Tall and self-confident, Elizabeth Willett looks more like a model than like an elementary school art teacher. As she walks down the sunny hall toward the art studio, as her classroom at Fort Worth’s Alice Carlson Elementary School is known, her black pleated skirt brushes her ankles. A line of…
In the Auping What sounds like self-doubt from Michael Auping is really a bad case of overanalysis. The chief curator of Fort Worth’s Modern Art Museum, known for his irreverent wit and self-deprecating humor, is second-guessing his idea for a groundbreaking exhibition of local and regional contemporary artists at the…
Home art invasion Dr. Joseph Kupersztoch recently retired as a professor of microbiology at UT-Southwestern Medical School to pursue his “other passion” — art. He says his family ran Galeria Mer-Kup in Mexico City for 34 years, and after taking early retirement at the age of 55, Kupersztoch planned to…
The mothers of invention It was Richard Franck who actually wrote, “Art imitates Nature” in his Northern Memoirs, printed in 1694; whoever revised it to “art imitates life,” though, nailed a concept that crystallized 1999 on the Dallas-Fort Worth visual art scene. Take tragedy and misfortune, for example; in life,…
Bill Barter can’t remember exactly when it occurred to him and his fellow Arlington Museum of Art board members that they could lose Joan Davidow. All he can recall is that the board knew losing the museum’s founding director would lead to nothing but turmoil. After all, Davidow is closing…
Your wish is granted There’s still a little life left in the National Endowment for the Arts. The organization is funded for fiscal year 2000 at about the same level as it was in the 1999 budget — just under $100 million. From an all-time high of $175 million disbursed…
Even for someone as prescient as Ravi Batra, the economics professor and author who predicted the Asian stock market crash and the fall of Communism nearly a decade before the Berlin Wall toppled, the final exam grades he’s posting on his office door in Umphrey Lee Hall at Southern Methodist…
MAC dandy First, they were using code words to explain why Theresa Jones abruptly left her job as director of the McKinney Avenue Contemporary last week, a job she held for four of the MAC’s five years of existence. (To wit, she left “to pursue other interests.”) When a key…
It’s dark in one of DNA Productions’ state-of-the-art workstations, located in a suite of rented offices on Cedar Springs near Love Field. John Davis — the “D” in DNA — is cuing up a scene from Olive, the Other Reindeer, the animation production company’s first hour-long Christmas special, set to…
The Kimbell, weakly It’s getting harder and harder to believe Kimbell Art Museum spokesperson Wendy Gottlieb when she says Fort Worth’s world-class museum isn’t holding some sort of grudge against the alternative press. When Gottlieb finally returned Blink’s call for comment about the Kimbell’s lost bid for a pricey Botticelli…
Do you know TITAS? The Dallas-based arts organization has brought avant-garde dance and theater performers from around the world to North Texas, but many people don’t know the name. Maybe TITAS needs an American Express card, recognized around the world. If not a card, then perhaps a sizeable grant from…
Potts bust Dr. Timothy Potts’ first try at a new acquisition for the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth since becoming its director a little more than a year ago has failed — to which, of course, Potts reportedly says, “You’ve got to be gracious in defeat.” Potts had his…
Call it insecurity, or the kind of intense inadequacy that makes the school bully lash out at the class Einstein. Call it some irresistible urge all humans have to topple the mighty, or even some perverse fantasy fueled by a very basic instinct — envy. Call it what you will,…
Art in the right place? When Ken Kahn announced in September he was resigning as president of the Arts Council of Fort Worth and Tarrant County — which oversees funding and professional assistance to 60 Tarrant County arts organizations — he agreed to help find his own replacement. After all,…
Commerce gets the cash It was slim pickins in the cash-awards category for the hometown artists, who will instead have to settle for getting their work into the McKinney Avenue Contemporary’s “Juried Exhibition of Contemporary Texas Art.” And that’s no small feat, even though good exposure somehow pales in comparison…
They’re not going to make it, judging from a quick glance at the clock and the degree of difficulty the dozen or so staff members at Florence Art Gallery are having. One of the gallery’s harried staffers stands at the wall phone, alternately talking, hanging up, and answering the next…
At first, independent Dallas tour guide Elaine Swartzwelder couldn’t see anything wrong with the loping longhorns and the three horsemen that make up the Texas trail-drive sculpture in Pioneer Plaza, and she’s seen it plenty. In fact, she says, it’s one of the most popular spots on her route, second…
Another thing coming Jeff Krulik thinks Texas is ready for Heavy Metal Parking Lot, his homage to the passion of Judas Priest fans in the late 1980s, which will be screened at a Good/Bad Art Collective short-art-film event in Denton on November 19. “It did really well at the Austin…
The dealmaker Local art gallery owners may be worried about the impact hotshots like Ted Pillsbury, new partner with Gerald Peters in Pillsbury and Peters Fine Art, and Talley Dunn, principal with Lisa Hirschler Brown in Dunn Brown Contemporary, are going to have on the competitive commercial gallery scene. But…
People are as likely to talk about the architecture of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth as they are to talk about the art. The building is art, many have said, and some argue that its relevance as an aesthetic monument is as important as its function. Louis I…
If publisher Gary Turner expects to get rich from Crime and Politics, he’ll have to try harder. Only one of the handful of mid-afternoon, weekday shoppers at Albertson’s on Midway and Northwest Highway had ever heard of it, even though a yellowing stack of the free neighborhood newspaper with the…
Home for homeless art Without too much fanfare, and with a still-leaking roof and the occasional uninvited mouse, Carol Brewer’s hard-won permanent home for the Dallas Street Art Project opened last Saturday in a rehabbed machine shop at 1325 North Peak St. in Old East Dallas. Brewer’s friends and colleagues,…
