Shelf Life

Walking through the first floor of Matias Faldbakken’s exhibit, Oslo, Texas, at the Power Station is an exhilarating hazard — spent bullets are strewn all over the floor like a Wiley Coyote…

William Lamson, Action for the Paiva (video still), 2010, Courtesy Marty Walker Gallery “Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.” — Jean Jacques Rousseau Last week, I spent a…

If you were to go into the Hawn Gallery in the Hamon Arts Library at SMU right now, you’d think you’d entered an exhibit of some of the University’s collections of old documents…

When I wrote about the show of Qui Anxiong’s animated films at the Crow Collection for a kids’ blog yesterday, I began with a disclaimer about the sometimes mature themes in…

So, I grew up on this tiny liberal arts college campus that was on an old 18th century farm in almost-rural New Hampshire. There was a legendary ghost, Emma, that…

 You’ve by now heard tell of how this year’s TWO x TWO guest of honor, the artist Mark Grotjahn, got all perschnickered on art-party libations, stumbled off scene just before his…

So, remember how a few weeks ago I wrote about how Dallas galleries need to mount more shows with: “contemporary work by a handful of emerging and established artists under the…

Last week I made my way through a derelict neighborhood in East Dallas, down a busy one-way throughway, to the storefront space of Oliver Francis Gallery, an ambitious new alternative space run by a…

It’s State Fair time again. I haven’t been in nearly a decade, but I’ve promised my small people I’ll go this year. I look forward to it with a kind…

Last week, a Facebook friend of mine — an artist living in Dallas whom I’ve never actually met — caught my attention when he posted this on Facebook after his recent visit to…

Gaffes and Informations at Fort Worth Contemporary Arts features the singular and collaborative work of Kevin Todora and Jeff Zilm. Enter dim gallery. Startled by digital sound. Digital sound. Digital sound.…

I recently learned that the gals who run the Nasher Sculpture Center’s store, Heidi Smith and Carolyn Spinelli, have been showing work by local artists in tandem with the museum’s…

This year, New  Texas Talent at Craighead-Green Gallery, juried by Marcie Inman, Director of Exhibitions for the Irving Arts Center, has the odor of a world gone feral, or at least…

One of my favorite  writers, the poet Donald Hall, speaks often of gardens and nature in his work, recounting his farmstock lineage, his beloved dead wife’s care of her New…

For half of my life I’ve lived in Oak Cliff — a now hip and cool, but once bad-repped and socially misunderstood place that I’ve long prized for its rogue-ish solitude…

I wrote awhile back about the need for more unsanctioned, free-thinking, button-pushing art to take place in Dallas — things out in the public that recall, maybe, Dallas’ renegade spirit, or at…

  From the sea of summer group shows I trekked through the other night, two artists stood out: Benjamin Terry and Kerry Pacillio, both on view at Cohn Drennan in a…

I had an email correspondence about Dallas with a friend this week — I’ll call him Toojerstraap. You may know him. Dallas, and its particular insufficiencies – art-wise and all-wise,…

   When we came back down to visit Texas a few years after moving to New England in a giant green Mercury Continental, I have the distinct memory of stepping out of the car and then…

In honor of Memorial Day, here’s a round-up of some of my favorite war monuments, all politics and other contest-ables aside, and in no particular order. Ara Pacis Augustae, Rome, 13-9 BC Consecrated…