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.
We’ve seen these items before: Native Indian blankets, pottery and masks. But rarely like this. Eugene and Clare Thaw collected Indian artifacts as fine art, not history. So the DMA’s new show has a crafted beauty that makes the familiar feel fresh.
It’s a big weekend in local visual arts. The Dallas Art Fair starts this evening, and guest blogger Brad Ford Smith gives us a little preview of one artist at the fair whose work you might want to check out. And he reminds us about new shows at the Nasher, the Contemporary and the Belmont Hotel.
Coming up is a HUGE week for contemporary art in North Texas: The Dallas Contemporary opens three shows, the Nasher Sculpture Center opens a new one, the Goss-Michael Foundation, etc. – and they’re all tied to the Dallas Art Fair. Art&Seek on Think TV talks with the Contemporary’s Peter Doroshenko on his shows, the function of art fairs and what a collective of young French artists is up to in South Texas.
Quite a few art museums have created video trailers for an exhibition, but San Antonio’s McNay Art Museum has done a lovely job for a smart, witty and accessible show (it runs through May). The sculptures recreate ordinary objects with ordinary materials and they recall everything from miniature Claes Oldenburgs to sort of a demented Marcel Duchamp readymade.
Car culture and the American landscape have been Ed Ruscha’s twin topics since he took Route 66 west from Oklahoma in 1956. Fort Worth’s Modern Art Museum has a major retrospective of 50 years of his art: maps, photos, parking lots, gas stations, the works.
It’s the Kimbell and Impressionism – again. Next year, the Kimbell will be the only US stop for a sizable collection of late-19th century European paintings that are going on a world tour – 73 works by the likes of Degas, Monet, Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec, all from Massachusetts’ Clark Art Institute.
All of the dates aren’t nailed down, but next spring’s Foote Festival is considerably fleshed out with contributions from 15 organizations: theaters, the Arts Magnet, SMU’s DeGolyer Library, Arts & Letters Live, the Dallas International Film Festival — and, oh yeah, Art&Seek.
