Official behind-the-scenes blog of the Dallas Museum of Art
Twenty-five works from the celebrated Rose-Asenbaum Collection of modern and contemporary jewelry are now on view, and included in free general admission, in the Museum’s Tower Gallery exhibition Form/Unformed: Design from 1960 to the Present. The collection includes over 700 pieces of modern studio jewelry created by more than 150 acclaimed artists from Europe and around the world. Take time to “ooh” and “ahh” over these magnificent bracelets, brooches, necklaces, and more.
Indian artist N S Harsha recently completed his first U.S. museum solo show, a mural commissioned by the DMA. This 120-foot wall painting is on view through February 21, 2016, in the Museum’s Concourse between the Barrel Vault and Fleischner Courtyard. Below is the completed project as well as the mural in progress. When asked about his feelings on his work being painted over and “lost” after the completion of the exhibition, Harsha replied, “The physicality disappears but the work is etched into the minds of people,” adding that he was happy to leave the space clean for the next artist.
N S Harsha with press during installation, August 2015
Gavin Delahunty, The Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the DMA, and N S Harsha speaking to the press during installation
With the newly renovated and reinstalled Arts of Africa Gallery set to open next month, it is an ideal time to take a look back at some previous installations of African art at the DMA.
African Gallery at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Fair Park, in 1972.
African Gallery at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Fair Park, in 1978.
African Gallery at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Fair Park, in 1979.
African Gallery at the Dallas Museum of Art, downtown, in 1989.
African Gallery at the Dallas Museum of Art in 1992.
African Gallery at the Dallas Museum of Art in 1996. This image was taken after the major renovation and reinstallation of the third floor galleries, The Arts of Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, in 1996, the last major renovation of the African Gallery.
It is interesting to see how the installations have changed over time from dark-colored galleries, to white walls, and back to deeper colors, and from primarily cases of three-dimensional objects set in the walls to primarily vitrines so you can see all sides of the object.
Hillary Bober is the Archivist at the Dallas Museum of Art.
Today Uncrated celebrates man’s best friend during National Dog Day. Below are some of our favorite pooches in the DMA’s collection. Visit these artistic canines in the Museum’s galleries, which are always included in the DMA’s free general admission, and see if you can spot a few other pups in works throughout the collection.
Nicolas Mignard, The Shepherd Faustulus Bringing Romulus and Remus to His Wife, 1654, oil on canvas, Dallas Museum of Art, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Algur H. Meadows and the Meadows Foundation, Incorporated, 1970.25
Mythical aso (one of a pair), Malaysia, Borneo, Kayan people, 19th century, wood, Dallas Museum of Art, The Roberta Coke Camp Fund and the Museum League Purchase Fund, 1995.34.2
John White Alexander, Miss Dorothy Quincy Roosevelt (later Mrs. Langdon Geer), 1901-02, oil on canvas, Dallas Museum of Art, gift of the Pauline Allen Gill Foundation in memory of Pauline Gill Sullivan, 2007.36
Ralph Earl, Captain John Pratt, 1792, oil on canvas, Dallas Museum of Art, gift of the Pauline Allen Gill Foundation, 1990.146.1
Get this Family Gallery Guide, and others, online or on your next visit to the DMA.
Kimberly Daniell is the Manager of Communications and Public Affairs at the DMA.
School is back in session in DFW and at the DMA. You may have heard about the establishment of the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History at the University of Texas at Dallas last fall and the downtown campus at the DMA. Dr. Kimberly L. Jones, the DMA’s Ellen and Harry S. Parker III Assistant Curator of the Arts of the Americas, will lead one of the Institute’s first seminars this fall on Inca art inside the Museum galleries, and ahead of the completion of the construction of the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History’s space at the DMA. Check out the progress below on the the new downtown campus in the Museum’s building.
Kimberly Daniell is the Manager of Communications and Public Affairs at the DMA.
This Friday we’re traveling through the 20th century during Late Night with a different decade highlighted every hour. We asked one of our favorite costume gurus, Breanna Cooke (you may remember the amazing Greek Hero look she created inspired by The Body Beautiful), for tips on how to dress for a time traveling evening.
The evening kicks off with a tribute to the 1920s-30s, so here’s how you can make a flapper headband and then put together an outfit.
What you’ll need for the headband:
Ideas to complete the outfit
For the gentlemen
It’s still hot in Texas, but a suit is a great accompaniment to your flapper friends. Find a bow tie, grab your fedora, shine your shoes, and we’ll see you at the DMA!
Once you have your costumes complete, come kick up your heels with the Matt Tolentino Band, who will be performing songs from the roaring 20s and 30s at 6:00 p.m. Check out the full night’s lineup online at DMA.org.
Breanna Cooke is a Graphic Designer, Costume Creator, and Body Painter living in Dallas. To see more of her work, visit breannacooke.com. Check out progress photos of her latest projects on Facebook.
