Looking for some inspiration, a deeper dive into current issues, or your next favorite recipe? Here’s a list of books recommended by the Arts & Letters Live team honoring Hispanic Heritage month.
Children’s Picture Books: Love by Matt de la Peña and Loren Long Dreamers by Yuyi Morales Both authors and illustrators previously featured at Arts & Letters Live!
Yuyi Morales presenting Dreamers at Arts & Letters Live in 2019
The DMA participated in #AskaCurator Day on Twitter last week—a day that harnessed the power of social media to connect our curators to just about anyone with a Twitter account and a burning question. Users tweeted their questions using the #AskaCurator hashtag for our seven participating curators to respond to. This resulted in a wide-ranging (and fun!) array of answers, from absurd museum gifs to personal anecdotes. Here are a few of the highlights:
Q: How important is social media to seeing and finding new artists?
2/2 "I often come across new artists via Instagram, but it’s also where I first read breaking news in the field (the good, the bad, and the funny), virtually experience faraway exhibitions, and stay in touch with artists and colleagues around the world." #AskaCurator
Q: What’s one of the weirdest paintings in your collection?
"This painting is fairly strange because of all the metallic milagros that someone has sewn on to its surface. It doesn't seem to have been done with any religious intent, but instead to embellish the content underneath. Like adding a piece of flair." —Mark Castro #AskaCuratorpic.twitter.com/NxzjlUE9x3
Q: What is your biggest “OMG I can’t believe I get to work/handle these object(s), pieces of history, etc.”?
Heather Ecker 1/3: Such a hard question as I find everything about this profession thrilling. I remember the first time that I held a 3,000 year old ceramic in my hands and noticed the fingerprint of the potter. Sent chills down my spine. #AskaCurator
Heather Ecker 3/3: This all still happens to me when I handle historic manuscripts and other objects in the Keir collection… it is a thrilling, captivating journey and connection across time and geography. #AskaCuratorhttps://t.co/VxC5mnHdBPpic.twitter.com/GNr5IWN1Rl
Q: How have you done your job during the pandemic?
"We came together as a group to curate a show where we drew upon the works we steward to express ideas about this ever shifting moment." —Sarah Schleuning, Interim Chief Curator and The Margot B. Perot Senior Curator of Decorative Arts #AskaCuratorhttps://t.co/1ANd5Nsi05
Lola Cueto’s tapestry Tehuana (Fruit Seller), on view in Flores Mexicanas: Women in Modern Mexican Art
Dolores Velásquez Cueto, better known as Lola, began taking drawing and painting classes at the National School of Fine Arts in 1909, when she was just 12 years old. Two years later, against the backdrop of the Mexican Civil War, she became a student at the school full time, taking classes alongside such notable artists as David Alfaro Siqueiros, who himself was only one year older than her. Cueto was a voracious student, studying printmaking and other mediums at the National School, while also studying painting at the Open-Air Painting School in Santa Anita under the acclaimed painter Alfredo Ramos Martínez. She also began to teach drawing at a night school for workers, and her interest in education would continue throughout her life.
Cueto’s early work was praised by critics, raising her profile in the flourishing art scene in Mexico City. In 1919 she married fellow art student Germán Cueto Vidal, who would become one of the most well known experimental sculptors of the period. Their home was one of the city’s cultural hubs, where prominent artists and other cultural figures came to socialize.
Although Cueto continued to work in other mediums, she was increasingly drawn to tapestries, no doubt influenced by a childhood passion for embroidery. At the same time, she was part of a contemporary international trend—inspired in part by the Bauhaus—that sought to modernize historic artistic traditions using new techniques and technology. In her early tapestries, for example, Cueto used a sewing machine to create dense, precise embroidery with mercerized and silk threads.
The brooches in Kiff Slemmons Hands of the Heroes series, part of the exhibition Contemporary Art + Design: New Acquisitions, are each inspired by historical figures. Browse our round-up of interactive materials below to help you become familiar with the heroes represented and their historical significance.
Kiff Slemmons, Hands of the Heroes, 1987–1991, silver, ebony and mastodon ivory, Dallas Museum of Art, gift of Deedie Potter Rose; TWO x TWO for AIDS and Art Fund for Wearable Art, 2020.12.1-12
Tracy Hicks was a beloved figure in the Dallas arts community when he passed away in 2014 at the age of 68. Having myself moved to the city only in January 2017, I never got a chance to meet him, but his reputation soon reached me as I attempted to immerse myself in the local arts scene. Hicks was a foundational figure in Dallas, where he had lived since he was a toddler, before ultimately moving with his wife, journalist Victoria Loe Hicks, to North Carolina.
