The 12 Most Newsworthy Art Moments of 2012 for Dallas and Fort Worth

This year brought with it a full-on art assault, and it was nice to see Dallas chumming up the headline waters. If, after this last year, you still think art is a gentle sport, where paintbrushes seductively caress canvases and everyone sips red wine, you weren’t paying attention. Things got rambunctious. Exciting. And I’m pretty sure the wine was secretly replaced with Goldschläger.

Still, some shows, trends and special projects held our attention longer than others, and since we’re nearing the end of the world year, it seems fitting to look back, if only to piece together all of those blacked-out nights.

12. Collectives
While not a specific event as much as a movement, it was interesting to watch our emerging artists unionize. Don’t like the gallery scene or the spaces being offered for your kind of work? Fuck it, form a collective. Want to present an important medium that isn’t immediately associated with monetary exchange, like video and performance art? Form a collective. Want friends to drink with while you build a conceptual installation in a boarded-up building, a swimming pool or public transportation vehicle? Yes, dears: Form a collective.

Viewing art became more fascinating as these creative street gangs emerged across the Metroplex. Some were gentle, pensive. Others got their rocks off by starting parties, rooted on interestingly designed curatorial concepts. Others, I’m fairly certain, slashed my tires. It happens. It’s art.

11.) Kris Pierce’s Red Telephones
Part of where is the power, a project curated for Fort Worth Contemporary Arts by Terri Thornton, was this freestanding piece of communication, told in three parts. Pierce positioned three red phone booths in geographically distant parts of Fort Worth and installed recording transistors in them.

We pocket ourselves into neighborhoods and cross willingly into similar ones, but for those unfamiliar zip codes and city blocks? Except dipping in to grab something unavailable on our own patch of earth, we rarely visit. Spending time in them to communicate with our neighbors is even less common.

Pierce decided to unify those fragmented voices via public (and totally legal) wiretapping. He placed one phone booth in Unity Park, where Feed by Grace services those without homes. Another went in front of a bar. The third was put in front of Fort Worth Contemporary Arts.

As people spoke into the phones, giving their thoughts, sass or confessions, they were knowingly recorded. We were then (and still can, just check archives) able to access the chatter and see that, really, we’re all the same. Nobody knows what to say when put on the spot. Kids act crazy everywhere. We’re all waiting for something to happen when we pick up that receiver.

10. Invisible Shell, by Erica Felicella
Adding to this year’s strong showing of performance art was Felicella’s 48 hours in Plexiglas lockup. She built a dunk tank-like prison, put on a catheter and sat inside, writing for two days.

She didn’t eat. Guardians kept her awake. And she compulsively scribbled a mantra in order to connect with her most isolated emotions. By the end of the weekend, the papers had balled up around her and her legs were unstable, but the entire Oak Cliff community came out to show support and brace her as she walked. When the wads of stationary were flattened out, each read: “To see myself I went inside my own shell.”

9. 8-Bit Performance/Street Art, Straight from Nintendo World
It started with a voicemail left on the Observer‘s community inbox, teasing us that two dudes dressed like WaLuigi and Wario would be somewhere in Dallas, spray-painting a Nintendo mural. It took about three seconds and one tweet to find them, and when we got there it was simply magical.

Equal parts performance art and street art, Kid NES and Eder stayed in character throughout, in effort to “trap the real Mario.” Just when we thought it couldn’t get better, they made a time-lapse video, complete with break dancing and a guy dressed as Gumby running the turntables.

8. CentralTrak, Simply Killing It
This extension of UT Dallas has been a tremendous art incubator, and that Hara Kiri performance series, curated by resident Danielle Georgiou, still floors me. It’s become a must-attend location, by giving temporary digs for important work we just can’t see anywhere else. We experimented with time travel (Co- Recreating Spaces curated by Carolyn Sortor & Michael A. Morris featuring crazy German conceptual artists, e-team), played indie games at an art arcade (by the incredibly new collective, tiny thumbs) and introduced our dogs to the gallery.

Yeah, that’s a mouthful, and it only scrapes the surface. There’s a strong collection of current residents, and the space is under wonderful direction. I’d hate to think of Dallas without it; it’s helped make everything so much more interesting.

