Du Chau, the ceramist and teacher at several local colleges (Brookhaven, SMU), tries his hand at printmaking in an undeniably lovely exhibition at Kirk Hopper Fine Arts. The artist uses a mix of techniques to emphasize life and energy in clear defiance of war and violence and, for balance –…

“To See As Artists See: American Art from The Phillips Collection,” in its final week at the Amon Carter in Fort Worth, moves through a tidy, accessible chronology of 20th century art. It doesn’t delve into anything you’d be embarrassed to look at it with kids or grandparents, but it…

The sculptor William Cannings is a professor at Texas Tech, but he has a long history with Cris Worley going back to her days at Pan American Art Projects. That an Englishman as accomplished as Cannings ended up in Lubbock instead of New York may seem like a fluke or…

Mixmaster art critic Betsy Lewis picks her favorite works of the year: BEST PIECES “Aragh,” Morehshin Allahyari and Richie Budd, from “Monstrous Coupling” at UT-Dallas Allahyari’s and Budd’s “Aragh,” from UT Dallas’ high-spirited exhibition “Monstrous Coupling,” mixed political commentary with simplicity of execution and a complex concept. Three mundane objects…

As we hit mid-December, here is an unconventional art show that has nothing to do with the “scene” and everything to do with real life at its harshest. Every fall, the art program at the Stewpot heads to the central branch of the Dallas Public Library to exhibit pieces created…

Conduit Gallery opened three solo shows last weekend, so this is a review in three acts. Robert Barsamian’s canvases are proportionally like television screens: Some are square, like the little sets propped on kitchen counters, and some follow the mold of the mini-movie screen. He has mastered a great range…

Standing near the entrance of SMU’s Hope Lobby at the Meadows School of the Arts, with its inscrutable black body fixed next to a bright wall of windows, “Monument to Berezovsky” makes for convincing and disciplined political art. It’s a guest here, and it looks uncomfortable in the setting. The…

Yesterday Culture Editor Jamie Laughlin checked in with a dispatch from Tiny Thumbs, the pop-up arcade at UTD. Today, in her regular column, art critic Betsy Lewis chimes in. Popping with delightful, brainy concepts and aberrant deviations from the gaming norm, CentralTrak’s “Tiny Thumbs” pop-up video arcade, which popped up…

Great graffiti is hard to measure. The rules are sketchy. If it’s done legally, is it still graffiti? If the artist is paid to do it, is it still graffiti? What if it is protected behind a fence or advertises a business or promotes a product? I did a bunch…

Inside Fort Worth’s William Campbell Contemporary these days you’ll find Texas, where even the armadillos have a Technicolor glow. Specifically you’ll find Cowgirls and Critters, breakneck kitsch so shrewdly transformed into lively contemporary art that you can imagine the artist, Austin’s Bob “Daddy-O” Wade, with a Velvet Elvis on one…

Shifting from strange to familiar, then endearing to wacky, the UT-Dallas exhibition “Monstrous Coupling” finds both comedy and sobriety among oddball artistic pairings. Curator Andy Amato contextualizes each piece through a list-of-works stacked by each entrance, and it’s a fun read, using a quote from The Tempest to set the…

Last Thursday night, while Madonna struggled to shake off the burdens of being fifty-freaking-four in some remote corner of Planet Earth, I sat in the Power Station listening to UTA art history professor Ben Lima inform a packed room that “Madonna has been the topic of hundreds of academic journal…

See also: Courtney Kerr, Dallas Fashion Blogger Whose Closet We Covet, Scores Bravo Show Sol LeWitt explained conceptual art best: “In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work … The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” I’ve had bar fights over…

In the late nineties I heard an episode of NPR’s This American Life about life in prison. The segment that stuck with me was from a former inmate who wound up in the prison infirmary, where a piece of red thread somehow ended up on his infirmary blanket. The gist…

See also: “Rachel De Joode’s Brief and Wondrous Art,” a preview of the show. I left Rachel De Joode’s “Real Things” show at Oliver Francis Gallery, subtitled “Explorations In Three Dimensions,” feeling nagged by this question: Is ascribing meaning to an artwork the job of the artist or the viewer?…