May 22 - June 30, 2020
a new series of exhibitions sited within the Nasher’s entrance vestibule on Flora Street. The installations will be viewed through the windows from the outside of the Renzo Piano-designed museum, providing exhibition space for North Texas-based artists and offering the public an accessible way to view art while the building is closed. The first Nasher Windows exhibition will be viewable beginning Friday, May 22 and run until Wednesday, May 27.
Presented weekly until the museum resumes operating hours, Nasher Windows installations will run Friday-Wednesday and host a roster of early- and mid-career North Texas artists selected by the Nasher’s curatorial team of Jed Morse, Catherine Craft, and Leigh Arnold. Artists have been invited to submit proposals for the space, with especial interest in site-specific work or work made for exhibitions previously scheduled in other art spaces but cancelled due to the pandemic lockdown.
“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 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.”
The first Nasher Windows exhibition will be presented by Dallas-based artist Tamara Johnson and run Friday, May 22 through Wednesday, May 27. Johnson’s work Deviled Egg and Okra Column, 2020, was slated for exhibition at the Dallas art space ex ovo before the show was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A fitting homage to the Nasher Collection, the piece is a nod to Brancusi’s Endless Column (date?) and features a mirroring tower of stacked deviled eggs and pickled okra, cast in resin and spanning the height of the vestibule space. Of the work, Johnson says: “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. 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.”
For the second installment of Nasher Windows opening on May 29, artist Xxavier Edward Carter will present an installation called Start Livin’ in the New World, a title pulled from the hip hop band The Roots. The work on view will be a collaged ‘tapestry’ of paper receipts and the flotsam and jetsam of consumer culture, all bound together and suspended from a magnolia branch. Carter comments on the installation: “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.”
Subsequent artists for Nasher Windows will be announced via media alert and on the Nasher Sculpture Center’s social media channels in the coming weeks.
On View: May 22, 2020 | 10 am – 5 pm
Tamara Johnson: Deviled Egg and Okra Column
Artist talk: May 29, 2020 | 10 am – 5 pm
Xxavier Edward Carter: Start Livin’ in the New World
2001 Flora Street
Dallas, 75201 TX
(214) 242-5100
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