Official behind-the-scenes blog of the Dallas Museum of Art
For seventeen years Young Masters has showcased the amazing talent of area AP High School students. Come share our awe over the creative work produced by Advanced Placement® Studio Art, Art History, and Music Theory students from 10 North Texas High Schools through April 28.
Over the next couple of months, as you’re wandering down the concourse of the DMA, you may notice an eclectic mixture of vibrantly colorful paintings, intricate sculptures, detailed music compositions, and even essays on display just outside the Center for Creative Connections. That’s because our 16th annual Young Masters exhibition is underway!
The Young Masters exhibition is the product of a collaboration between the Dallas Museum of Art, AP Arts Strategies and the O’Donnell Foundation, in which Dallas area high school students who are completing AP Art History, Music Theory or Studio Art courses are invited to submit work to be chosen for display. A whopping 732 works were submitted for this year’s exhibition and from those, 60 final works of art were chosen.
Tuesday night marked the DMA’s annual Young Masters Reception and Award Ceremony in which members of the Dallas community came together to recognize and celebrate the talent of this year’s selected students. The night began with family, friends, students, and teachers crowding into the concourse to take photographs with the selected works of art.
The celebratory photographs and mingling were followed by everyone making their way into Horchow Auditorium to recognize each individual student and reveal a selected nineteen students who received top honors in the exhibition. Ceremony attendees heard a reading of the top selected essay, listened to a beautiful performance of the top selected music composition, and learned more about the artistic process and inspiration behind the top selected works of studio art.
Though most awards have been announced, there are still ways that you can get involved with the exhibition. During March and April Late Nights, be on the look out for staff or volunteers who will be handing out People’s Choice Award fliers for you to cast your vote in any of the three exhibition categories. You can also learn more about selected works from the exhibition at the March and April Late Nights when students are interviewed here at the DMA.
Amy Elms
McDermott Intern for Visitor Engagement
The 2013 Young Masters exhibition opened at the end of December and will be on view through February 17 in the DMA’s Concourse. The exhibition features work created by Advanced Placement Studio Art, Art History, and Music Theory students from area high schools. Stop by the DMA’s Concourse and visit Young Masters for free. You can access works by the Music Theory and Art History students on your smartphone.
This year’s exhibition features the work of students from Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, Coppell High School, Creekview High School, J. J. Pearce High School, Lake Highlands High School, Lovejoy High School, McKinney Boyd High School, Newman Smith High School, Plano East Senior High School, Plano Senior High School, Plano West Senior High School, and Richardson High School.
From ancient Greek sculptures of Aphrodite with a vessel of bathing water, to paintings of bathers by turn-of-the-century artists like Cézanne, swimmers and bathers remain popular subjects throughout western art history. Why have so many artists chosen this subject? Perhaps it is because cleansing oneself is universal, or because bathing can be related to purity.
Our new exhibition, Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties features a number of bathers and swimmers. With physical culture in its heydey, 1920s artists often presented bathers and modern swimmers as models of the ideal physique.
Here are some works in our collection featuring bathers and swimmers. Click on any of the artworks to scroll through larger images. The next time you visit the Dallas Museum of Art, be on the lookout for other bathing beauties!
Why do you think artists include bathers in their artworks?
Andrea V. Severin
Coordinator of Teaching Programs
Artworks shown:
Following her new installation in the third-floor galleries of objects that reflect transport along Eurasia’s Silk Road, “seasoned” curator Dr. Anne Bromberg sat down with us to discuss her fascinating career. A lifelong Dallasite—except for her years at Harvard getting her B.A. in anthropology and M.A. and Ph.D. in classical art and archaeology—Dr. Bromberg has been on the staff of the Dallas Museum of Art for more than forty years, first as a lecturer and docent trainer beginning in 1962, then as head of the education department, and currently as The Cecil and Ida Green Curator of Ancient and Asian Art. What’s more, she has led an inspired life, traveling extensively to little-known locales, researching and experiencing the cultures within her discipline.
Q: How would you describe your job at the DMA?
AB: Most curatorial jobs involve trying to acquire art for the museum, organizing exhibitions and/or working on exhibitions that come to us from elsewhere, publishing, lecturing, working with volunteers, [and] cultivating donors. In terms of legwork, it’s going around and seeing dealers and other collections, visiting other museums, going to conferences, and giving lectures outside the museum.
