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While the Cowboys finish saying goodbye to their old home one piece at a time, they’re busy finishing up the newest feature at their digs Arlington: 14 works of contemporary art commissioned specifically for Cowboys Stadium.
Gene Jones led a media tour for through the building yesterday, along with family members Charlotte Anderson and Melissa Meeks, who Jones said helped make the calls about which art to include, and where.
The works are in various stages of completion — some hanging, finished, above the stadium’s entryways, others surrounded by painting crews and plastic wrap. Jones said we can expect to see all but two of the pieces finished in time for the Cowboys’ home opener September 20.
Rather than stock the place with statues of old players and coaches, Jones said artists are responding to the building and the Cowboys more subtly. The artists each toured the building, some early on in its construction, before settling on their designs. Anderson said the finished collection will reflect the ways the artists were influenced by the space, “some by light, some by glass, some by what this building will mean to the people who enter it.”
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Los Angeles-based artist Dave Muller working on his Solar Arrangement above one of the concession stands as the tour came by, and said that while much of his work only lasts a few months on the wall at an exhibit, he took a break to chat, half with his benefactors and half with the press.
“There’s something creatively satisfying,” Muller said, “about doing something that I know is going to be up for a long time.”
“Forever,” Jones corrected him.
Standing under Annette Lawrence’s “Coin Toss,” a spiral arrangement of wires over the stadium’s southeast entrance, Jones said, with the movement and energy implied by the piece, she likes “to compare it to what’s going on on the field, only in an artistic kind of way.”
Terry Haggerty, who had just arrived at the stadium for a look around before starting work on his piece, said he liked the idea of doing work that will be viewed over and over again, from multiple angles as fans walk by. “Maybe at first you won’t think anything of it,” he said, “but you come back and maybe then you start to think about what art you like.”
