The Dallas Planning Commission has approved guidelines for West Dallas – now that the Hunt Hill Bridge may prompt major redevelopment there. But can profit-hungry development be directed? Can the older neighborhoods be preserved? We ask Brent Brown, the head of the Dallas CityDesign Studio, about the future of an area that includes train tracks, chickens wandering unpaved roads — and long-established Hispanic families.
Amid all of our efforts at preening for the Big Game — pitching North Texas as Open for Business and Ready for Our Close-Up — some substantive good has actually come about. Good, that is, beyond the bump up in retail. Like Slant 45, which may well have been the largest community-service effort in North Texas history. We talk to Gigi Antoni, president of Big Thought, which ran the project.
Alexander Calder looms so large in mid-century modern art, it’s hard to imagine anyone not knowing (and enjoying) his work. Yet it’s the premise of the Nasher’s current show – ‘Alexander Calder and Contemporary Art: Form, Balance, Joy’ – that the seven young artists also included here had to ‘re-discover’ Calder. Nasher director Jeremy Strick explains – and discusses the Nasher’s various sighting, sounding and speaking series.
Walker Evans, Margaret Bourke-White and Berenice Abbott created groundbreaking bodies of work: Evans for his depictions of Southern poverty, Bourke-White for her towering images of industrialization, Abbott for her New York street scenes. We talk to Jessica May, co-curator of the Amon Carter exhibition ‘American Modern,’ about these three artists, how each crossed paths and influenced the others, about the dot-matrix and the urge for narrative.
The National Performance Network has been an important support system for emerging, unconventional artists for 25 years — helping such groups as Urban Bush Women and the Blue Man Group when they were just starting to tour. The NPN is holding its 25th annual meeting in Dallas next week with shows at the Majestic Theatre and the Latino Cultural Center. We talk with NPN CEO MK Wegmann.
Dallas native Regina Taylor has directed one of her plays at the Dallas Theater Center before this, but ‘The Trinity River Plays’ will be her first premiere there as a playwright — in a co-production with Chicago’s Goodman Theatre. We talk to Taylor about attending SMU, the growth of her play, its title and its food content.
Our very good friend Cindy Chaffin headed over to the cavernous-but-no-longer-so-empty warehouse where ArtCon will happen tomorrow night, and she taped Margo Lee Miller, Rob Conover, David Harrell and at least half a dozen other area artists getting ready for the big to-do. See you all there.
Having all their music instruments stolen didn’t stop a Brooklyn band from taking a subway ride and cutting a new music video … that’s gone viral. But how did they do it?
We rarely get much serious fog action here in North Texas. I mean, real fog, the little-cat-feet-squatting-down-and-turning-into-a-thick-fat-furball kind of thing. But San Francisco is a whole nother climate, and here’s some truly gorgeous footage of surging, rolling, whispy, furtive fog — just when we’re starting to cool down a little for autumn.
It’s the Hall O’Death, it’s the Attack of Social Media. It’s our local Fox News station on how tweeting and Facebooking have made journalists into frantic, multi-platform self-promoters.
