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…
This ornament had a Twinkie inside, ’cause you might get peckish during the pending Hostess apocalypse. Each year the MAC puts on a killer holiday party/fundraiser called Blue Yule. The event’s main draw is the quasi-competitive ornament sale, where guests politely booty check each other to reach the piece they…
At first glance, you think it’s the strangest decision for a wrap, ever. Upon closer inspection, this sedan gets even more perplexing as you realize that it’s hand-painted. Yup. A hand-painted, 360 degree replica of van Gogh’s dorm poster classic,The Starry Night. I don’t know who the artist/driver is, but…
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…
We live in a world that is drowning in equal parts beauty and unoriginality. Look around. There are at least 10 items within your immediate reach that have been created by a graphic designer. The beautiful often comes from a successful graphic designer: one that has taken client needs in…
When Dallas Contemporary first contacted the Trinity Groves boys, asking if they’d consider letting Fairey dress up the empty walls of some West Dallas locations, the vision wasn’t fully realized. “My partners had no idea who Shepard Fairey was,” said Larry “Butch” MacGregor, who owns the property along with Phil…
At some point in the near future, a feeble, and impoverished Romanian child will be trekking along the Carpathian Mountains in a free pair of piss-sticky rain boots, all thanks to Dallas. Not all of the rain boots donated will be drenched in human runoff, but a few pairs were…
The Intown You Project is an Uptown outpost of an international public art installation called the “Before I Die” project. Basically, it’s a huge outdoor chalkboard that asks, “What do you want to do before you die?” A little over a month ago we told you about the installation, but…
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…
See also: Dallas Handmade Arts Market’s Grand Opening is This Weekend Sometimes you have to take the plunge, no matter how terrifying. Early this year, Jorge Herrera walked away from a successful and secure career in the financial world because he had a dream, both for his own professional gratification…
Excerpt from Paul Sharits’ “Shutter Interface” (1975) *Maybe don’t watch this if you have epilepsy. As far as artistic genres go, video art is still a young tyke. It didn’t grow into a known and identified category until the late 1960s and early ’70s, and from there it’s exploded. Still…
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…
The most surprising aspect of Ari Richter’s skin art — aside from its unorthodox canvas, of course — is its unexpected beauty. Richter guided me last Thursday through the white drywall maze of CentralTrak to his summer studio, where he was putting the finishing touches on what will open on…
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?…
What do you get if you mix rainbows and sprinkles, unicorns and starbursts, with a little country-and-western Texas realism? Well, Jennifer Moreman is the woman to ask. Now living in Tyler, Moreman grew up in Dallas, where she graduated from Trinity Christian Academy before taking a BFA from Baylor. She…
