The temperature was hovering somewhere in the mid-90s on Saturday afternoon when Olaniyi Rasheed Akindiya, better know as Akirash, stepped out of CentralTrak. The temperature was significant because Akirash was wearing only Scotch tape and empty water bottles on his feet. As he splashed water around the concrete and onto…
The Webb Gallery is what the FOE must have been years ago — this amazing, secret spot that you’re not really sure if you should share or if you should continue to hog it all to yourself because it’s perfect in all its little-known glory. It’s an incredible space to…
Editor’s note: Over the weekend, Betsy Lewis took home second place for arts criticism at the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies’ annual awards. See the rest of her work here. Moving violations, Border Patrol checkpoints, a flurry of camp Americana souvenirs — how, exactly, does a short story flourish as a…
Ro2 Art Downtown has a small works show, aptly named CHAOS, which is so dense with artwork that I’m not sure where to begin. Gallery owners Jordan Roth and Susan Roth Romans invited a long list of artists to submit a maximum of five works in any medium, with a…
Aside from a swath of fabric draped across her own masterpiece, The Golden Goddess stands entirely in the buff. The statue pre-dates Deco, but looks like something that could guard Versace’s old South Beach nest. She’s had a peculiar life, this golden girl. And it seems like divine intervention that…
Last weekend’s Design & Build Workshop from Tumbleweed Tiny House Company was not so much a workshop as a meticulous seminar: tablecloths and pastries in a hotel ballroom with 50 attendees passionate to adopt a truly counterculture lifestyle. The Tiny House movement may be the ultimate fuck you to more-is-more…
Tumbleweed Tiny House Company will show you how to design plans for a tiny functional house, then build the thing, plop it on a trailer hitch, and exist by roaming the land as the unfettered Kerouac gypsy soul your high school self was certain you’d turn out to be. Or…
Lucy Kirkman’s solo show at That That, a hard-to-find new art space in a Deep Ellum building that you’ve passed a million times (think of the Finley Shirts window on Main Street), is rooted in the Jorge Luis Borges short story “Library of Babel,” 10 dense and challenging pages of…
Walking through the installation room of Wunder-Block, a new exhibition by Katharina Grosse, is an instant lesson in size perception. I feel like I’ve been zapped by a ray gun, transformed and shape-shifted into an ant harvesting dust on a busy MAC cosmetics counter. Mountains of pigments — charged-up royal…
He’s the most recognizable pin-up painter in history, and ten of Gil Elvgren’s famous dames in peril are either about to be, or are now, available through Dallas-based Heritage Auction. But remember, Elvgren’s ladies are classy, so there’s no love for cheapskates. The lowest-priced work in the set will cost…
T.N.B. preview from Thomas Riccio on Vimeo. Hellbent on keeping it left-of-center, Dead White Zombies leaked this teaser video for its new show T.N.B., which opens for previews at the end of the month. Housed in a former drug den and billed as a “healing in the hood,” the intimate…
Saturday’s Oak Cliff Visual Speedbump Tour was proof that decorative inspiration doesn’t end with throw pillows. Not for ‘Bump artists, anyway. Each home was such a vivid representation of its owner’s aesthetic that their little touches and personal styles carried all the way to their respective thrones. Over the course…
Do-gooders and art promoters ArtLoveMagic held their annual art party in the basement of South Side on Lamar over the weekend. The heat and an overkill of art-centric activities conspired to kept the crowd modest, and maybe that’s also why the attendees, their plastic cups of wine sloshing, were slow…
Last Saturday night, I swept my eyes from left to right, then back again, over photographer Denise Prince’s four pieces at CentralTrak as if I was flipping through pages in a magazine. On another wall, there was a bigger neon display, its bold blues and pinks distracting you from the…
Dallas’ sprawl is often seen as a weakness, especially when it comes to creating community. But sometimes a little distance is useful. It allows for distinctive pockets of artistic personalities to emerge, and when those pieces click together, as should happen on Saturday, our city’s many influences become visible, tangible…
There’s a lot going on in That Mortal Coil (Rebuking the Ideal in Contemporary Figurative Art), CentralTrak’s newest group show, curated by Heyd Fontenot. The exhibition is a search for beauty in unconventional bodily spaces, and a retaliation to how the human figure is perceived in terms of physical perfection…
A man stands alone in the first-floor hallway of the Fairmont Hotel in downtown Dallas. His lanky arms hang behind his back, hands clasped. His fedora sits low between his eyes, obscuring his unflinching gaze at the glass encasement filled with large-scale, Renaissance-style oil paintings. Tony Bennet, the hotel doorman,…
The art collective In Cooperation With Muscle Nation thought of a great idea: Combine the identities of each individual member to create a single work of art. Their approach was to gather 20 objects from each member, photograph each of those objects individually, then cover Oak Cliff’s Davis Foundry Gallery…
WWF legend The Ultimate Warrior stands in front of a U.W. branded background, shirtless and in full guise. His chest is wet with sweat, muscles flexed to full suspension and nipples sharp enough to gouge the canvas mat. What was probably a reactionary response to an interviewer’s mention of arch-nemesis…
Last week’s Not Waiting For Permission, the 2nd Annual State of the Emerging Arts at UTD’s CentralTrak, continued the out-in-the-open conversation that’s forcing people to take notice, and perhaps sides, in their support of local art. For too long it seemed the conversations dictating the fate of independent galleries and…
We indulge the word memory in a utilitarian way, as though it were a physical space, crammed full of ancient locker combinations and emotional residue, a kind of messy junk drawer full of neural sparks that you’ll sort through, someday. In Cassandra Emswiler’s new solo show Canticles of Praise, on…
The most visually stimulating thing at the new Love Field terminal is the Cinnabon sign. There’s been a lot of hoohah this week over seven new commissioned “public” artworks at the terminal. Dixie Friend Gay’s “North Texas Sunrise” (2013) is a wall of mosaic tile at the entrance. It’s a…
