s a member of Muscle Nation.
Photos: Red Arrow Contemporary
“She’s blowing up” takes on a whole new connotation when referencing Paris-based installation artist Anne Ferrer. Her inflatable sensorial sculptures—and her watercolor paintings that will be included in this exhibition—speak to her nomadic lifestyle of late. She can pack up her entire show in a single suitcase; not many artists can claim that.
This summer, she’ll call Red Arrow Contemporary’s large box space home, as her show “Blow Up” moves in and her dainty beauties begin breathing, growing and evolving into the fantastical creatures they are meant to be. Red Arrow is the perfect boyfriend du jour. The freshman gallery and D Magazine nominee for Best Art Space is making a name for courting fresh new artists and curating shows that are expanding the art scene in the city.
Ferrer’s work has been heralded as “lush and sensuous, sensitive and bold, mysteriously animated, Parisian,” by Ed Rubin, who curated her 2011 “Billowing Beauty” show at New York’s LAB Gallery.
Now, 2013′s “Blow Up” might just knock our socks off, or at least have us kicking our feet up and laying down on a bed of balloon goodness. But her sculptures, which use sailboat material, are much more than just blown up round things.
There are trench coats whose stuffing explodes through the seams:
Cheerfully colored figures dancing to undulating fans:
Cartoon-like shapes flirting with our eyes:
Ferrer lives and works in Paris and was raised in a small rural town in southern France. She studied in the U.S., receiving her BFA from the University of Oklahoma and her MFA from Yale. She has shown throughout France, at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Centre Pompidou, and the Chateau d’Avignon, at the Ho Ham Museum in Seoul, la Casa de Americas in Madrid, the French Institute in Rome and Naples. She’s also recently built a monumental installation for the Dumbo Art Festival in Brooklyn and exhibited at the LAB Gallery in New York.
While she has shown in Texas before, at Blue Star in San Antonio, her first show in Dallas promises to be a good time (just what you want from your inflatable friends, right?), and promises to be Red Arrow’s most memorable show of 2013.
“Blow Up” opens Saturday with a reception from 6-9 p.m. The exhibition runs throughl June 22.
Local arts advocacy group ArtLoveMagic holds its signature event, Underground, on Saturday. It’s a live art show, where visitors can watch artists at work. The event is part of the organization’s mission to help connect artists with the public.
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In 2011, Char McGaughy was in the same position a lot of young artists find themselves in. She was ready to share her art with the public, maybe even sell it. But she didn’t have a clue how.
“I searched for a long time to try to find out how you get into galleries, how do you get your work out to the public,” she said. “And I never had any luck until I came across ArtLoveMagic.”
She met the arts advocacy group at the Deep Ellum Arts Festival. ArtLoveMagic’s mission is simple – to help artists make the most of their talent. McGaughy first showed her oil paintings at one of its events. Since then, she’s been in multiple art shows and done work for the Dallas Observer and D Magazine.
“And it just keeps coming. And I would not have done it without them,” she says.
ArtLoveMagic was formed in 2007 by Michael Lagocki, David Rodriguez and Justin Nygren. Lagocki and Rodriguez are both artists; Nygren has a background in event planning.
Each month, they hold small art shows and offer free workshops where kids learn from artists. Then once a year, they stage a massive event called Underground. At the show, visitors can engage with more than 100 artists as they create new work.
Nygren says that before Art Love Magic, he sensed an unhealthy level of competition among local artists. He hopes that these group events will serve as a rallying point.
“In the larger art conversation – the national art conversation – Dallas, unfortunately has been kind of off the map,” he says. “And my perspective is that the best way we can put ourselves on the map is banding together as one large community.”
ArtLoveMagic’s founders originally thought they’d come up with a great idea for a business. Instead, Nygren says the non-profit’s turned into a labor of love.
“You work with people who are struggling and trying to figure out how to make a career out of their art and you come alongside them and say, ‘I’m here, whatever you need.’ That DNA gets passed on. We’ve basically become this huge, massive family of people who are driven by our passion.”
Be sure to check out our Artist Studio Tour videos with a trio of artists who are participating in Underground.
A NEW MUSEUM: Dallas is hundreds of miles from open water. But a little detail like that isn’t keeping us from getting our own maritime museum. A lot of the details are still being worked out, but the Dallas Maritime Museum would likely open in 2016 on a 3.5 acre site near the Trinity River. A decommissioned nuclear submarine – the USS Dallas – would be a major feature. “We look upon its purpose as education, but also as a living memorial to the contributions North Texas has made to the Navy, the Coast Guard and the merchant marine,” Rollie Stevens, the president of the museum’s foundation, tells dallasnews.com.