In fall 2018, Greg Metz invited me to see a brilliant retrospective of Hicks’s work at UTD’s SP/N Gallery. After walking through several rooms that showcased Hicks’s investigations around the intersection of scientific and archival processes with art, we encountered a light-locked space. Upon turning the corner, Freedman’s Field, a collection of excavated artifacts artfully arranged on a table, lay in resplendent glory. I had known of the work because it was first exhibited at the DMA in 1994 as part of the Encounters series, which keenly paired his work with the YBA artist Damian Hirst.
Tracy Hicks, Freedman’s Field, 1990–94, wood table, pottery shards, broken bottles, old watch parts, fragments of porcelain dolls, coins, buttons, oxidized silverware, and rusted metal, Dallas Museum of Art, Charron and Peter Denker Contemporary Texas Art Fund, 2020.14
Seeing it for the first time in person, after being steeped in the artist’s world and regaled with stories of his life and practice through Professor Metz’s fabulous tour, was a revelatory experience. The intense love and care Hicks had shown for these objects, which were repositories of such an important and lesser-known history of my new hometown, was palpable. I instantly fell for it, and knew it belonged back at the DMA, where it could communicate these local histories to visitors in perpetuity.
Close-up of Freedman’s Field
After that visit, we sought to learn more about the history of Freedman’s Town and its eventual demolition, beautifully explored in scholarship collected in SP/N’s exhibition catalogue, and in a semi-permanent exhibit at Fair Park’s African American Museum. Meanwhile, our collections team got to work learning how to care for such an installation, meeting with those who had cared for it before—including friends Ron Siebler and Nancy Rebal, who had shown the work in a memorial exhibition Rebal organized for Hicks in Corsicana in 2015—and learning firsthand about the myriad of decisions Hicks made in creating the work. As you’ll see, Freedman’s Field is unlike most works you’ll find in an art collection. The typical rules of cataloging just don’t apply here. It is better conceived as an archaeological dig. And Erick Backer, Preparator; Katie Province, Registrar; and Fran Baas, Objects Conservator, bravely undertook the challenge to apply their best professional standards to its care.
Interim Chief Conservator Fran Baas carefully treating the artwork.
The word curator comes from the Latin curare, “to care,” and this work is all about care: the care Hicks showed for the city of Dallas, the care the many local artists we met with showed to Hicks, and our care in honoring those relationships that predated us. My hope is that this work’s testament to that loving care might encourage us to pay closer attention to the world around us so that we can hear the stories it yearns to tell us.
Dr. Anna Katherine Brodbeck is the Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Artat the DMA.
Click here to dive deeper into this piece by watching an excerpt from Ron Siebler’s film Remembering Tracy Hicks.
Earlier this year, Dr. Vivian Li, the Lupe Murchison Curator of Contemporary Art, had the opportunity to interview artist Do Ho Suh, whose work is featured in the exhibition For a Dreamer of Houses. Read excerpts from the interview below about his inspiration and how the pandemic has changed his practice, and click here to read the full interview.
Do Ho Suh, Hub, 260-10 Sungbook-dong, Sungbook-ku, Seoul, Korea, 2016, Polyester fabric and stainless steel, 117 × 102 × 65 in. (2 m 97.18 cm × 2 m 59.08 cm × 1 m 65.1 cm), Dallas Museum of Art, TWO x TWO for AIDS and Art Fund, 2019.15. Photo by John Smith.
VL: Many of your fabric piecesare replicas of a specific place you once called home and are often described as such with the precise address as the title. Can you describe the place that inspired Hub, 260-10 Sungbook-dong, Sungbook-ku, Seoul, Korea (2016), and why you selected to make a fabric replica of this particular structure?
DHS: Hub, 260-10 Sungbook-dong, Sungbook-ku, Seoul, Korea is an area of my parents’ home in Seoul, where I grew up. It’s a traditional han ok (Korean house)—a 70s copy of the one King Sunjo (1790–1834) built in the early-nineteenth century because he wanted to experience the life of ordinary people. I’ve continued to stay there whenever I’m back in Seoul so it’s the site of decades of memories for me. I think of the fabric architecture works as, in a sense, an act of shedding skin, slipping out of my clothes and packing them quietly away to unfold elsewhere.
The Hub sculptures are transitional or in-between spaces—corridors, passages, entryways. This one is an area between the bathroom and the living room/bedroom. Traditional Korean architecture is much more porous than in the West—there is less rigidity to the separation of the rooms, and the outside world is much more integrated: sounds travel; doors or windows become walls; you feel the temperature of your external surroundings keenly; the spaces themselves are reconfigured throughout the day and night. That porous quality all feeds into this sculpture and it’s partly why the translucence of the fabric is key. I began using fabric partly because of its affinities with those qualities in Korean architecture and Hub, 260-10 Sungbook-dong is probably the closest one of my Hubs comes to the original structure, because three of the walls are doors and windows covered in rice paper. The transition feels very natural.
