Shelf Life

I don't really care about Dallas for Dallas and all of that talk. I want to fully exploit the potential of exoticism that the word Dallas brings to mind to people outside of the state.

Close to thirty dexterous, expertly rendered book pages painted on shimmery linen or transparent silk are a puzzling compendium of little known facts.

I’m late on this—the show I am about to review closed last weekend. It has likely been packed up and moved, making space for the next thing. Art shows are…

I have a longstanding daydream that my house will burn down. I’d pull in the driveway one day to a pile of smoldering cinders that had once been my home,…

In a few days I get up on a stage at the DMA with two other artists to talk about the state of the arts in Dallas; in other words, Dallas’ “scene.”…

So it’s a mad-crazy art weekend here in Dallas, let me tell you, if the droves of sleek black cars and idle chauffeurs loitering outside art institutions, hotels and private homes didn’t give…

Allison V. Smith, Godbolt, March 2007 Marfa Contemporary, a brand-new West Texas outpost of the Oklahoma City-based City Arts Center, which bills itself as “a nonprofit organization dedicated to encouraging creative…

Despite all that’s wrong in this society it’s the responsibility of the new artists to occur. The explanation that the times and the society are bad is pointless. Probably they’ve…

I had 24 hours in NY last month and spent most of it going in and out of the enormous, heavy glass doors of Chelsea galleries (and the confusingly center-hinged…

This past weekend CADD hosted another effort to get people into galleries, called Design District Gallery Day. I did not, I’ll admit, spend the day participating in Gallery Day, though…

In a little carved out space of the Hoffman Galleries at the DMA, there are three pieces by Japanese artist Nobuo Sekine, founder of the Mono-ha Movement (mono-ha translates to “school of things”)…

  Amos Vogel, founder of Cinema 16, courtesy Northwest Chicago Film Society I’m not sure when the guys that run the Texas Theater sleep, they keep that theater so freaking…

I’d seen Bret Slater’s work before, in his studio, just prior to all of it getting zipped into a big duffle bag and schlepped across the Atlantic for Art Brussels by…

  Mishka Henner, Dutch Landscapes, 2011  So, it’s been about a month since the Dallas Art Fair weekend and all the very good independent shows and events that surrounded it.…

The group show up at Brand 10 Art Space in Fort Worth through April 28, called Showmen, with work by artists Tim Best, Titus O’Brien, Tom Orr and Cameron Schoepp, walks an elegant line between…

Last week, a little crowd gathered in Marty Walker’s small gallery space to look at artist Wayne White’s new show there called I Say A Lot of Things. We were…

Here are some brief thoughts on the Virginia Overton show, called Deluxe, at the Power Station — my sort of parenthetical reading to Overton’s larger themes here of memory, labor and spectacle. I…

My husband and I were invited to CADD’s (Contemporary Art Dealers of Dallas)  latest event this weekend — The CADD Mystery Dinner: Eat Your Art Out, and I have to…

Last night, the DMA hosted its latest State of the Arts panel, on the topic of contemporary art in Dallas. The panel was made up of a brotherhood of institutional…

Lawrence Lee and Jonathan Cross are art dopplegangers. While they look nothing alike, the trajectories of their art careers have played out in very similar ways, in no small part due…