The reports of Katherine Wagner's imminent "death" are not greatly exaggerated. On December 15, the executive director of the Dallas Visual Art Center will succumb, after 11 years in one of the hottest seats in the Dallas art scene, to what she calls the "modern woman's malady." She won't literally be dead, but she'll be gone, and sorely missed. Cover your ears that day, lest you be shaken by the great sucking sound of the vacuum her exit will surely make in the Wilson Historic District and beyond. Cover your eyes until the DVAC board finds someone to fill her ergonomic desk chair and keep the best of Texas artists permeating the Dallas gallery scene. Cover your mouth, to keep from begging her to change her mind, to delay her decision for one more shining season. Cover your collective ass, you spoiled DVAC board members, and don't rest upon it until you find someone at least half as good as she's been for this entire city's cultural climate.
Denton-based artist Lorand Fekete entered his bronze sculpture Metamorphosis of Mantissa in DVACs annual Members Exhibition.
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Through January 5, 2001 (214) 821-2522
Dallas Visual Art Center
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Tonight, Wagner's still occupying her chair in the large office she's called home since last year's massive construction project that resulted in DVAC's Meadows Foundation-funded new digs at Swiss Avenue and Texas Street. It's late, but she's got to finish two grant applications to the Texas Commission on the Arts before she can call it a night. She ran out at 5:15 p.m. to pick up her 14-year-old son, Alex, from football practice. She sat in the car, drumming her fingers, watching the dashboard clock, as Alex's coach kept the squad late, till 6:15 p.m. She drove to a pay phone to call her husband, Pete, because one of the kids had misplaced her cell phone and because their other child, 10-year-old Katie, had to be picked up as well, and Wagner was afraid she wouldn't make it. Pete couldn't get loose, so Wagner tackled Alex and raced to get Katie. The family rendezvoused at home, where Wagner's Italian heritage kicked in. She turned leftover pork into savory ravioli for dinner before returning to her office to work.
Days like this--and a terminal case of the "family needs me" flu--caused the death of Katherine Wagner, DVAC executive director, as we know her. It wasn't a hint of scandal or impropriety or marginal work performance or power politics that brought Wagner to her decision to leave her job. "For me, the hard thing was trying to be an excellent, wonderful mother and an excellent, wonderful director," the 47-year-old says. "There were times I just felt like I was compromising both. Does every working mom feel this way? You bet," she says. "I call it the modern woman's malady." Wagner's juggling days will end next month, when she'll stop bringing home the bacon, content only to fry it up in a pan. She'll be what she calls the "chief operating officer of the Wagner Family Inc." full time for the first time in her life. A job change for her husband has given the family a luxury it could never previously afford, Wagner says, and she wants to try being a stay-at-home mom before the kids are grown and gone. "It's really important to me to be in art, to work with artists. I'm best at supporting other people," she says, promising to return to DVAC as a volunteer. When she goes home for good she'll take the same skill set--nurturing, promoting, enriching, smoothing over, making ends meet--that served her and the visual artists of Texas well. "I want to be with my children," she says. "But I love this job, even as I'm giving it up."
Tonight, Wagner's working at the computer on her retro, 1960s-era massive wooden desk, beneath a stunning Heidi Strunk shrine-like art assemblage, with drawers of Melissa Miller's and James Surls' drawings at her elbow in the dark, deserted art center. Her train of thought is interrupted by the occasional call from Katie--"When will you be home, Mom?"--but other than that, she relishes the quiet, which allows her to concentrate. "This grant money will fund our exhibitions for 2002," she says, her planning calendar open to the distant future and a monumental juried show of the work by a recently coalesced group called "Texas Clay Artists." In her last couple of weeks at DVAC, she'll rally the troops of artist-volunteers, led by Bizarro cartoonist Dan Piraro and his painter-graphic designer wife, Katherine Baronet, to kick off DVAC's annual Thanksgiving fund-raising campaign. "We do this every year," Wagner says, "to help us pay for the operations of this building. Light bulbs, electric bills, toilet paper, everything." Wagner is feeling good about the recently completed Legend Awards, the largest single fund-raising and recognition project for DVAC, held each September to honor an artist, a patron/collector, and an arts professional. This high-profile program, which this year raised $40,000 of the art center's annual $250,000 operating budget, has become a signature event; like so many others--the Mosaics Series of exhibitions highlighting an artist's ethnicity in his or her work, the Critics Choice show, and the "Business of Art" seminars to help artists market their talents--it was started under Wagner's watch. She oversees grant writing, programming, education, fund raising, membership, and administration, and she's an active consultant to the talented guest curators who mount show after impressive show in the art center's galleries.