VL: How has the pandemic changed your studio practice, or is there anything you have become more focused on lately?
DHS: I keep thinking about what it means if you don’t have somewhere to call home. I first started to consider what home meant when I left Korea and I’ve never stopped, so for me it was something that came into focus when it was challenged. So many people must be struggling with that now. Also how borders—physical, political, social—impact our behaviors. I’m a transnational artist and I’ve benefited from notions of a borderless world, the fluid and constantly moving nature of the cultural sector. What happens to that now? They’re such complex areas though. I’m also thinking a lot about what’s happened in the wake of globalization, and to an extent neoliberalism—all the lost optimism, all the ambitions to build new walls and borders.
In terms of my studio practice, I’m inevitably doing less work on larger-scale physical projects and a lot of thinking around philosophical concerns. Even the fact that I’m spending a lot of time cleaning my apartment – I’m touching and seeing it in different ways and that’s really interesting to me. Looking anew at the objects you unthinkingly interact with on a daily basis. I’m also working a lot with my two young daughters on an ongoing project, but it’s really taken shape during the lockdown. We’ve been building a lot with Legos and whole fantastical worlds of modelling clay. I’m interested in what happens to our psychic space as we age, how the child’s mind works and what imaginative play communicates about how we frame our worlds, how we try and impose order on the chaos and how much better children are at navigating that chaos.
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See this work in For a Dreamer of Houses, now open to the public at the Dallas Museum of Art through July 4, 2021. Plan your visit to the DMA and reserve your tickets here.
Our recent reopening has stirred up great excitement, especially among DMA staff, who are thrilled to be able to welcome you back to your city’s museum! We asked a group of DMA curators to tell us what they are most excited about as the Dallas Museum of Art opens its doors. Read what they had to say.
Dr. Heather Ecker, The Marguerite S. Hoffman and Thomas W. Lentz Curator of Islamic and Medieval Art One of the joys of working with the Keir Collection is making new discoveries—sitting down with a manuscript or picking up a work in ceramic always feels like an adventure. A scribal note or a design can speak quite directly across geography and time.
Tile, unknown artist, 15th century, red clay with painting in blue and turquoise on a white slip under a transparent glaze, The Keir Collection of Islamic Art on loan to the Dallas Museum of Art, K.1.2014.893.1
Julien Domercq, The Lillian and James H. Clark Assistant Curator of European Art I am thrilled to be able to see real works of art again, and for visitors to be able to enjoy them firsthand in the galleries. There’s just nothing like being able to lose yourself in looking closely at brushstrokes of paint.
Frans Hals, Portrait of Pieter Jacobsz. Olycan, 1629–30, oil on panel, Private Collection, Courtesy of David Koetser Gallery, Zurich
Dr. Vivian Li, The Lupe Murchison Curator of Contemporary Art I love seeing once again Miguel Covarrubias’s Genesis, The Gift of Life, an iconic Museum landmark that has become woven into the fabric of Dallas. Countless families, friends, and young ladies in their spectacular quinceañera dresses have captured beautiful memories in front of it.
Miguel Covarrubias, Genesis, The Gift of Life, about 1954, tempera on cardboard laid on panel, Dallas Museum of Art, gift of Jorge Baldor, 2019.60
Dr. Anna Katherine Brodbeck, Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art I am excited to return to For a Dreamer of Houses, an exhibition that was installed but never opened to the public before August 14. The Rubber Pencil Devil installation has a three-hour video, so that’s where I hang out during breaks.
Alex Da Corte, Rubber Pencil Devil, 2018, glass, aluminum, vinyl, velvet, neon, Plexiglas, folding chairs, monitors, high-res digital video, color, and sound, Dallas Museum of Art, TWO x TWO for AIDS and Art Fund, 2019.59. Photo by John Smith.
Dr. Nicole R. Myers, The Barbara Thomas Lemmon Senior Curator of European Art Among the things I’ve missed most are seeing and hearing visitors’ excitement as they explore the galleries and linger in front of objects that speak to them. It’s great to see the Museum come back to life.
Plan your visit to enjoy all of these wonderful art experiences and more! Reserve your timed tickets here. We can’t wait to see you back at the Museum!
