Synecdoche: Midge LynnHaley-Henman Gallery 422 Singleton Blvd. 5 to 8 p.m. Saturday Dallas-based Midge Lynn chose the title Synecdoche to describe her process of capturing a particular moment in the life of the model. Lynn is a conceptual artist who plays with the world of everyday objects and people, the…
From his backyard studio, Oak Cliff artist Chris Bingham has detailed the face of a survivor. “Abdur” was granted asylum from his home country, Afghanistan, where he was accused of being a spy for the United States. In a mostly dark painting, a colorful bandana represents his loss of identity…
Aesthetically, the two shows running concurrently at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Kathryn Andrews’ Run for President and Michael Dean’s Lost True Leaves, could not be more different. It’s a testament to much of contemporary art’s surprising simplicity that despite the drastic difference in appearance, both sets of work essentially explore the…
Cellular Level6 to 8 p.m. Friday William Campbell Contemporary Art 4925 Byers Ave., Fort Worth Cellular Level, an exhibition of new works by acclaimed Fort Worth artist John Holt Smith, opens Friday at William Campbell Contemporary Art. While any mention of “stem cells” is often surrounded by controversy, Smith’s paintings…
Jay Shinn: Air Space Barry Whistler Gallery 315 Cole St., Suite 120 6 to 8 p.m. Friday If you know what a decahedron is, you are probably either A) a high school geometry teacher or B) the artist Jay Shinn. Shinn uses the 10-faced, three-dimensional wooden shapes as canvasses for…
Aurora, the Dallas Arts District’s biennial light, video and sound art extravaganza is back this weekend in its off-year, scaled-down iteration to preview next year’s festival and resolve some of the issues that come when you’re just too darn popular. Prelude is the title of this year’s two-day preview event…
FIVE: Ties That Bind The Art Room 2712 Weisenberger St., Fort Worth 6-9 p.m. Friday Sibling rivalry. Mommy issues. Crazy aunts. Local artist Deedra Baker explores these themes and more at FIVE: Ties That Bind, a one-night show featuring portraits, still lifes and landscapes that document the nexus of three…
Closing: Ryder Richards’ Invisible Hand and Artists Anonymous7 p.m. Friday Beefhaus 833 Exposition Ave. Friday night is the last chance to catch Ryder Richards’ Artists Anonymous at Beefhaus. This particular breed of AA is an open session where addicts (the art kind) who’ve hit rock bottom (in the art sense)…
Brian Donnelly, better known as KAWS, is an artist who refuses to be labeled. He began his career painting graffiti but he’s anything but a street artist. He designs and sells consumer products — toys, apparel — and yet his work has shown in museums across the country and around…
Artist Thoele Sarradet is a creator of characters, and it all started with Bugs Bunny. “Bugs wasn’t someone who I perceived had a gender,” she says. “They were so relatable. They weren’t this strong, all powerful creature. They were just clever and liked to drive their enemies insane.” Anyone meeting…
Like much contemporary art, the work of Lucie Stahl grows more fascinating the longer you spend with it. On first encounter, Stahl’s work doesn’t resemble the kind of art one expects to find in a serious museum like the Dallas Museum of Art, where it is on view through March…
José Parlá: INSTINCTS6:30 p.m. Thursday Goss-Michael Foundation 1305 Wycliff Ave., Suite 120 Free Opening this week at the Goss-Michael Foundation on Wycliff Avenue is INSTINCTS, an inaugural solo exhibition featuring works by the critically lauded artist José Parlá. Parlá, a Brooklyn-based artist whose talents include painting, sculpting, architecture and photography, created…
Lately the fire marshal seems to have eased up a bit on arts spaces. The disbanding of art events this summer began with Dean Terry’s art-music-performance event Acoustic Nerves in May, which was shut down even though the event was funded with city money. It touched off a wave of crackdowns citywide…
Ever been to the Pollock Gallery at SMU? No? Ever even heard of the Pollock Gallery? Also no? That’s not surprising. Despite the romantic idealization of curious, art-hungry university students and despite what was no doubt an intentional choice to put the gallery in SMU’s student center, students rarely venture…
What looked like giant shards of glass were suspended from the ceiling at odd angles and pulsating with hyperactive designs. Entering the room was like stepping inside a broken mirror that reflected psychedelic electronic images, immersing the viewer in a frenetic visual pingpong. Eric Trich was the man behind the disorienting…
The Dallas Observer has recently been collaborating with a team of videographers known as Exploredinary. (Perhaps you’ve seen this video they made about a party store in Oak Cliff selling Donald Trump piñatas, or this one about Leon Bridges.) We thought it appropriate to tell you a little bit more about…
On August 16, Gabriel Dawe became the fourth living Texas artist to install work in the atrium of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth. Plexus No. 34, commissioned by the museum, is a reflection of the artist’s continued obsession with discovering the artistic limits of thread…
Micsmith Ras lugs a cooler full of tattoo gear and a deck of playing cards, with his phone number written on each card, as he make house calls for his body art business. He has the look of an artist who has been working for a long time – he…
Many kids today probably don’t know this, but street art didn’t receive mainstream acceptance until Banksy became a household name in the mid-2000s. Before then, graffiti was widely seen as an eyesore created by an unsavory population. Countless tags were covered and movies like Demolition Man envisioned a squeaky clean…
The Dallas Art Fair has established itself as a world-renowned and respected fair, exhibiting galleries and artists of international repute. Starting in 2017, the fair will evolve and expand under new leadership. Kelly Cornell, who began working at Dallas Art Fair as an SMU student intern in 2011, was just…
Frustrations with the recent closings of art spaces by the fire marshal reached a boiling point on Tuesday as nearly 100 artists, gallerists and others close to the matter assembled in the auditorium at the Central Public Library. The discussion got heated as some artists lashed out at city officials…
Fort Worth artist and writer Christopher Blay spent the past few years working out an idea he had during a CentralTrak residency in 2014. Training his imagination on an actual conspiracy theory about a time machine inside the Large Hadron Collider, Blay places the stories of seven black victims of police…
