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DARts Public Art Index

PUBLIC ART in Dallas
an Ongoing Saga

Digital Photographs + Commentary
© 2000 by DARts Editor J R Compton

When I think of Public Art,
this lurid wind-up-adillo
often clatters into my mind.
You might have seen him
on a downtown street winding
through Deep Elm.

Years ago, University of Dallas Art Professor Jurgen Strunk told his class that there was no public art, because the public doesn't make art.

Unfortunately, that just isn't true. The public makes far too much art. Sometimes I wish they'd leave the task of filling up space to the professionals. But sometimes the pros aren't any better at it than the amateurs.

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I was amazed to find this classical Icarus among the shaped paintings
under the Central colonnade that separates downtown from Deep Elm.
Most of the paintings down there are simply awful.
But a spare few actually fly.

Probably the highest density of art per square foot of wall space in Dallas is in Deep Elm, just east of downtown Dallas, on the other side of elevated Central Expressway. That's where the dillo at the top of this page lives. And that's where you'll find a melange of competing and sometimes covering graffiti -- like all around the central image below, captured live in an open space parking lot off Main Street.

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Here, the counterpunctal endless overlay of image-on-image-on-image serves to separate this simple, monochromatic face in the center. Simple, straight-forward work almost always rises to the top of our attention.

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