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…
You might say that Nikola Olic is an engineer. It’s what he studied at University of Texas at Arlington and he’s been working at a healthcare software company he co-founded, Doctor Alliance, since he received his degree. But you might also say he’s a classical pianist, a professional BMX flatlander…
Durational art like film forces its creators to imagine how viewers will perceive it. How long do you have to communicate your message before something else calls their attention and they walk away? It’s a problem inherent to all contemporary art, but one to which film is especially susceptible. Lip service…
There’s a shop full of motorcycles in various states of disassembly at the intersection of Highways 183 and 35E. The inside looks like a motorcycle graveyard but it’s really a place for resurrection, where bikes are taken apart, repaired, painted and put together under a completely new skin. Two guys…
Everyone from Dallas City Council members to the mayor have gushed over Dallas’ arts community in recent years. It has seen a lot of growth, with the establishment of the Nasher Prize for sculpture, micro-grants being offered to up-and-coming artists by the Office of Cultural Affairs and the opening of…
Reciprocated Salvage at CentralTrak800 Exposition Ave. 12 p.m. Saturday This show is all about emotional expression. Melanie Bonajo’s work. is influenced by programming algorithms, mathematical formulas and physics. Emotional outbursts are salvaged from interfaces such as iPhone photostream and reciprocated in compilation. Vivian Fu examines how self-portraiture has moved from…
Ten months ago, the Dallas Museum of Art lost its director of four years when Maxwell L. Anderson resigned in order to accept a job as director of grant programs at New Cities Foundation in his hometown of New York City. In Anderson’s absence, president of the board Walter Elcock served as…
The box set sitting under glass at Holly Johnson Gallery isn’t your standard rock compilation. And while its contents resemble CDs in their size and shape, they are actually custom 5-inch vinyl records — little palm-sized things, complete with sleeves, album art and liner notes. Housed inside their grooves is…
“The camera, for me, is a weapon,” Richard Andrew Sharum says. “Every time I pull that shudder is like pulling a trigger.” Sharum is a photographer and activist who has been shooting professionally for 12 years. He’s taken photos all over the country as well as abroad, but for the past…
