There’ll be a lot of gay sailors and upscale trashy-looking women at the DMA next fall. More than usual. We mean the mannequins, of course. What were YOU thinking? The Dallas Museum of Art will present the US premiere of an exhibition of Jean Paul Gaultier’s fashions (including, yes, a section devoted to “Eurotrash/X-Rated”).
The Dallas Contemporary has re-booted. Dedicated to cutting-edge visual art, the Contemporary moved into a sprawling new home this year and its director retired. The new executive director Peter Doroshenko talks about that space, about the changes he’s bringing.
We talk to Heather MacDonald, co-curator of ‘The Mourners: Medieval Tomb Sculptures from the Court of Burgundy,’ a mouthful of a title that doesn’t convey how intimate, personal and gorgeous this once-in-a-lifetime touring exhibition is.
In February, the Dallas Contemporary moved into its new warehouse space. That’s one reason its new show is called “Seedlings.” Another reason, the artists themselves are young ‘seedlings.’ And then there are the artworks — different takes on nature and art, nature and machine, confrontation and collaboration.
Art is a commodity, art is labor — especially in this economy. Artist Carolyn Sortor went to UTD’s CentralTrak to see if they’d join a national conversation about art and economics. The results are an art exhibition featuring inventive (and subversive) treatments of money-making, and more. Jerome Weeks reports.
Museum curators are some of the more invisible arts managers, yet their jobs demand they be diplomats, scholars and set designers. Associate curator Heather MacDonald has become a major presence at the DMA, helming (or co-helming) three shows, two of them now running, and the third, perhaps the DMA’s most significant show this year. It has already opened to acclaim in NYC.
Hiroshi Sugimoto, Tyrrhenian Sea, Scilla, (photograph) 1993 In the Undermain Theatre’s current, superb production of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, set designer John Arnone has lined the back of the stage with four, large, silvery-grey panels. My heart sank when I saw them. The fear was that director Stan Wojewodski was going to use video projections, jazzing [...]
Westerners often see African art as ‘folk crafts’ — anyone made them. But according to Roslyn Adele Walker, the DMA’s senior curator of African art, that’s because early explorers weren’t interested in individual artists. There actually have been celebrated artists in Africa, and the DMA has one of our country’s leading collections of their work. The museum has just released a new, sumptuous book by Dr. Walker, showcasing the collection’s riches.
A hard-hat tour of Dallas Contemporary’s new home next to the Design District finds a vast, raw warehouse space that does have some great potential. It opens next month with a risky, large-scale show, complete with a wooden mockup of an airliner — “part-disaster area, part-playground.” Just the kind of show such a space calls out for. But will it fly?
Toward the end of his life, artist Jacob Lawrence returned to the first series of paintings he ever did — on the brilliant Haitian revolutionary, Toussaint L’Ouverture — and transformed 15 of the paintings into silkscreen prints. Courtesy of the Curtis E. Ransom Collection, the Dallas Museum of Art is exhibiting them all, packing a fair amount of color, history and vivid storytelling into a little gallery.
