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of visual art news, views & reviews in Dallas, Texas, USA
More than 1.100 pages
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I'm Not The Dallas Observer's
New Art Critic & Neither Are You
CentralTrak pool
For a while there, couple weeks ago, I was proffered the job as The Dallas Observer's art critic. Boy, do they need one. Despite niggling doubts, I accepted and was eager for more interview. But I haven't heard back, so I'm likely no longer in the running. Good thing. They need someone younger, energetic. I haven't a clue who. But I need to get back to promoting Dallas artists.
The possibility promised serious conflicts of interest since I couldn't then cover the same subjects here — or take random months-long vacations from art — I get so tired of it sometimes I've developed The Art Ennui Index, so you can read about those without me flogging through it all again.
Laura Abrams - corrugated flower at Haley-Henman
I have been — may still be — in my latest bout. Haven't even looked at art this month, except my own, but these images are all from all this summer. I've promised more than I care to deliver about that show last month, yet am eager to get on to something I can watch from afar. Snipe and run. Don't much care what's going on in the commercial gallery scene. I still donate to EASL but won't attend their Fort Worth Heist (but have the only pix of their Hot Deep Dallas one), and I'll document the Fort Worth Art in the Metroplex experience again, since I got a piece in.
When I do re-start writing about art, I'll concentrate on individuals. Already got a few in mind. One would have to be Laura Abrams about whom I've writ snippets on these pages before. But she deserves serious pixels. Her show at Haley Henman was monster, even if she did pay me to photograph it. Otherwise, I might have missed it. Stupidly.
There's been the usual gob of new galleries over the summer. First, I didn't have time — what with that show. Then I didn't want to bother checking them out (but will, gradually), though Haley-Henman, which has been around awhile, is doing right by Dallas artists. Now there's a place a really fierce show could shine.
John Williams - Big Mouth - wood and acrylic
- approximately 24 x 24 x 14 inches
at Salon du FIT in the Bath
House —
Reminds me of the commercial gallery scene
At The Ob, I would have had to fill half a tabloid page — no telling how many words — maybe twice a month — cutely accompanied by as many as two little black & white images. Here I go on till I'm finished, then stop, piling through big, vivid color images. My experience — I'd need another index for all those comments — is that editors change writers' words till I don't even recognize my own writing. You can imagine how well I deal with authority figures. I don't pay me much here, but it's worth every penny.
The DO's new editor wanted stories "about the artists, their art and the characters and players behind the art scene, with a fresh, accessible, knowledgeable voice," which is what this site is already all about, except we concentrate on that all-important first element, Dallas artists. Traditionally, The Ob barely notices them. He suggested I write a column to see if it was okay. I began thinking about this story and these exact subjects then. Their last crit was relegated to smaller and smaller slots in tinier and tiniest type us Baby-Boomers could barely see. Then they disappeared altogether.
CentralTrak in the Rearview Looking Back at Fair Park
Got excited about UTD's CentralTrak in the hot of summer. It might yet be this season's most successful new art venture, led by former DO art critic Charissa Terranova. If it lasts, it could build into something a little more involved and involving. I got splashy new color emails every couple days about something yet again new from them in July.
Flurry of activity, since suddenly stopped. They need pacing and a pro PR person, but have interesting ideas where art's heading. Turns out the Trak is an upscale townie dorm for UTD resident alien artists who push some real and many imagined envelopes in a reconditioned elderly Deep Fair Park office building near under the overpass of Central Expressway. Not entirely unlike SouthSide on wherever after they kicked out amazing local artists like Scott Barber in the big middle of chemotherapy not long before he died — and installed international ones I don't know a single name of.
Art in CentralTrak's Downstairs Hallway
Before there was a Central Expressway, there was a Central Track for trains, eventually replaced by the expressway and why street names don't continue east and west of the track north and south.
CADD (Contemporary Art Dealers Association) — can you imagine anyone wanting to call themselves CADDs? Curious choice — and their new gallery. DADA (Dallas Art Dealers Association) never approached dada, so CADD probably comes closer to reality, except they're opening a gallery — Yes, an organization of galleries is opening yet another gallery, and downtown, where the parking is never free. Next to the big Needless Markup store. Can't wait.
DADA — with yet another mass opening (Art Walk) in September — used to insist new galleries wait two years before acceptance into it and their publicity extravaganzas. Now they take anybody with a room of art. Anyone. One hopes CADD continues to be more discriminating. I attended CADD's Vernissage summer a year ago, and it seemed promising. They didn't even respond to my press pass request for this summer's repeat, but neither was I excited about doubling the experience.
Under Central Expressway
Another institution whose big event I tried to get press passed into was the Texas Sculpture Association's Silver Anniversary to-do that's a big fund-raiser at the Nasher. I emailed my creds, they emailed sloshily inert replies. I got the real skinny from a friend on the board. Then they sent a letterhead page saying they didn't know what they'll do. I'd told them I just wanted to photo the sculpture, but much as I love 3D art, I probably won't attend.
Meanwhile, TSA's founding president and parliamentarian Morton Rachofsky is showing innovative three-dee art at the Geometric MADI in Upper Oak Lawn along with long-time former SMU art chair Roger Winter [lower on that same 2007 page] most of whose reputation rests on painting. Check the DallasArtsRevue calendar for full information — it's very confusing. The MADI's been showing many little shows by Dallas sculptors and is a bright and joyous venue.
Were I The DO's critic, I would happily Bronx cheer TSA, the idiots at 500X, Light & Sie, Art Prostitute, etc. for removing me from their press lists. I entertained daydreams of purposely leaving them out of whatever I wrote there, but the high was short-lived. It might, though, have been nice to write for younger readers.