ON THE PROWL: Today and tomorrow the Fort Worth Music Festival takes over the city’s Panther Island Pavilion. And the venue is turning into a versatile space for a city in need of one. It’s already hosted another major event this year (April’s Untapped Festival) and future plans call for everything from a concert series to a Forth of July party to a 5K. But it’s the space it provides the local music scene that might be most valuable. “Anyone who wants to see a local band drawing more than 1,000 people but fewer than five or six thousand has no choice but to head east, toward Grand Prairie and Dallas,” Preston Jones writes on dfw.com. “Plenty of Fort Worth acts capable of pulling more than Lola’s Saloon or the Live Oak can hold (like the Orbans or [Quaker City Night Hawks]) end up playing spaces like the Granada Theater in Dallas, where capacity is just over 1,000.”
MAJOR MONEY: The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture is getting a major influx of cash. It’s the recipient of a pair of endowment gifts totaling $1.5 million. Dallas philanthropist Kim Hiett Jordan donated $1 million, with the other $500,000 coming from the McDermott Foundation.
This week, Art&Seek’s Stephen Becker and Dallas Morning News movie critic Chris Vognar review Star Trek: Into Darkness. We’ve got a feeling both Trekkies and non-Trekkies alike will enjoy. And we take a listen back to our January interview with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Johnny Knoxville ahead of next week’s DVD release of their movie, The Last Stand. Be sure to subscribe to The Big Screen podcast on iTunes. Stream this week’s podcast below or download it.
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For a shortened version of our Star Trek: Into Darkness review:
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This is the first in a series of reports on the development of the second Gathering.
In December 2011, more than 200 area artists were involved in staging and performing A Gathering: The Dallas Arts Community Reflects on 30 Years of AIDS, perhaps the largest, single, cross-cultural collaboration ever staged locally. It involved volunteer dancers, musicians, singers, actors, video artists and choreographers in an AIDS awareness benefit at the Winspear Opera House to mark the 30 years we’ve lived under the pandemic. And the people who brought together the dozen local arts groups for a single evening did it all — writing, coordinating, directing, rehearsing, re-writing — in less than four months.
Now they want to do it again this fall. But do it a little differently.
For starters, they’ll have more prep time. The producers held their first, high-level, planning session Tuesday night at Charles Santos’ house. A Gathering was the brainchild of Santos, the director of TITAS, the music and dance presenting organization. He had done AIDS benefits before, while in Austin, but A Gathering was his first since moving to Dallas in 2001. He wound up putting his heart and a ton of last-minute effort into it.
Santos conceived the show as something of a “deconstructed musical” or “concert musical,” with songs and dances, no sets or staging, but with a loose ‘emotional arc’ pushing things along from loss and grief to eventual hope and community action. The show would focus on Dallas-area history, people, losses, artists, and organizations. It benefited the local, non-profit care organizations in a four-way split: AIDS Arms, AIDS Interfaith Network, AIDS Services of Dallas and Resource Center Dallas.
But in the end, A Gathering didn’t gather the audience it could: the Winspear was not even half full. Santos and Chris Heinbaugh, AT&T Performing Arts Center’s external affairs vice president, figure that’s because a) it was a first-time event, people didn’t really know what it was, what to expect and b) because of that, the groups involved didn’t really promote it the way they could have, certainly not the way they might have pushed a regular, annual fundraiser. Santos says that one group leader, after being blown away by the show, even called him and apologized for not doing more.
“He saw it was that good, that moving,” Santos says.
So Heinbaugh, Santos, music director Gary Floyd and Joel Ferrel, associate artistic director of the Dallas Theater Center, have started conferring for a second Gathering (Ferrell was not at Tuesday’s meeting). They plan on using much the same impressive line-up of local performers — including the Turtle Creek Chorale, the Texas Ballet Theatre, Dallas Opera, Bruce Wood Dance Project, Dallas Wind Symphony and the Dallas Black Dance Theatre — but they’re building a different show.
Why? Heinbaugh says they really can’t employ the historic timeline approach that the occasion of the 30th anniversary permitted them. Heinbaugh researched and wrote the original Gathering, including the speeches and AIDS data that were projected on screens (“In 1985, Dallas County reported 125 cases of AIDS — and 123 deaths.”) That history helped stitch together the first show, made it flow. Now he’s got to find some other threads.
