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…
We’ve raised some questions about the mayor’s #DallasArtWeek, but we also made sure to check out the annual Dallas Art Fair at the Fashion Industry Gallery, where artists and galleries displayed their work in one easy-to-peruse space. There was a lot of thoughtful gazing going on over the weekend, and…
At City Performance Hall last night, Mayor Mike Rawlings led a panel discussion about the future of the arts in Dallas, part of his #DallasArtsWeek initiative. All the panelists – Dallas Museum of Art director Maxwell L. Anderson, Dallas Theater Center artistic director Kevin Moriarty, filmmaker and Oak Cliff Film…
I remember a few years ago my car ran out of gas on I-35. I hopped down the bridge and started walking, in the dead of night, on Colorado toward Beckley. I’d left Oak Cliff a few years before, but the corner boys and gang bangers were right where I…
If the Dallas curator scene had a cypher, Kevin Rubén Jacobs would be Riff Raff, refusing to stay on beat, dropping obscure references, making meta-mash potatoes out of the other MCs and showcasing his deep knowledge of the pop culture and art world. His Oliver Francis Gallery has already kicked…
“Deep Ellum’s back” has been vomited out and up ad nauseum. The truth is it never left. Changed perhaps. Got its face kicked in a few times, then touched up with a lil plastic surgery, and now exists as an amalgamation of its roots and reanimations, with a strong neighborhood…
Named for Stephen King’s 1986 film, Maximum Overdrive the exhibition, which opens today at UT Dallas, picks up where the apocalyptic survival movie leaves off, with humor, gore and machismo. The movie is a cult classic for its depiction of electronic devices taking over the world, accompanied by a totally…
After stops in Fort Worth and Denton, British artist, culture critic and broadcaster Matthew Collings ends his North Texas tour at the Nasher Sculpture Center tonight. Not sure whether he’s worth your mind’s precious time? Here are five reasons. 1. He’s a tastemaker And even though he surely finds that…
At one point or another, it happens to all of us: We look at art and we just don’t “see it.” For Stephen Lapthisophon, artist and art history professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, it’s these moments he enjoys most. “There are works of art that I love…