Can you imagine smart-ass and curmudgeonly old me employed by an org whose advertisers would inevitably complain? That even has advertisers? I have played out my own hiring and firings in the Letters to the Editor pages of the DO in the long distant past, had numerous photographs pirated without credit by them, and was their first paid typesetter, so we go back.
Probably far enough.
James Michael Starr - Song, 2008 - assemblage, iron bar, book illustration — from Fierce
Fierce is history, but The Fierce Blog lives on, un-updated.
Before you post or E-mail anything to Dallas Arts Revue, please read our How to Send Stuff to DARts page. There's stuff there you need to know.
DallasArtsRevue, before there even was a
dot com, first published on paper in December 1979.
See A Short History of DallasArtsRevue for more information.
The Art Ennui Index now includes as many mentions of my disbelief in objectivity as I could stand to list and link on one page, so that page also now serves as the nearly equally onerous Objectivity Index, so maybe I'll never have to explain either concept again. I probably should add all my gripes about publications changing my art crit there, too.
I've updated the How to Photograph Art page for the first time in years.
My review of the Texas Sculpture Associations 25th Anniversary show at the Plano ArtCentre is now on its own page.
The Oak Cliff Visual Speed Bump Art Tour 2008
500X '08 Open Show & Kettle's Spring Cleaning
Unsolicited Art — is a free-for-all page needs the one best piece of art you made this year. Now that it's almost netted its third hundred hits, I'm expecting a fourth piece from one of those readers any moment now, because only one in about every hundred visitors is smart enough to submit to something that likely won't turn them down. Read about it, pay attention to the inevitable rules, look at the work there now, then email me a big JPEG of your work, then join the world-wide ranks.
How to Look at Art doesn't tell us how to look at art — at least not directly. It's the story of a panel discussion by that name, which began the day of the Dallas Art Dealers Association (DADA) Spring Gallery Walk. We followed through with selections from the tour.
Visiting the Fort Worth Community Arts Center
Barnstorming The Contemp – gathers artists to brainstorm new uses for their new building.
The DARts Art Calendar keeps adding images & event.
Tats, Sistahs, 50/50, Verse & Eggs - covers a tattoo show at the Kettle, Sistahs at the South Dallas Culture Center, 50 works by 50 artists at the Soda in Oak Cliff and Verse and Reverse and Ann Huey and Julia McLain-Echol's Eggsabition at the Bath House Cultural Center.
Emotionally abused and battered, Grad students see hope! - Dave Hickey at UTD in 2003
Jim Dolan writes about Teresa Elliott's portratis of cows in The Strange Familiar
and Katja Zimmerman's Bill Traylor Beyond Plagiarizing shows an artist ripping Bill off.
Recently Updated DARts Pages:
Since I mentioned EAT ART, I went back and updated all those elderly pages. Fascinating to see how much I've learned about formatting web pages in the last few years. Then I did the same with the endlessly fascinating (?) Midnight Rambles, and that's enough for another little while.
I've just seen and reviewed a couple Art-related Movies and am about to delve into several others; D-Art 2005 Member Show; Modalities of the Visible (Brookhaven's then-new gallery space) in 2002; The Fort Worth Art Dealers Association's 2002 Gallery Night Extravaganza; and I'm still adding artists to the Fierce show, though that can't go on much longer.
The Editor was one of 11 arts writers choosing 18 works by 13 artits in Pix2 - The Critics' Choices
Wallpaper & Other Repeating Patterns - a tour of diverse galleries showing new work, much of it involving repeating patterns.
Art Conspiracy 3 shows artists making art and it getting auctioned in Artists Arting at ArtCon3
The Fierce Page is helping to organize an exhibition called FIERCE! at 14th Street Gallery in Plano this July.
The Dallas Contemp's New Building reminds of us D-ART's checkered and their often re-writen history.
Showing Process, Again - The 15th Annual White Rock Lake Artists Studio Tour in 100 pictures and packed with process.
After here, links move to the Reviews Index
The oft-updated Arts Calendar of shows, lectures, tours and other Dallas art-rleated events
Index of Subindexes - all our departments
Art Crit - index of stories about art
Art Spaces - places that have art
The Aesthetic Crisis Center has hundreds of links to visual, animated, interactive, art and political sites.
Art Movies Reviewed & thousands of other movies reviewed
ThEDblog follow The Editor's thoughts, issues, activities and plans for and about this site.
Index of Supporting Members' art pages
The Reviews Index lists most of our stories.
Small Sculpture in Texas - stories about 3-D art
Submission Guidelines - How to send us stuff
Visual Art Groups in Texas
Site
A Simple Introduction to this site.
The Site Map is an index of indexes, some of which have been updated this century
Contributors
Jim Dolan Michael Helsem Norman Kary Tracy Hicks Ken Shaddock Kathy Dello Stritto & Katja Zimmerman
Dallas-area Visual Art Groups
The whole long story about that spring day of art goes in and out of How to Look at Art but there's a short poetic essay called Didactic Exposition — a third of the way down the page that says what I think is how we relate to art.
Schools, Universities & Classes
How to Design & Distribute Invitational Postcards
Art Services and I Want
I Want - Readers want; I post
Lost Artists - people looking for artists
Editor's links
J R's Amateur Birder's Journal
including The Great Six-pak Duck Rescue1,103 movies reviewed
The last time I counted, the total DallasArtsRevue.com page count was 1,119.
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Benzene Countersince 1:11 pm Weddy May 25 2005. Not counting, of course, the 121,617 hits to this page before we moved to our latest web host. The counter at right above will keep on ticking when we move on to the next host.
If you want to show someone one of our pages, send them the web address (URL), because we update some pages often and have not yet learned to update previously printed pages. Our Time Travel Module will be down for next couple of centuries, I'm afraid.
