Last weekend you no doubt conspired at the annual charitable art happening Art Conspiracy. This weekend, a similar charitable happening is taking place in the Cedars: Art Heist. The event is the main fundraiser for the Emergency Artists Support League, or EASL, an organization that distributes grants to artists in need. Attendees enjoy an open bar, food, and here’s the catch: on their way out, they get to snatch a work of art by one of 150 artists who have ..read more

It glows. It hums. It refracts. It reflects. It’s quiet. It’s pervasive. It includes. It arrests me before I enter. Black and white stripes on the doors could be part of gallery decor. Knowing better, it is a moment of recognition. Orr’s signature stripes announce the entrance. Greeting and obstructing view, they assert and they flirt.

Stripe. Stripe. Stripe. Stripe. Stripe. A glimpse of shiny surface inside fractures the lines. Outside comes inside: blue sky, green tree, black sweater, black vinyl. ..read more

1. Pegasus News has a preview of Regina Taylor’s The Trinity River Plays, which debut at the Dallas Theater Center a week from Friday. The three works deal with the maturation of a writer growing up in Oak Cliff:

“You’re defined by that ‘hard rain’ that falls,” Taylor said. “Some people want to try and run away from it, some people stay around and take the nourishment from it to grow deeper. There are these moments and storms that threaten to uproot you. You start having these questions.”

2. This long profile of artist Vernon Fisher in Fort Worth Weekly is well worth your time. The Fort Worth artist, who currently has a retrospective show up at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, speaks at length about his development as an artist, his education, and the experience growing up in Texas:

“The world I came from is reasonably rigid and religious. Everybody in town is Baptist, Methodist, Church of Christ, that sort of thing,” Fisher continued. “And the worldview is pretty homogeneous, and it’s still at a moment in non-urban culture where one could speak with authority on what everyone believes. You didn’t have to have any kind of caveats when you said something about the nature of reality, because everybody just sort of understood that this is the way reality is: God made the world and so forth. . . .

“I hate to use words like ‘deconstruction,’ but in a way I think these paintings are interrogating this whole notion of that universe by using that universe against itself,” he said, “like how Hollywood sees that or how popular culture reflects that sort of absolutistic, inflexible, rigid self-righteousness. I’m making it more pejorative than I really mean to, because we were all complicit in it.”

3. Go help the Dallas Morning News choose actors to star in an upcoming imaginary movie about the Rangers’ 2010 season. Some suggested actors thus far include Meryl Streep as Cliff Lee (“Because she can do anything”) and Ashton Kutcher as CJ Wilson. My contribution: Will Ferrell as Josh Hamilton.

Few phrases strike terror into the heart of the music critic so quickly as do the words “All-Mozart Concert.”

For, while the critic probably enjoys and personally applauds the music of that particular genius as much as anyone, he or she also knows that performers can either play Mozart well or can’t, and that there aren’t all that many different ways to play it well. In other words, once the critic has made note of the fact that an ensemble is ..read more

Two weeks ago I offered some ideas for improving the public environs of the AT&T Performing Arts Center. That post, and the conversation it inspired, indicated that there is still much concern for and confusion about the year-old center, its role, and its future.

On November 4 at 5:30 p.m. we will host a public forum on the Arts District at the D Magazine offices, 750 N. St. Paul St., Suite 2100. Joining us will be Dallas Arts District executive director ..read more

The AT&T Performing Arts Center board of directors has elected a new chairman, D. Roger Nanney, a vice chairman at Deloitte LLP, who has served on the Performing Arts Center’s board since 2002. We sat down with Nanney to talk about his transition into this new role, and the center’s transition from a project under construction to an operating venue for the performing arts. You can read the first part of that conversation here. This is part two.

Front Row: How would ..read more

I mentioned yesterday that I missed the Dallas Opera’s season-opening simulcast because of the Rangers’ thoroughly satisfying thrashing of the Bronx Bozos. This evening, the architecture, design, planning and consulting firm Gensler was planning on hosting a backstage tour of the new opera house, but the clever image above just dropped in my mailbox announcing its postponement. The opera is not the only arts organization that is on the receiving end of bad timing. The wonderful, young theater company Upstart Productions, which we feature in the November D Magazine, opens its Pinter triptych tonight, only the dramatic consideration of art, politics, and truth will be going head-to-head with Cliff Lee’s scalpel precision pitching – truth and beauty are, for once, seemingly at odds. 

We always see those reports about plummeting work productivity during the early stages of the NCAA Tournament. I wonder what kind of impact the Texas Rangers’ success is having on October’s arts attendance.

UPDATE: As Suzanne Calvin points out in the comments, it is worth clarifying that the event postponed this evening is a backstage tour and not the actual Dallas Opera performance. And, if it’s any consolation, Paulo Szot’s Don Giovanni promises more scoring than either the Rangers or Giants will manage this evening.

1. Art Daily reports on Dallas Museum of Art contemporary art curator Jeffrey Grove’s latest project, “Re-seeing the Contemporary,” an exhibition that brings together exemplary pieces from the museum’s permanent collection as well as some loans from local collections.

Jeffrey Grove . . . describes the installation as “more speculative than definitive,” explaining that the works are installed “in a roughly chronological sequence with each gallery encompassing either a span of time, reflecting select movements, or exploring ideas expressed in radically different ways over many decades.”

2. Mansfield’s own Kelly Clarkson will sing the national anthem during game three of the World Series at the Ballpark in Arlington, reminding the world that our region produced the only American Idol with actual musical talent. Still, I’d like to see more ambitious choices for games four and five (if necessary), home grown musicians who aren’t the equivalent of Spring Creek Barbecue. Like, I don’t know, R.L. Griffin.

3. Those Aussies don’t mince words. Michael Kanter, artistic director of Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre is not happy about the state government’s recent spending on refurbishing the city’s performing arts center, which he calls “an obscene pimple:”

Kantor fulminated against a ”defensive” and ”snarly” mainstream media unable (or unwilling) to comprehend his ”risk-taking” and ”trail-blazing” theatre, and criticised the state government for ”wasting umpteen millions” on refurbishing the Arts Centre, ”that badly designed and ugly shrine to mediocrity”.

At Ted Kincaid’s last exhibition at Marty Walker Gallery, he showed us clouds. Now, the artist’s new work, which you can view on his website, travels even farther in the stratosphere. Kincaid’s site shows images from a few new series of work comprised of digitally fabricated moon-scapes, mountain ranges, sea vistas, and other other-worldly sights that seem to derive their inspiration from early photographic works, such as this piece from 1856 by Gustave Le Gray, “The Brig Upon the Water,” that was recently featured in the Lens of Impressionism exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art, and this classic piece of early cinema, Georges Méliès’ 1902 silent film Le Voyage dans la lune. Though they are an homage to the material qualities of photography, Kincaid’s images are prints constructed using no photographic material.

Image: From Georges Méliès’ Le Voyage dans la lune.

What used to be part of First Baptist