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?

Earlier this year, the Amon Carter bought a rare, complete set of Edward S. Curtis’ monumental work of photography, The North American Indian. Culled from 30 years of research and more than 40,000 photos, the 20-volume work was forgotten and Curtis went bankrupt. But it contains some of the only visual evidence of a number of the 80 tribes Curtis documented — and it helped shape the way we view native Americans. Jerome Weeks reviews.

The NEA has released its full research report, 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (that link will take you to a downloadable PDF — but stock your printer, it’s more than 100 pages long). And earlier today, they streamed a live webcast discussing the results (the webcast will be made available online next [...]

According to an AP report by Jamie Stengle, the Dallas-based Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art was contacted by the friend of an Ohio vet, John Pistone, who picked up a photo album while he was in Hitler’s home near Berchtesgaden, Germany, at the end of WW II.
Turns out it was one of [...]

How do today’s arts education programs prepare students to make a real living in the arts? Jose Antonio Bowen, Dean of the Meadows School of the Arts and Algur H. Meadows Chair and Professor of Music at Southern Methodist University, discusses the topic on a recent episode of Think.

Considering the Dallas Symphony’s two-season-long commitment to highlight movie composers by commissioning world-premiere works from five of them and presenting multi-media perspectives on their careers — oh, and considering the Fort Worth Symphony’s New Year’s Eve concert of movie music — this Variety story must seem like a bucket of cold water. Or, gosh darn [...]

Paul Baker — theater director, educator, builder — was memorialized in a tribute Monday at the Dallas Children’s Theater. The founder of the Dallas Theater Center and the Booker T. Washington Arts Magnet High School was remembered as an inspiration, a stubborn visionary, a father and grandfather.

The British sculptor is best known for her haunting, “negative space” creations — like Ghost (1990), the plaster cast of the inside of a Victorian room (left) — and the Holocaust Monument in Vienna, also called the Nameless Library because it is a concrete cast of thousands of books, with their spines in, a commentary [...]

The wife and I and our Child-Home-From-College escaped North Texas for New Orleans last weekend and stayed in the Quarter. We enjoyed ourselves just wandering around — a sign of a great, pedestrian-friendly city — and came across a light, fresh, nifty restaurant called, simply, Eat, on Dumaine Street. It provided a very pleasant break [...]

North Texas is the land of splashy charity benefits. For a good cause, we’ll dress up and dance at any party. But in the past decade, homegrown benefits have sprouted up that have found local artists and musicians banding together to contribute their own work for charities.