But Santos has been compiling music selections anyway, and he thinks there’s a way to follow a similar emotional arc. He, Floyd and Heinbaugh spent two and a half hours Tuesday listening to some 30 songs from the classical repertoire (Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater) and Broadway shows (“Falling Slowly” from Once) to dance-pop hits and faves from The Voice or Smash (Duffy’s “Mercy,” Pink’s ‘Nobody Knows”). They debated possible local singers for the tunes, wondered which songs would provide good material for a choreographer or for an onstage transition, a shift in tone.
Santos is pushing for songs and for dramatic excerpts that do not directly address AIDS. He wants to get away from the expected material — selections from Rent and Angels in America – and away from overused gay anthems like Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.” He likes taking an “ordinary” song or scene and re-contextualizing it. It’s not too hard to find songs about loss or uplift to fit the occasion. But for him, even Madcon’s “Beggin’” can work. It’s not a soulful grovel by a lovelorn singer; it can be about non-profits trying to raise money.
Santos already has a list of more than 40 songs, and the first Gathering in 2011 used only half that number. So the culling and winnowing will continue over the next several months — as the producers start meeting with individual artists and groups.
After a stellar performance at the Homegrown Music and Arts fest in Dallas, Quiet Company met up with the On The Road crew in the KXT lounge at Hotel Indigo to play “… And You Said It Was Pretty Here” off of their album A Dead Man On My Back: Shine Honesty Revisited.
Afternoon Delight is a daily diversion for when you’re just back from lunch, but not quite ready to get down to work. Check back weekdays at 1 p.m. for another one.
The Office calls is quits with tonight’s series finale. In this video, the regulars get together to reflect on nine seasons at Dunder Mifflin. Fans of the show: Grab a hankie.
Today, we round out our latest group of Artist Studio Tours with a visit to Desmond Blair’s studio at UT Dallas. You can check out Desmond’s work, and that of more than 40 other artists, in person at Art Love Magic’s Underground 5, returning for its fifth year to South Side on Lamar on May 18. Underground 5 inspired Art&Seek to revive its Artist Studio Tour series .
A special thanks goes out to Tony Walls who allowed us to use footage from his inspiring video that followed Desmond as he created a painting. And check out studio tours with two other Underground 5 artists, Marilyn Vicente and Riley Holloway.
Medium: oil painting, pencil, digital art.
Number of years in this space: 2 years
What do you enjoy about working here? Typically it’s quiet here. I come in here on weekends or I come over here after I get off of work and I can turn my music on and get away from the hustle and bustle of the world. I can really come over here, clear my head and create at the same time; really just relax and zone into what I am doing.
If you could change something about the space, what would it be? I wish I had access to a bed here. Because I work in this studio, I envision someday having a house where there is a big open studio. I can go up stairs, crash for a little bit, and then come back down and just get to work. Because some times my inspiration doesn’t come at 5 o’clock when I get off of work, sometimes it comes at 1 AM. I think that is how creativity works, and even if it is just to get that initial thought out of your head, ideally I would like to fuse both spaces.
REVIEWING ‘PRISCILLA’: In Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, a trio of friends sets off on a road trip that gets wilder by the mile. Dallas Summer Musicals has brought the disco musical – based on a 1994 movie – to town; it’s currently in residence at the Musical Hall at Fair Park. So is it worth the trip? “Priscilla meets the ‘fun! fun! fun!’ quotient,” Mark Lowry writes on dfw.com. “But over-the-top costumes and drag numbers can’t erase the empty feeling once the lights come up.” Lawson Taitte was impressed by the acting but annoyed with everything else. “When the songs wedge themselves into dramatic scenes, the stretch to make the lyrics fit inspires giggles in the audience,” he writes on dallasnews.com. “And you’d think that a big, splashy show like this one would at least have fun dance numbers, but the choreography never rises above basic.” Judge for yourself through May 26.
THE LIBRARY CONUNDRUM: The library’s attempt to keep up with 21st Century demands has long been a topic of conversation. But a Wall Street Journal story drills down a level to ask a more specific question: What’s the role of the big city, massive central library? Cities from St. Louis to Boston are restructuring these grand, old structures to try to bring them into the digital age. And similar plans are being considered for New York’s central library. But these renovations are tricky. “Changing New York’s central library to make it more relevant for today’s users makes sense only if ‘relevance’ weren’t such a moving target,” Julie Iovine writes in the story. It’s a good read for those who care about the future of these institutions.
QUOTABLE: “In Oak Cliff, we thought of ourselves as being across the border from Dallas. We were in these rough-and-tumble buildings and there was a real camaraderie. We were the wild boys.”
- Austin artist Bob “Daddy-O” Wade, once part of the famed Oak Cliff Five. He talks about an upcoming reunion show at Gray Matters Gallery with dallasnews.com.
