Archive for January, 2015



A DMA Anniversary Game

The DMA was founded on January 19, 1903, which means our birthday is right around the corner. For this year’s anniversary, I have a little game for you.

The Museum has had a few different names and many different logos over the years. Can you match the logo with the year it was used?

The answers are below . . . and no peeking!

A. 1909   B. 1938   C. 1944   D. 1958   E. 1970   F. 1984   G. 1995   H. 2002   I. 2003   J. 2007

1.

museum_logo_1

2.

DMCA_logo_2

3.

museum_logo_3

4.

museum_logo_4

5.

museum_logo_5

6.

museum_logo_6

7.

museum_logo_7

8.

museum_logo_8

9.

museum_logo_9

10.

museum_logo_10

How did you do? Sorry, no prizes, just a virtual gold star from the DMA Archives and bragging rights on your graphic design sense.

Hillary Bober is the Archivist at the Dallas Museum of Art.

Answers:
1. E   2. D   3. B   4. G   5. H   6. C   7. A   8. F   9. J   10. I

Recipe for Art: The DMA’s Delicious New Tour

With a new year beginning, we are delighted to announce a new school tour at the DMA! Starting this month, schools can book “Recipe for Art,” a tour developed for Kindergarten and First Grade visitors by our Manager of Early Learning Programs, Leah Hanson, and our Manager of Docent and Teacher Programs, Josh Rose.

One of the main goals of “Recipe for Art” is to help children make connections between art and their own personal experience. This is done by connecting a familiar idea (that of using a recipe to make a delicious treat) to the way that an artist makes a work of art. Instead of ingredients like flour and sugar, the ingredients for art are the elements of design: shape, line, color and texture.

On the tour, groups will visit four or five different works of art in the collection, in order to talk about the basic elements of design. Groups first explore what the terms mean before then looking closely at the work of art in front of them. This leads to discussion, after which the children engage in a variety of kinetic and multi-sensory activities. These activities were specially designed to address various learning styles and to focus on the attention span and needs of this particular age group.

One important characteristic of these young visitors is their need to move! The tour was specifically designed to give children opportunities for purposeful movement–movement that helps them connect what they see to the motion that they are asked to make. One example of this is an activity based on Jackson Pollock’s Cathedral. The children are each given “paint” (a piece of string) and they throw it onto a “canvas” (a piece of felt), in order to simulate the movement of Pollock’s action painting. This allows the children to burn off some of their energy, while also connecting them with the art!

The “Recipe for Art” tour was developed by members of the DMA staff, but it will be implemented by our wonderful docents, who lead most of our school tours. Yesterday, the docents gathered for a training dedicated to this new tour. Leah gave them an overview of the tour and its origins, before sharing tips and strategies on how to deal with this particular age group. After that, the docents were given an opportunity to look over the supplies for the wide variety of activities that they may use on the tour. I even took some of my fellow McDermott Interns into the galleries to try out some of the activities!

For most visitors of this age group, it will be their first visit to a museum. With this new and unique tour, we’re hoping to make their first experience not only a positive one, but one that they will remember. By teaching these curious and imaginative children the basic elements of design, they will then be equipped with all of the ingredients to make their own art!

We’ve already begun to schedule the “Recipe for Art” through the month of January. If you’re interested in booking a tour for your school or classroom, complete our tour request form online and our Audience Relations Coordinator Madeleine Fitzgerald will get you scheduled!

Liz Bola
McDermott Graduate Intern for Gallery and Community Teaching

Forward Facing

With the onset of a new year, it’s useful to take stock of what is up next at the Museum. At the end of January, we will mark the second anniversary of DMA Friends, our much-heralded free membership program. With more information gleaned from our visitors than ever before, we are excited to share insights among four major art museums exploring the opportunities presented by this program, thanks to a six-figure grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and DMA are partnering in a roll-out of the museum Friends program, and will have much to learn in the months ahead.

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Maxwell L. Anderson discussing the Wittgenstein Vitrine with AT&T Performing Arts Center’s Chris Heinbaugh

 

Following the evocative exhibition of 19th-century oils titled Bouquets: French Still-Life Painting from Chardin to Matisse, which local critics hailed as one of the best  exhibitions of 2014, we look forward to presenting three remarkable exhibitions of art of the last half-century. Between Action and the Unknown: The Art of Kazuo Shiraga and Sadamasa Motonaga opens on February 8 in the Hoffman Galleries, for the first time revealing some of the breadth of the Museum’s newly formed collection of postwar Japanese painting and sculpture, which augments an already major collection of European and American art of the 20th and 21st centuries.

The newly acquired Marcia H Travels (1970), the first work in the DMA’s collection by the Guyanese-born British painter Frank Bowling, will be displayed along with four other paintings by Bowling from private collections. Frank Bowling: Map Paintings, opening February 20, will mark the first time in nearly forty-five years that these “Map Paintings” will be brought together since their debut at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971.

Rounding out the spring, the US premiere of the internationally traveling exhibition, Michaël Borremans: As sweet as it gets, on the work of contemporary Belgian artist Michaël Borremans opens at the DMA in March 2015. Co-organized by the DMA and Center for Fine Arts, Brussels (BOZAR), this retrospective will draw our visitors into the fascinating realism of one of today’s most heralded painters.

A feast for the eye, all are made possible by the generous supporters of the DMA, to whom the Board and staff extend our sincere appreciation. I look forward to welcoming you to the Museum this winter and spring, and hope you will encourage others to join as DMA Partners to undergird free general admission—a year-round gift to our community.

Maxwell L. Anderson is The Eugene McDermott Director at the DMA


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