Guest blogger Brad Ford Smith helps you plan your weekend at the fair.

Bright lights, building bling, a new center for Texas architecture named for a friend, Rick Santorum’s voting record on the NEA and Glenn Ligon in Fort Worth: Is this a roundup or what?

Caravaggio and His Followers in Rome will only be seen in the United States at the Kimbell. The show documents how influential the 16th century master once was — despite his short, violent life. But there’s another story here, the story of a young artist starting out in the Big Art Capitol of Europe, finding a patron and leaving his mark — literally.

It’s the first survey of Mark Bradford’s meteoric career. In only 10 years, he’s had a solo show at the Whitney in New York and won the ‘genius’ grant. Bradford scavenges his LA neighborhood for scraps of paper — and turns them into archeological maps, abstract expressionist swirls, murals as ephemeral as newspapers, as corroded as Roman wall paintings.

The great British painter died in July, but he’ll be coming to Fort Worth in a major retrospective of his portrait paintings. THIS WILL BE THE ONLY U.S. VENUE.

Conduit Gallery has a new group show, Wunderkammer, inspired by the old ‘chambers of wonders’ that collected the strange and exotic. If the works by some 20 artists from Texas and Kentucky are all over the place, that’s part of the intent — to fascinate and puzzle.

The Amon Carter Museum opened as a regional collection of Western-frontier art, but over the past 50 years, it re-invented itself as a leading museum of American art, including a major photography collection. So – what now? That’s why its new director, Andrew Walker, is trying to re-think, re-frame the museum.

When it comes to transforming a city’s visual arts landscape, North Texas doesn’t have a residency program quite on the scale of CORE – part of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Now the MAC has launched a three-year collaboration with CORE, bringing its annual show to town, the first time it’s ever left Houston. Plus, a film documenting it.

Last year, there was ‘BODIES, the Exhibition.’ And later this month, there will be ‘The Accidental Mummies of Guanajato.’ What is it about about the West End and dead bodies?

Nearly every weekend, somewhere in North Texas, there’s a gun & knife show. So UTD artist-in-residence Heyd Fontenot has co-curated his own — with 100 artworks shot, stabbed or made from weapons.