7.) Shepard Fairey Waz Here
A complete 180-degree turn from Kris Pierce’s (non) payphones was the in-yo-face arrival of Shepard Fairey, for a highly choreographed, full-city overhaul orchestrated by the Dallas Contemporary. For a solid week that guy was followed by packs of adoring groupies and stalked by local graffiti artists. It was divisive, with some feeling those large murals, made by a celebrity, out-of-town talent, were too intrusive. Others, the first to feel pain when the images started falling, absolutely loved the things and thought they classed up their West Dallas walls. But one thing we can all agree on, based on his turn behind tables at an event celebrating the murals: he probably shouldn’t be a DJ, unless he’s working a wedding.

6.) Irby Pace’s Stolen-ish Photographs
I’m still unclear why this story didn’t get more attention locally. For his MFA show, UNT grad student (now an adjunct prof at a local college) Irby Pace saw the beauty in discarded images. They were left behind on iPhone and iPad camera roles at local Mac stores, and some were simply perfect. They had a life to them that you rarely see in posed photography, and that’s because the individual who took them probably never thought they’d be seen by anyone else.

But Irby did see them.

Soon he was downloading the things by the thousands, sifting through the cast-off portraits in search of the most lively, intriguing subjects. His selections became his show. And after WIRED picked up the story, Pace’s show became the subject of a global debate over artist’s rights, property rights and authorship issues surrounding abandoned images. It was fun, tech-rich, high-stakes art, and I gotta say: it was some great photography, whoever’s it was.

5. Remember that Biennale?
Yeah, kinda. This was another affair where got folks all rowdy. On one side of the ring was the Dallas Contemporary and its loyal fans who believed the exercise in curatorial flexing was both necessary and meaningful. On the other side were people with questions. “So … it’s a biennale that isn’t one … and will never be repeated?” Or, “How do you say, ‘biennale’?” And finally, “We aren’t Venice. Who the hell are we to think we deserve, and can just put on, a biennale?”

Anytime that many artists, art collectors and art educators get flustered and all whisper-fighty, it makes me smile. So I say, fuck it: let’s do another another one, just to see what happens.

4.) Michelle Rawlings Did That Show, Now When We See Her Dad Talk, We Envision Leather.
Remember when the Mayor’s daughter, RISD student Michelle Rawlings, showed her collection of found and Photoshopped images — including one of her daddy dudded up in leather?

I do!

It opened an intergalactic art portal to Shitstormville, Population: All Of Us. What some would call art schooly daddy issues, others would call Very Important and Misread. Where you stand is fully up to you — that’s how art works. But we can’t ignore that it happened, because really, it did.

3. The Complete Transformation of the DMA
Dallas got a late Chanukah/Christmas/Solstice present with the January arrival of our new Eugene McDermott Director, Maxwell Anderson. And since he landed on our doorstep everything has changed. Massive grants were acquired to expand the museum’s conservation department, study visitor engagement, and extend the facility’s technological reach. New talent was brought in and existing positions were shifted around, maximizing the skill sets within the institution. New relationships between the museum and other countries were formed, artwork was returned, other artwork was properly identified, and finally — at the end of the year, they announced that general admission would be free, beginning January 21. Golf claps all around, then do the wave. The DMA deserves it.

2. Hey, Is the Nasher On Fire?
Dear all that is sacred, will somebody please put Museum Tower’s management in time out? When it started, we just gave them a collective side-eye, hoping that Rawlings’ appointed mediator could push some policy through so those Picassos could get back on the Nasher’s walls. And now? AND NOW? We’re getting nonsensical press releases about missed meetings, secret agendas and buy-back policies on million-dollar condos. They’ve turned into that guy your best friend dated for a week, then broke up with, who — rather than moving forward — wants to make everyone’s lives utterly miserable.

Guess what, Museum Tower? I don’t want any more shockingly juvenile press releases or petty bickering. I want Terrell back.

1.) The Omni Got Hijacked
This is, hands down, my favorite thing Dallas did this year. It isn’t easy to negotiate an event like this, and it’s even tougher to write code for a building with programming as elaborate as the Omni’s. So the fact that our video artists took the initiative to do that is flat-out remarkable. But what really gave me goosebumps was seeing thousands of curious people cluster under bridges, gather in fields or peer down from parking garages like it was Laser Floyd on the Fourth of July.

It brought worlds together and informed the city that there is more here than what lies on the surface. It gave a voice to our skyrocketing video art community. And it made a building that many of us have a complicated aesthetic relationship with a little more relatable. Even if only for one night.