Archive for the 'Members' Category



Merry Museum Memories

HM and Marilyn Hailey at the member preview for All the Worlds a Stage

Marilyn Hailey has been a member of the Dallas Museum of Art and a Museum Store volunteer for more than twenty years. Last week, she stopped in to purchase a gift membership as a Christmas gift for a friend. I had the opportunity to sit down and ask her a few questions about why she loves the Museum.

Do you remember why you joined?

MH: A friend had a volunteer position with the Museum Store and was moving. She asked me to take over for her and I did.

If you could have one work of art from the Museum’s collections in your home, what would it be?

MH: Vase of White Lilacs and Roses by Édouard Manet.

What is your favorite activity at the DMA?

MH: I enjoy coming to the exhibition previews on the member days. I love the jazz on Thursday nights as well. I sometimes tell Wendell [Sneed, Jazz in the Atrium Program Coordinator] who to bring back.

What has been your favorite special exhibition?

MH: Splendors of China’s Forbidden City: The Glorious Reign of Emperor Qianlong. That Christmas, every gift I bought was from the Splendors of China’s Forbidden City gift shop. I love oriental art. My husband, HM, and I lived in Japan for a while when he was in the Air Force.

What is a typical day like for you?

MH: I get the newspaper and read the funnies, and then work on the computer crosswords. I spend too much time doing that. I’m in a lot of leagues in the city.

 

Creating MAW

Special Member Gift

Member Appreciation Week (MAW) is about celebrating and thanking members of the Dallas Museum of Art.

The Dallas Museum of Art has an event planning team, but this event falls directly to me. This isn’t just any event – it’s an entire week to personally say “thank you” to all our members. One of the best parts of my job is talking to people every day about why they love the DMA. It’s my chance to say that I’m happy you are member. Our members are pretty amazing. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been stopped at the mall and grocery store by members.

Our first MAW was last December. We had a great turnout, but we realized that we were competing with holiday parties. This year, we decided to have the event before Thanksgiving, so that we wouldn’t interfere with other events. We will celebrate Monday, November 15 through Saturday, November 20 so that all members have the opportunity to stop in. We have tours, scavenger hunts, story time for kids, and my favorite, the Museum Store estate sale!

I start the actual planning in July, which means a lot of coordinating with our educational staff. With the help of Arts & Letters Live, we secured an appearance with author Stacy Schiff for her new book, Cleopatra. We’re thrilled that it’s a sellout and we  hope to provide more events like this in the furture. Speaking of other events, on Monday members will be the first to shop for pearls, gold, watches, vintage brooches, rings, sterling silver pieces, pendants, and more at the second annual Art/Find estate sale in the DMA’s Museum Store.

My favorite part of planning MAW is picking out the member gift! This year’s gift is photo cubes. We’ve noticed that people love taking photos here so why not give them something to display those photos. I’ll soon be creating little squares for the photo cubes that say, “Add your photos to our Flickr page!” I’m constantly in the galleries taking photos and I add them to the Museum’s Flickr page all the time.

I hope you can make it next week, and if you do, please be sure to say hello. For a complete listing of events, visit DallasMuseumofArt.org/EventsforMembers.

Wendi Kavanaugh is the Member Outreach Manager at the Dallas Museum of Art

Membership Memories

This month we spotlight Caroline and Robert Belanger, DMA members since 2004.

Tell us a little bit about yourselves and why you joined the DMA? The strength of the Dallas arts community is what independently brought both of us here. Caroline moved from Austin to help run Pan American Art Projects, a Latin-American art gallery. Rob relocated from Atlanta to work with Dr. Anne Bromberg in the curatorial department at the Dallas Museum of Art. We are now running our own art-consulting business, Belanger Art Methods,  and we are proud to serve the arts community and to support the Museum as active members of the Junior Associates Circle.

What’s your favorite activity at the DMA and why? For us, it would have to be Curator’s Choice, the first Junior Associates Circle event of the year. It is always an exceptional opportunity to meet new members and to hear a curator speak about one of their favorite works of art in the Museum’s collections – right in the galleries. Not to mention that is the very event where we first met!

What is or was your favorite exhibition at the DMA and why? Caroline: In 2005, Dr. Dorothy Kosinski curated the exhibition Dialogues: Duchamp, Cornell, Johns, Rauschenberg, which revealed both the overt and covert dialogue and shared visual vocabulary evident in the work of these four modern and contemporary artists. Personally, as an art historian, I enjoyed how this exhibition investigated the exchange of philosophies and strategies throughout modernism from Dada and surrealism to pop art, and even found-object assemblage. Also, it was nice that the majority of the works in the show are in the DMA’s collections.

Rob: Charles Sheeler’s “Power” Series from 2006, curated by Dr. William Keyse Rudolph, is a great example of how small, intimate exhibitions can be among the most memorable. The exhibition focused on a series of six iconic paintings by Charles Sheeler, a self-proclaimed “precisionist” painter and founder of American modernism. The key to this exhibition was that it not only reunited all of the paintings for the first time in many years but also skillfully integrated numerous original photographic studies and archival materials into the gallery layout, offering an exceptional snapshot of the creative process from start to finish.

What is your typical day like? As art consultants, no day is really the same, but the one constant is that we are always problem-solving. For example, one day we will be curating, inventing mounts, and physically installing works of art on-site for a private collector. The next, we are in the office researching, designing, and editing an exhibition publication for a museum. The day after, we may be visiting a gallery to help a client buy or sell. Since we have a broad range of expertise, we get the chance to work on a lot of great projects with some really fascinating people.

Members Celebrate African Masks

Last Friday we posted to our blog that it takes several weeks to install an exhibition, and they are planned many months (if not years) in advance. Once the Museum’s membership department knows when exhibitions will open, we start scheduling our preview events.

This past weekend was busy; we hosted three previews! Over 1,000 DMA members took the opportunity to tour African Masks: The Art of Disguise before opening day.

In addition to greeting members at the exhibition and assisting them with the new smARTphone tour, we hosted the first Members Lounge at Late Nights. Some of you may remember that when the we presented the King Tut exhibition, DMA members were able to take a break from the crowds in a separate lounge area. We decided to bring the concept back during Late Nights. If you are a member and plan to visit during the September Late Night, stop by the Members Lounge at Late Nights for a snack and some additional fun. And please be sure to say hello!


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