‘The Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas unveiled a new program last Friday which takes advantage of the museum’s glass-fronted entrance vestibule on Flora Street, and allows for exhibitions of works by North Texas-based artists without viewers having to enter the space. The Nasher has been closed since Friday, March 13. The program, Nasher Windows, kicked off on May 22 with the work of Dallas-based artist Tamara Johnson, and continues on May 29 with artist Xxavier Edward Carter’s Start Livin’ in the New World.
Tamara Johnson with her sculpture “Deviled Egg and Okra Column.”
Johnson’s piece, Deviled Egg and Okra Column, 2020, was meant for an exhibition at ex ovo in Dallas, but was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The work is a cast resin sculpture of repeated and stacked deviled eggs and pickled okra that runs floor to ceiling.
“Since moving back to Texas in 2018, my work has shifted to explicitly focus on a more personal iconography — my relationship to the South and the ways in which my (temporary) body moves and works within this familiar, yet unfamiliar landscape,” Johnson says of the work. “Each of these works explore a personal terrain, embedding meaning in foods I associate with my upbringing, like deviled eggs, picked okra and Rotel. These items become condensed bouillon cubes of material meaning, holding vulnerability, sexuality, and humor in a delicate balance.”
Nasher Windows installations will run Friday-Wednesday weekly until the Nasher reopens to the public, and will feature early- and mid-career North Texas artists selected by the Nasher’s curatorial team of Jed Morse, Catherine Craft, and Leigh Arnold. The curators have invited artists to submit site-specific proposals or works previously slated for exhibitions that have been cancelled due to the Great Lockdown of 2020.
“During this time of crisis, before we can reopen the Nasher doors to the public, we are compelled to imagine new ways to show art to our local audiences, and to give our region’s artists a space to show their work,” says Nasher Director Jeremy Strick. “We are grateful that the beautiful building Renzo Piano designed affords us the opportunity to offer our front windows for this series of exhibitions. We hope that the effort contributes to our community’s healing, well-being, and enrichment.”
Xxavier Edward Carter’s “Start Livin’ in the New World.”
Artist Xxavier Edward Carter will present Start Livin’ in the New World, a title pulled from the hip hop band The Roots, beginning tomorrow, May 29, for the second Nasher Windows installment. It consists of a collaged ‘tapestry’ of “paper receipts and the flotsam and jetsam of consumer culture, all bound together and suspended from a magnolia branch.”
Says Carter of the work: “This space surveils the viewer, being set inside of the institutional glass façade of the Nasher Sculpture Center during a global pandemic, echoing the words of the song, ‘It ain’t nowhere to run, it ain’t hardly nowhere to hide,’ at a time where communities of color are being disproportionately affected by a crisis that is being exacerbated by the consumption of capitalist living and a government that continues to adhere to corporate safety and racial divisions rather than investing in the people.”
For more on the Nasher Sculpture Center and Nasher Windows, please visit the museum’s website here.
