Blink

Guess there simply wasn't enough "green" at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary on St. Patrick's Day, or so administrative manager Mary Nicolett was told when she found out she would be out of a job beginning April 21. "I was told it was budget constraints," says Nicolett, who has coordinated exhibitions, handled publicity and media relations, and even installed visual-art exhibitions when necessary at the MAC for the last three years. Nicolett says she wants to stay in the area and will look for a new administrative position in the arts. "Something along the lines of registrar or office administration for a nonprofit or a commercial gallery," she says. Nicolett's departure means that a virtual skeleton crew is left running the MAC -- only interim director Hank Lee, facilities manager Casey Logan, and membership services and gift shop manager Sonjia Gladbach remain as full-time staff. MAC director Theresa Jones left last November to join Pillsbury and Peters Fine Art, and MAC Cyber Cafe manager Marina Zakarian left at the first of the year for an office-management job.

Nicolett's other career, though, as a contemporary artist, seems to be taking off. She says a respectable crowd of the "usual suspects" attended the March 10 opening of "Nice Ass," a three-person exhibition of work by Nicolett, Jo-Ann Mulroy, and Derrick Saunders at Dallas' only artist-run, cooperative gallery, 500X. She sold three of her eight new pieces on opening night. "I was overwhelmed, really, because these works are very fresh," she says. "I finished them just a week or so before the opening, so I myself hadn't really had time to absorb them." Nicolett says some of the pieces feature clothes-dryer lint, dryer knobs, and pantyhose. The exhibition title, she says, other than being a desperate ploy for attention, comes from the recent discovery of a graffiti tag on the gallery's train-track side dock door. "It said 'nice' something," she says, "and some of the board members thought it could have been 'ass.'" The show is up through April 9. In addition to her job at the MAC, Nicolett is a board member and hypester for 500X. Gladbach's work will be featured in a new show at the Arlington Museum of Art, opening March 31, and both she and Nicolett are showing in Denton April 8 in the Good/Bad Art Collective's "Curv" free-for-all.

E-mail arts news and fresh examples of fruit-basket turnover to BLINK at anna.helber@dallasobserver.com.