Visual art news, views, reviews and calendars in Dallas, Texas, USA

Accidentally FWADA

Story + Photographs by J R Compton
with additional photographs by Anna Palmer

e didn't plan to go on the Fort Worth Art Dealers Association Autumn Art Walk. We didn't even know that was when it was, till we bumped into Brad and Laura Abrams at the Art in the Metroplex show at TCU, where they had some FWADA tour maps.
 

Fred Spaulding - detail at Art in the Metroplex

One wag said this sort of thing has been being done for decades in ceramics circles, but we liked it immensely and thought it the most monumental and impressive art at AiM. It was held together with metal bands, but the catilevered tower looked lilke it could topple at any moment. Something about tension...
 

Since it happened that we were in Fort Worth already, fed up with the AiM extravaganza's self-absorbed juror, and needful of more local art to look at, we set out on a much-edited, accelerated version of the tour.
 

Dustin Burrington - Robo Kaiju (Robot Monster) - ceramic

This was my second favorite tower at AiM. I missed the reference to robots and thought of it as a quiet little personal totem. It looked great, white into the darkness in front of it with large windows splashing it with light.
 

S Braley Cook - Archaeo - copper wire

We had neither the time nor inclination to go to them all, but we liked the stops we visited — as well as much of what we found along the way. I'd seen the horse atop the monument at the top of this page before and later wished I'd shot it. This time I stopped, got out and did it from several angles — still managing to neglect to record its creator...
 

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Kana Harada - Mansion with a View and Amaoto ...
Sound of Rain, Sound of Heaven - foam sheet (details)

Harada's gently floating constructions are simultaneously ornate and simple. They were my third favorite towers at AiM, but placed opposite the room's wall of windows, they were robbed of many of the shadows they really needed. Although they still twirled and swung with passers-bys and wafts of AC.

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Peter Ligon - Midway Liquor Beer

After visiting his studio at the Shamrock Hotel last spring, we were pleased to see Peter Ligon's stylized but matter-of-fact drawings of Dallas at the AiM show.

My beloved camera was on intermittent fritz and got mailed off to the shop two days later — I have to keep fixing the old one till I can afford to buy a new. So we used Anna's point-and-shoot for many of the images on this page.
  

still more towers, in downtown Fort Worth

I deleted the city from behind that uppermost image, so there was just the tower topped with a horse and no clutter of city, but there was Fort Worth all around us almost everywhere we went over there, so we photographed a lot of that, too. After awhile the place and the art flowed together like quicksilver.

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Fort Worth Urban Prairie Schooner

On the way to 111 I saw one of those prairie schooners I like so much, and was enraptured with all the fine lines, big, curved and rectilinear volumes and mysterious pipes and masts.

But first we visited what read, on the map, like something of an independent gallery, where we found lots of photographs behind glass (too reflective for rephotographing) and an opened door that led to Dennis Blagg's studio. We poked around, then went off to photo the tower, wishing we could stop in the middle of the big bridge we seemed caught awhile in the endless navigationally deprived loop of.
 

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Downtown Fort Worth through
the windows at the Amon Carter

Anna wasn't so sure she wanted to stop at the Amon Carter, but it's my favorite Fort Worth museum, and I wanted to show it off. The Kimbell is world-famous and high-falutin' and the Modern is, well, modern... But the Amon Carter is down-to-earth, down-home with plenty of Indian and cowboy art and stacked with photography and graphic art and history. We both loved it, spending long minutes on our hurried tour through every show upstairs, and I circled every gallery down, too.
 

UNT in FW (detail)

We were eager to find out what this University of North Texas artspace FW was all about. So we had to stop there, too. On the outside it was all about ornate post-modern strutty bright architectural lines, angles, circles, cylinders and shadows.
 

Red-handled Steam Pipe

Inside were Jenifer Pepper drawings of the celebrated ordinariness of electrical wire tangles under AE's desk, and practical sculptural entities like this release valve — lots of photo opportunities.
 

Handley-Hicks

Handley-Hicks on the far west side had Kathy Lovas dolls and needlepoint and lovely pink flamingo vignettes in the bathroom. Marvelous.
 

Kathy Lovas - Don't take it serious. It's too mysterious.

 

Our other favorite bathroom on the tour was the
floor-to-ceiling empty golden frames at Kornye West

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