Q: You are in charge of a very diverse area of the Museum’s collections. What is your particular area of expertise?
AB: Classical art, meaning the art of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, and all Asian art, but I’m mainly working with South Asian art.
Q: How did you become interested in Asian art?
AB: One of the really outstanding teachers I had taught evolution in her biology courses, including historical geology, and I was really fascinated with historical geology and that got me into reading about archaeology. And I thought, this is what I want to do. A good teacher makes a difference. I’ve actually been interested in Asia for a long, long time. When I was an undergraduate, I was reading books on Zen Buddhism and haiku, the Ramayana, and things like that. Books stimulate your passion to go see these things in reality.
Q: What are some of your favorite places you’ve traveled to?
AB: I think both my husband, Alan, and I would say the single favorite place we’ve been is Isfahan in Persia. Italy, of all the European countries, is easily the most seductive, and everybody I know who has been to India is dying to get back. We’ve been there so many times, and you feel like you’ve just scratched the surface.”
Q: What is your favorite object within the ancient and Asian collections at the DMA? Within another collection?
AB: The Shiva Nataraja, because that image is the single most important iconic image in Hinduism generally, and many Hindus would agree with that. It is exceptionally beautiful both aesthetically and because it represents the loving quality of the god Shiva. South Indian Hindu poems describe worship as falling in love with the god, and our Shiva Nataraja is the embodiment of that Chola period poetry.
Brancusi’s Beginning of the World. because of my background, I personally have a strong response to pure geometric forms and classical idealism, and I’m certainly not alone in believing that the ancient Greeks would appreciate that classical, pure, and geometric vision of the beginning of the world.
Q: Do you personally collect art? What types of objects are you most drawn to?
AB: Primarily we’ve collected what I would call third-world contemporary art—things that at the time were being made wherever—New Guinea, India, South America, Mexico, etc.
Q: Why do you think it is important for people to study non-Western art?
AB: If you study non-Western art, you’ll learn what human beings create and why. If you stick only to your own civilization, you are much less likely to think about why these things are being made . . . or about a much more serious question to me, why do we call it art?
Q: Describe your current project, an installation of objects from the DMA’s collections focusing on the Silk Road.
AB: The Silk Road installation is something that has interested me for a long time. We do have a lot of artwork that really displays the meaning of the Silk Road, which tied Eurasia together for millennia. So I was delighted when I got a space where I could show the ties between the Mediterranean world and Asia.
The Silk Road is an ancient transcontinental network of trade routes that spread across Eurasia from the Mediterranean to China and Japan. The phenomenon of the Silk Road is constantly studied and has recently been featured in museum exhibitions around the world. The new installation, organized by Dr. Bromberg, addresses six themes related to the Silk Road, including the development of cities and trade, the importance of animals to early societies, and the spread of religions. The installation presents well-known DMA favorites, such as the Javanese Ganesha and the bust of a man from Palmyra, and new works from several local private collections. Opening this weekend, come see the new installation on Level 3 the next time you visit the DMA.
Ashley Bruckbauer is the McDermott Intern for Programs and Resources for Teachers at the Dallas Museum of Art and Madelyn Strubelt is the McDermott Curatorial Intern of Ancient and Asian Art at the Dallas Museum of Art.
On Saturday we opened the Young Masters exhibition in our main Concourse. The exhibition features forty-eight selected works created by Advanced Placement® Studio Art, Art History, and Music Theory students from thirteen Dallas-area high schools participating in the AP Fine Arts Incentive Program. In a departure from the traditional studio art exhibition featuring original 2D and 3D works of art, this year the exhibition includes original essays written by AP Art History students in response to works in the DMA’s collections, as well as original four-minute compositions by AP Music Theory students. Here are a few images from last week’s installation:
Photography by Adam Gingrich, Dallas Museum of Art Marketing Assistant
Who’s that lady? Find out tonight at 7:30 p.m. when University of Oregon Art History professor Dr. Kathleen Nicholson discusses allegorical portraits in 18th-century France at the Museum’s annual Michael L. Rosenberg Lecture.
Nicolas de Largilliére, "Portrait of the Comtesse de Montsoreau and Sister as Diana and an Attendant," 1714, oil on canvas, lent by the Michael L. Rosenberg Foundation, 29.2004.11