After recently acquiring a piece of Caddo pottery by Chase Kahwinhut Earles, we reached out to the artist at his home in Oklahoma to hear about his practice and process. Listen to his introductory message and read his Q&A conversation with Dr. Michelle Rich,The Ellen and Harry S. Parker III Assistant Curator of the Arts of the Americas at the DMA.
Chase: Kuha-ahat [Hello]. Kumbahkeehah Kahwinhut [My name is Kahwinhut]. Hello my name is Chase Kahwinhut Earles, and I’m a member of the Caddo Nation. I make traditional pottery and also contemporary pieces incorporating modern interpretations of our culture.
Chase Kahwinhut Earles, 2019. Photo by Travis Caperton, University of Oklahoma
Michelle:Can you describe the process by which you make your pottery?
Chase: I make pottery the ancestral, or traditional, Caddo way. I dig the clay myself from the banks of different rivers, mostly the Red River between Texas and Oklahoma. I process it to dry it and break it down into usable material. I collect and crush freshwater mussel shell to mix with the clay as a temper, which helps strengthen it so the vessels survive through the pit-firing process. All of my pieces are hand built using the coil method. I don’t use a wheel. After a piece dries, I burnish it with smooth stones to make it shiny. There’s no glaze. Then I pit fire the vessels. The final step is to engrave the design into the carbonized surface of the pots.
Photo by Travis Caperton, University of Oklahoma
Michelle:Pit firing is very different from kiln firing. Will you talk about that a little bit?
Chase: I fire my pots in a traditional pit fire. This is different than the modern kiln, which slowly heats the pottery until it gets to high temperatures. Our pit firing is started by stacking sticks and lighting an open ground fire. First, we heat the pottery near the fire to drive out moisture, and then they go right into the fire. I’ll add more wood, and the larger fire will get to a high enough temperature to vitrify the clay. You can see the pots start glowing! Sometimes things can go wrong, and if a pot gets overfired it will become fragile or might even spawl or crack. Large pieces, such as the Alligator Gar, can be fired in sections or with multiple fires.
Michelle:What inspired you to make Caddo pottery?
Chase: My parents took us to the Southwest when we were young. I loved and was inspired by the beautiful Pueblo pottery and wanted to make those beautiful pots. And I did learn how, but realized there was something not right about that, and I came to understand the difference between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation. That pointed me in the right direction—to look at my own tribe. I mean, why wouldn’t I have? But I didn’t expect to find anything. Lo and behold, we have one of the biggest pottery traditions in the country, but not many people know about it! Then my purpose was obvious. I dove in, obsessively learning everything about our tribe, our pottery tradition, and our techniques. Jeri Redcorn, a Caddo elder who revived Caddo pottery, helped me get started.
Photo by Travis Caperton, University of Oklahoma
Michelle: The words “contemporary” and “traditional” carry a lot of weight when describing Indigenous arts made in a customary fashion. Where do you situate your work?
Chase: The question of contemporary and traditional is complicated with Native American art, where these words are used to describe the difference between something that’s made in a modern manner or something that’s made exactly how we’ve made things forever. My work up to this point has been primarily trying to save our ancestral and traditional ways of making pottery, so it’s a very ancient style, method, and technique. The present-day definition of “contemporary” is that you’re a living artist. So, in fact, we can be contemporary and traditional at the same time—I’m a living artist producing fine art. But I thought it was important to learn and reestablish our ancestral way in order to have a base to move forward, evolve our work, contribute to Caddo culture, and develop a modern narrative.
Chase Kahwinhut Earles, Batah Kuhuh Alligator Gar Fish Effigy Bottle, 2018, Caddo, ceramic, Dallas Museum of Art, The Otis and Velma Davis Dozier Fund, 2020.9
Michelle:What does it mean to you to have the DMA acquire your work?
Chase: It means the world to me. When I set out to make pottery and art, specifically our tribal art, it was clear that not many people knew about the Caddo, even though we were once a huge, great society. And no one knew about the pottery, and the tradition kind of got forgotten. Having my work in institutions and museums like this is the ultimate goal—to share our beautiful artistic traditions with people and educate them about our identity, our culture, and our continued presence. So, on the scale of importance, it’s up there at the top!
Also, I can’t thank the DMA enough, especially for this opportunity. It goes a long way to educate people about the importance of Native American artwork in the context of American art. I applaud that effort and am very thankful for it.
In fall 2019, Sandra Cinto’s large-scale mural Landscape of a Lifetime was brought to life in the Museum’s Concourse by the artist, along with the help of some DMA staff and a team of artist assistants from around Dallas. The team spent roughly three weeks working on the 153-foot mural, which features 24 shades of blue shifting from night to day, intricate pen drawings of celestial elements such as stars and clouds, and low-level audio of crashing waves, rustling leaves, birds, and crickets.
