Capsule Reviews

Lesley Dill Dill combines a variety of material--horsehair, wire, thread, tea, glue, ribbon, paper, felt, organza--to create work that is at once precious and weird. The wall-scaled "Blonde Push" brings to mind the enormous fringy brushes of a car wash without the whim and froth of suds. Long strands of cream-colored horsehair hang from text rendered in twisted wire above. There is a high level of craftsmanship combined with an intriguing sense of obsession in Dill's work--a monomania of the fine and delicate. Through April 21 at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary, 3120 McKinney Ave., 214-953-1212. (Charissa N. Terranova)

Patterns of Progress: Bird's-Eye Views of Texas This is a show for those image lovers truly interested in the hybrid possibilities of art. The maps of small-town Texas dazzle not so much because of their avant-garde intermingling of media but the way in which they mark a fusion of art, craft and economic development. Some 60 oblique urban views of cities in Texas line the walls of the galleries upstairs in the Amon Carter Museum. Made by itinerant mapmakers in the last three decades of the 19th century, they are testament to a boom in city growth driven by railroad expansion. The urban grids offer a pragmatic strain of beauty, the tedium of which is broken by detailed vignettes of local buildings in the framework of certain maps. Through May 28 at the Amon Carter Museum, 3501 Camp Bowie Blvd., Fort Worth, 817-738-1933. (C.T.)

Sean Scully: Wall of Light Like Woody Allen in the drug-inflated "nostalgic look at the future" Sleeper, it would seem that the painter Sean Scully has been asleep for 200 years. Unfortunately, though, Scully lacks the irreverent and self-deprecating sense of humor of Allen's character Miles Monroe. Twenty-five years would be more exact: Scully's been snoozing since the famed exhibition A New Spirit in Painting held in London back in 1981. Scully is a serious spiritualist making bad art and painting worse than he did in the 1980s. Back then, painters like Scully who returned to bold expressive brushstrokes were called "neo-expressionists." Today we might call him rearguard-expressionist. Talk about tedium: With gallery upon gallery of milky brown grids layered atop milky blue grids, you won't need to go beyond the first room. Through May 28 at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 3200 Darnell St., 817-738-9215. (C.T.)