The fall art season is upon us. Last weekend, a bevy of openings brought with it some fantastic art. This weekend, we have even more with numerous museum exhibits opening, as well as an array of gallery shows. This week, because one of the openings features an artist near and…
Arthur Pena and Francisco Moreno have been friends and known each other’s artwork for five years. They both approach painting with a focus on production and labor. Making use of limitations or defining a painting only as an attempt, both artists develop very specific ways of producing paintings. But with…
Welcome to 10 Brilliant Dallas Women, a pop-up online series about 10 awesome women making Dallas a better place to live. When she moved to North Texas to work on A Dallas Drinking Fountain Project in 2009, Lauren Woods had been living in San Francisco for 10 years and was…
If social media keeps telling you the rich and famous like your style, you might be on to something. Lil Ronny Motha F will pursue his dream of making it as a hip-hop artist either way, but he takes it as a good sign. Beyoncé played his song during a…
Serving Second Chances begins with a gorgeous shot of the Dallas skyline before the camera pans down to a man sleeping on a bench in front of City Hall. During a Robert Johnson lookalike contest at The Stewpot, guitarist Gerald Williams showed up out of nowhere and won first prize…
Shallow Reign are one of the earliest and most important bands to come out of Deep Ellum during its emergence in the 1980s. After a long hiatus, the group returned for a show at The Kessler Theater last Saturday. The performance was an emotional one: Back in December, Shallow Reign’s…
About a decade ago, Kaleta Doolin took a women’s studies course at SMU. While doing research for a paper on women in the arts, she came across a quote from the author of a book she studied for the very first art history course she took in the 1970s. In…
Wanz Dover is a veteran of the Dallas music scene. He’s been a part of it for over 20 years and is one of the best live performers in the cit. (If you don’t believe it, just catch his band Black Dotz live.) Dover does regular DJ sets all over…
Shoose McGee’s daughter will turn 4 on September 19, the same day his new EP is released. His daughter is in the “repeat stages.” With joint custody, McGee isn’t always around her. But when he is with her, sometimes he notices that she has memorized songs that he wouldn’t have…
Every artist struggles to reach certain milestones, but viewers aren’t always offered a glimpse of the journey. Neither of the two upcoming solo exhibitions at Kirk Hopper Fine Art have a unified or cohesive look. With a sample of drawings and paintings from two different projects, one focuses on the…
All Good Cafe isn’t just a restaurant with badass country fried steak and bacon to die for. Thanks to owner Mike Snider, its employees are a close-knit family of artists. Snider, who never married and doesn’t have kids, has become a father figure to those who work for him, using…
Working in ballet for nearly 50 years, Texas Ballet Theater’s artistic director Ben Stevenson is a modest legend who has always focused on telling a story with his art. Dracula: Dangerous New Terrain was first performed in 1997 in Houston and has now become a seasonal ballet, like The Nutcracker…
Dorrough probably could have been in the NBA. He played basketball in high school with several people who became professional athletes. But by the time he was a senior he had refocused on hip-hop music and decided to switch gears. But Dorrough wasn’t through with sports. And now, after a…
Two of the most incomparable promoters in Dallas have joined forces. On Halloween, the Coathangers will perform at Pariah Arts, a semicircular steel structure in The Cedars. Vice Palace is Arthur Peña’s roving venue that has played a role in bringing the art and music scenes together. Parade of Flesh…
Violence affects people in different ways. Some become shut-ins, others are drawn to work with people and create social change. Fifteen years after a stranger was shot and killed in front of her home, artist and Pulitzer Prize winning writer Karen Blessen is still spreading peace through art with her…
For Matthew Smith, owning his own record label wasn’t always part of his game plan. A lot of things had to happen before her got there. There were his stints in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he survived almost a decade of combat. Then there was the motorcycle accident, in which…
Joe M. Nanez’s family found out he died in World War II when they saw him killed on a Dallas movie theater screen. His brother-in-law, Regulo Vasquez, saw i t on a newsreel after a film as a teenager. He stayed for the next showing and watched the film again,…
On her 24th birthday, Samantha Rios was at a house watching a performance of a 20-minute play she wrote called No Guts. Rios sat in the back, visibly nervous and staring at the ground. At the same time over at SMU, another play she wrote was being performed, one of…
Straight Outta Compton, one of the most highly anticipated movies of the summer, drops this week, and Jeffrey Liles can’t wait to see it. But Liles, the Artistic Director at The Kessler Theater, has special reason to want to see the NWA biopic: He knew the group personally. Once upon…
Plugging an auxiliary cord into a phone is commonplace at a hip-hop studio: Let’s hear what you got. But it’s different when you are standing in Aftermath Studios and Dr. Dre is handing you the cord. You’re about to hear your music like you’ve never heard it before. Dallas producer…
Jay Clipp is a career DJ. For the past 10 years, he’s made a living from live performances. But in the past year something changed: He started offering music production courses through his Keep Spinning DJ Academy and now admits that educational entertainment is what he is most passionate about…
EV Borman is obsessed with pop culture. Old movies, pulp magazines and pulp art all influence the Dallas singer-songwriter, but it’s by no means a matter of ironic consumption. In particular, Borman is fascinated by burlesque dancers, which she’s parlayed into a musical style that walks the line between raunchy…