Sandra Cinto and team working on the mural
To coincide with the recent launch of our virtual tour of the mural, we reached out to some of the participants who helped bring this work of art together and asked them to reflect on their experience. Here’s what they had to say:
“Learning Sandra’s simple drawing vocabulary of dots and lines, which we deployed in the cavernous Concourse in the form of stars, bridges, mountains, and clouds, created a link to an ancient human past of painting cave walls, tombs, temples, canyons, and shelters with an extended family that speaks a common language of art.” —Tino Ward
Sandra Cinto: Landscape of a Lifetime at the Dallas Museum of Art
Cinto working with an artist assistant
“Being an artist is a selfish pursuit. Even when it comes to a mural, helpers are treated as a necessary evil, paycheck players brought in to meet a deadline. Sandra Cinto is a magical exception to that rule. Her mural, Landscape of a Lifetime, allowed us lucky few to feel truly invested as this piece took shape, while Sandra deftly handled the key elements. Rather than keeping us at arm’s length, she built a nest in the clouds and drew us in. I was given the job of drawing stars. Up close, they seemed tedious and mundane, but when taken in from a distance, they shimmer—not unlike Sandra herself. I had the privilege of being part of a project that was communal in the best sense of the word—an enterprise of the spirit. Thank you, Sandra.” —Russell Sublette
“Working on Landscape of a Lifetime was one of the most memorable experiences of my life. The opportunity to learn from such a successful artist was an honor. I made many meaningful connections that I am eternally grateful for.” —Meena Valentine
Meena Valentine contributing to the mural
“Sandra Cinto firmly believes that everyone can draw. The elements that you see throughout the mural are composed of simple marks—the stars are lines radiating from a center point, the mountains quick penstrokes—but with many people drawing, they come together in a multitude to form a harmonious whole. That is another component of Sandra’s philosophy: communities of people can be an incredible source of love, care, and creative potential.” —Hilde Nelson
The DMA’s C3 Visiting Artist Project offers opportunities for North Texas–based artists to create an interactive installation and facilitate programming around a theme related to the works in the C3 Gallery. Over the years, the project has showcased the talents of artists from many backgrounds and with various creative approaches and missions. We asked five former C3 Visiting Artists to respond to works in the DMA’s collection that resonate with them. Here’s what they had to say:
xtine burrough & Sabrina Starnaman Former C3 Visiting Artists, October–December 2017 Find out about their work through their project page and get to know them through their DMA interview.
Eyedazzler textile, Arizona, Navajo (Diné), 1880–90, wool with indigo and aniline dyes, Dallas Museum of Art, Foundation for the Arts Collection, anonymous gift, 2016.19.2.FA
Why they chose this work: Our artistic practice investigates the importance of work, especially work by women not credited to the maker. Women are the weavers in many cultures. The Navajo culture’s creation myth tells of Spider Woman, who taught people how to construct looms from the elements: sky, earth, sun, lightning, and crystals. We selected the eyedazzler textile to celebrate women’s work in textile technologies.
Timothy Harding Former C3 Visiting Artist, January–April 2018 Find out about his work through his project page and get to know him through his DMA interview.
Charles Demuth, Buildings, 1930–31, tempera and plumbago on composition board, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas Art Association Purchase Fund, Deaccession Funds/City of Dallas (by exchange) in honor of Dr. Steven A. Nash, 1988.21
Why he chose this work: I first encountered the work of Charles Demuth during my undergraduate studies in painting. Seeing how he rendered architectural subject matter with collapsed space and reduced elements helped me think differently about working through problems of paint and form.
Lisa Huffaker Former C3 Visiting Artist, July–September 2017 Find out about her work through her project page and get to know her through her DMA interview.
David McManaway, Jomo/Jomo #14, 1992, mixed media, Dallas Museum of Art, Texas Artists Fund, 1992.523
Why she chose this work: David McManaway’s Jomo/Jomo #14 houses talismanic objects in a shrine-like Wunderkammer that resonates with exponential, not just additive, significance. Likewise, I aspire to exceed the “sum of parts” as I bring fragments of the world into my art and writing.
Lauren Cross Former C3 Visiting Artist, September–December 2018 Find out about her work through her project page and get to know her through her DMA interview.
Why she chose this work: When I was first introduced to the work of Annette Lawrence, I saw so much of the work that I do reflected: the use of brown paper and the connection to personal narrative. Her work Anna Cooper Lawrence is not only related in its use of material but also in her use of family history, a key element in my own practice. My work at the DMA, Assembly, embodies all these qualities with visitors in its use of brown paper and its connection to the familiar among us.
