5 Art Events for Your Week: April 14-17

Super Fantasy Mercado 2
Southwest Center Mall (formerly Red Bird Mall)
3662 W. Camp Wisdom Road
Ongoing through April 30

If you think Southwest Center Mall, now anchorless and populated by the likes of “Body Bang” and “Eargazum/Xperience,” is a solid venue for an art show, gold star for you! Back for round two after a dazzling show last fall, pop-up shop Super Fantasy Mercado 2 features art from more than 40 Dallas-based artists displaying their work amidst a maze of eclectic vendor stalls, and want to know the cool part? You can buy it and take it home with you.

SFM’s organizers chose the unlikely venue because, not in spite, of its unlikeliness. Last fall it was held at Vikon Village Flea Market in Garland, which was sort of an experiment to see if people would come out, says Brent Ozaeta, one of SFM’s organizers. “Having the pop-up in this particular location was based on the idea of inserting our art into the everyday. The goal of this installation is to bring new visitors to a new environment,” he says.

Other artists featured are Keith Carter, William Greiner, Ferne Koch, Earlie Hudnall Jr., Clarence John Laughlin, Danny Lyons, Birney Imes, Brandon Thibodeaux, Shelby Lee Adams, Paul Greenberg and Peter Brown.

Beyond Nature
Moudy Gallery at Texas Christian University
2805 S. University Drive (at Cantey Street), Fort Worth
Ongoing through April 20

Last summer a group of artist-types were sitting at a bar and one of them said, “You know where we haven’t been lately? The Arctic Circle!” Everyone high-fived. The next day they hopped on a pontoon and once there, traversed the archipelago of Svallbard and made frigid art together.

No, seriously, the 2016 Summer Solstice Expedition happened last year. For it, 16 Dallas/Fort Worth-based artists, musicians, scientists and writers traveled to the Arctic Circle for a project they hoped would revolve around the idea of making work in an unfamiliar territory. Beyond Nature takes a panoramic view of their collective experiences through the lens of not only artists, but explorers.

Billi London-Gray and Daniel Bernard Gray — They Don’t Care
Umbrella Gallery
2803 Taylor St.
6-9 p.m. Saturday

In 2005, the philosopher Kanye West said, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” In 2017, the new president of the United States said, “I don’t think they care at all,” referring to his tax returns.

Two people we can safely assume do care are artists Billi London-Gray and Daniel Bernard Gray, whose pop-up group exhibition They Don’t Care, is dedicated to the first Tax Day under President Trump. They’ve invited artists spanning a range of disciplines — including photographs, sculptures, paintings, performances, sound installations and other media miscellany, to wax politic visually. The artists describe the exhibition as “an expressive platform to show what we do care about — issues, policies, specific conditions, general concerns and broad hopes.”

Participating artists include Aye-D, Abby Bagby, Cor Fahringer, Daniel Bernard Gray, Diamond Gray, Billi London-Gray, Kijana Martin, Raul Rodriguez, Kiran Sattar, Susan Sponsler, James Talambas, Mark Thames and Tierra Firme (Sarita Westrup and Analise Minjarez).

Admission is free.

Closing: True South: A Group Expedition
Photographs Do Not Bend Gallery
154 Glass St., Suite 104
Closes Saturday

This weekend is the last chance to see True South, a collection of bucolic images of the people and landscapes of the South. The show covers a hefty range of turf stretching from Georgia and the Mississippi Delta to the is-it-or-isn’t-it-the-South state of Texas. The photos are nothing fancy, yet haunting: In Jack Delano’s “Interior of a Sharecropper’s Home,” a mirror on the wall reflects a young girl wearing rags who looks like she’s trying to hide. William Christenberry’s 1978 C-Print “House and Car,” is what it sounds like but way cooler. True South also includes portraits of people from Appalachia, prisoners in the penitentiary in Huntsville, sweeping plantations of Louisiana and Mississippi, and 3rd Ward neighbors in Houston.

Bill Haveron — Selected Retrospective (pictured at top) Kessler X+
1230 W. Davis St.
Opening reception 6 p.m. Monday

Even if you’re not into art, odds are high Bill Haveron’s paintings will still get to you. The same goes for people who are into art, but like the kind that hangs on the walls of too-quiet galleries populated by refined people. You could be at, say, the Kessler Theater (the site of Selected Retrospective) on a random weekday for reasons wholly unrelated to anything approaching the realm of visual art and it will still get to you.

An existentialist with sharp technical prowess, Haveron’s works feel like diaries, often chronicling his agrarian coming of age in Bryan, where his mother ran a honky-tonk. His drawings are about longing, good and evil, and that gray space in between. Haveron confronts us with unabashed human frailty — our meanness, fear and distress — in a way that’s uncomfortable until it isn’t. At its core, Haveron’s work reflects sex and love and grief and death, the things that make us and undo us. He’s got a penchant for un-sentimentalizing the sentimental.