A good retrospective walks you through the stages and phases of an artist's career, like a road map for a career's journey. A great retrospective takes you on the trip. The joint exhibition between the Nasher Sculpture Center and the The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth succinctly walked visitors through the career of David Bates, pairing early works with later iterations and telling a narrative of the artist's preoccupations with the Gulf Coast. His early work seemed almost prophetic when placed next to his series of paintings about Katrina that filled several rooms in the Modern. Then, a trip to the Nasher saw a man interested in rendering a canvas into something three-dimensional. His sculptures were a new story of a painter reinventing himself late in life to deal with something more corporeal. This collaboration didn't just shine a light on a Dallas-based artist's four decades of work, it also told an interesting story about one man's lifelong journey with artistry.