On August 16, Gabriel Dawe became the fourth living Texas artist to install work in the atrium of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth. Plexus No. 34, commissioned by the museum, is a reflection of the artist’s continued obsession with discovering the artistic limits of thread…
Durational art like film forces its creators to imagine how viewers will perceive it. How long do you have to communicate your message before something else calls their attention and they walk away? It’s a problem inherent to all contemporary art, but one to which film is especially susceptible. Lip service…
Independent and foreign film screenings are hard to come by in this town, making festivals, which are often run by passionate volunteers, an integral component of the Dallas film scene. The Oak Cliff Film Festival just wrapped up its 5th, and arguably best, year this June. The higher profile fests,…
The gap in knowledge between parents and their children may have never been trickier to navigate than it is today. While it’s now widely accepted that one’s gender is not necessarily determined by one’s sex, we’re still right smack dab in the middle of figuring out how this affects various…
Eighteen years in, the Festival of Independent Theatres, FIT for short, is still going strong. In a decade in which city support for the arts has been continuously shrinking (with no sign of change), the city’s 18-year history of support for FIT (also with no sign of change) is refreshing…
Through August 21, visitors to the Nasher Sculpture Center have the chance to visit one of the most poetic uses of Renzo Piano’s light-filled gallery in quite some time. American sculptor Joel Shapiro rose to prominence alongside Frank Stella, Carl Andre and Tony Smith as part of a movement in…
“It’s just messy right now,” a character in playwright Steve Yockey’s The Thrush and the Woodpecker states defensively early in the play. If only it were just messy right now. Steve Yockey is a Los Angeles-based writer whose play Blackberry Winter is currently receiving a National New Play Network (NNPN)…
You don’t need to possess any knowledge of theater at all to know the character of Ophelia, Hamlet’s doomed lover; her tragic descent into madness, like some of Hamlet’s more dramatic speeches, has taken on a life of its own. But young Dallas playwright/actress Janielle Kastner would like you to…
Back in 2009, just as the Dallas Theater Center was moving into its brand new home in the AT&T Performing Arts Center’s Wyly Theatre, DTC artistic director Kevin Moriarty sat in the audience for a performance of Cara Mia Theatre Co.’s original production of Crystal City 1969. Although it was his…
If you’re new to the performance art world, or you slept through the 1990’s, or you’re too young to have been there as it happened, then you probably didn’t flip out when Wordspace announced Karen Finley would be performing not as Karen Finley but as Jackie O on April 1…
Will Eno has much to say about life in the 21st century and a deft way of saying it in The Realistic Joneses, a play which premiered on Broadway in 2014 (in a production directed by Sam Gold) to rave reviews. The same could be said of director David Denson’s…
Dallas artist Jeff Zilm is engaged in a quest to determine the role art can play in a world riddled with images: what meaning can it possibly have to offer a world over-saturated with visual stimuli? Specifically, Zilm has his eye on the technology of film and how the medium…
“In the beginning was the stone and the stone prompted ownership” is how Fiston Mwanza Mujilla’s Tram 83 opens. An epigraph that serves as an elusive foreshadowing of the story that follows. The stone in question is a diamond, African diamonds, to be specific, which have prompted a diamond-rush in…
Titus Andronicus With Spider Bags and Baked Trees, Dallas Friday, September 18, 2015 Despite two previous tours which both stopped in Dallas, New Jersey sextet Titus Andronicus seem to have been unable to convince Dallas audiences of their relevance, as evidenced by a rather disappointing turnout on Friday night at…
Despite a vibrant and burgeoning film community here in Dallas (thanks Dallas Film Society, Texas Theatre, Video Association of Dallas and the many, many others who make it happen) we tend to pay a great deal of attention to what’s new while more or less neglecting the old. We can…
Picture with me, for a moment, a hypothetical. You’re nearing the end of your life, a fabulously intellectual life. A life people will want to read about (like I said, this is purely a hypothetical). It’s rapidly becoming apparent that you’re going to have to write about it, since people…
Mixmaster presents “100 Creatives,” in which we feature cultural entrepreneurs of Dallas in random order. Know an artistic mind who deserves a little bit of blog love? Email lauren.smart@dallasobserver.com with the whos and whys. Classical music. It seems as though we’ve had a love/hate relationship with it over the past…
It seems like everyone in Dallas has literature on the mind lately thanks in large part to Oak Cliff’s massively popular Wild Detectives and Will Evans’ brand new publishing house Deep Vellum. As much as we love both organizations it might be worth some of your time to get to…
Oh, jukebox musical, you’ve brought us so many gems. Mamma Mia!: The ABBA musical. The Boy from Oz: The Peter Allen musical. Holler if Ya Hear Me: The Tupac Shakur musical. Wait. Oh. Never mind. OK, so maybe the jukebox musical is actually a horrible concept but perhaps with the…
Mixmaster presents “100 Creatives,” in which we feature cultural entrepreneurs of Dallas in random order. Know an artistic mind who deserves a little bit of blog love? Email lauren.smart@dallasobserver.com with the whos and whys. The hyper-connected world we live in makes art and music from the far reaches of the…
What is it about fantasy football that inspires such manic fanaticism? Each year, when it’s time for our fantasy football draft we drop everything, gather in front of our computers, often in groups, naturally, and enter into the fantasy world of fantasy football. Right. Welcome to the future, where we…
Nearly every art critic in Dallas has weighed in on the subject of performance art in the past 72 hours thanks to inside)(outside, a performance art project curated by Dallas-based PerformanceSW. inside)(outside is an online exhibition exploring gender roles through performance but Saturday night the online project manifested itself in…