During this month’s Art Babies, our mini museum-goers joined a hungry caterpillar at an imaginary dinner party to explore the sense of taste. Armed with their very own—Museum staff approved!—silver spoons, they goo-ed and gah-ed over the shiny silver serveware on Level 4. Their appetites primed with art, we then headed to the Art Studio, which was transformed into a smorgasbord of color, texture, and even flavor! Our petite Picassos used vibrant food puree “paint” to create their own masterpieces, taste-testing encouraged. Class ended with a colorful, baby-approved snack of blueberry carrot oat mini muffins, which you can try out at home:
Preheat oven to 375° F.
Line mini muffin pan with paper liners or spray with non-stick cooking spray. In large mixing bowl, stir together oats, both flours, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. In medium bowl, whisk eggs and sugar until pale and frothy. Add yogurt, carrot puree, vegetable oil, and vanilla, whisking until fully combined and smooth. Add carrot mixture to flour mixture and stir with rubber spatula until flour is mostly incorporated. Gently fold blueberries into batter with a few revolutions, just enough to incorporate remaining flour and distribute berries evenly throughout.
Divide batter into muffin cups, using a tablespoon scoop to fill them almost to the top. Bake about 10 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Note: A regular muffin pan can be used instead, increasing the baking time to 20 minutes.
Tickets for our fall classes go on sale September 3—we hope to see you then!
Sarah Coffey is the Education Coordinator at the DMA.
View from Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group located in the famous Flatiron Building
The annual DMA Arts & Letters Live planning trip to New York provides the foundation for each season of the DMA’s literary and performing arts series. During more than 30 meetings in five days at the end of July, Carolyn Bess and I learned which authors are generating a lot of buzz for their new books, and who will be on tour during our 25th anniversary season. These meetings provide a portal into the publishing world not yet revealed to the media or to the public. Here begins the dialogue regarding the authors and books publishers want to catapult into public conversation. We share statistics and successes from our recent events as we attempt to woo such “wish list” writers as Donna Tartt, Bill Bryson, and Nick Hornby. Authors often tour to a predetermined number of cities and only for a short time following their book release date, so there can be significant competition when it comes to securing them for Arts & Letters Live. We seek to balance the type of books, speakers, and performances we feature in each season to construct a mix of literary and historical fiction, poetry, memoir, nonfiction, pop culture, and emerging authors.
Though our meeting schedule certainly kept us busy, we managed to squeeze a few excellent cultural outings into our visit. The Tony Award-winning Broadway musical adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s acclaimed illustrated memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic was excellent and would fit nicely into our Artful Musings category (if only Alison weren’t in such high demand these days!). We enjoyed seeing Gerald Murphy’s Cocktail on view in the glorious new Renzo Piano building of the Whitney Museum of American Art as we look forward to hosting Liza Klaussmann tomorrow night at the DMA for her new fictional account of Sara and Gerald Murphy in Villa America. On a Friday evening visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, we joined the Museum Hack tour for what their brochure terms “a highly interactive, subversive, fun, non-traditional museum tour.” Their strategy did not disappoint. During our three-hour tour, we learned obscure and whimsical tidbits about a select number of pieces in the Met’s collection and wandered the galleries after hours, inciting childhood fantasies of spending the night in the Met like Claudia in E. L. Konigsburg’s iconic novel, The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.
One of the things that impressed me most during these meetings was the number of times publishers commented on the excellent reputation of the Dallas Museum of Art and Arts & Letters Live. After working on events with publicists all year via phone and e-mail, it is gratifying to meet with them in person and to hear how much they appreciate the quality of events that we host at the DMA. The professional relationships built and fostered during this New York trip are a key component to Arts & Letters Live’s success.
Michelle Witcher is the Program Manager, Arts & Letters Live, at the DMA.
This month, the Dallas Museum of Art debuts a new acquisition in the American galleries that highlights the work of Henrietta Shore (1880–1963), an artist who made a significant contribution in the development of American modernism. While she and her work were held in high regard, by the 1940s both had fallen into obscurity. Fortunately, the artist is now undergoing rediscovery, as well as a long-overdue reassessment of her impact on American art of the 20th century.
Henrietta Mary Shore, Waterfall, c. 1922, oil on canvas, Dallas Museum of Art, Foundation for the Arts Collection, Boeckman Mayer Family Fund, 2015.24.FA
Waterfall is a remarkable product from one of the most innovative periods of Shore’s long career, when she visually interpreted the natural world into its most essential and abbreviated forms. These “semi-abstractions,” as she called them, were an attempt to convey in a symbolic way the underlying spiritual forces she sensed in nature rather than a literal transcription of the visual phenomena she observed. In Waterfall, pure line and the juxtaposition of positive and negative shapes laid down with the sheer application of pigment are the means the artist employed to render visible the dynamic power of the eternal. Color is the emotional key she wielded to unlock the visual impact of the whole.
Although she was born in Toronto, the key portion of Shore’s artistic training was acquired in the United States, most significantly under Robert Henri in New York. After several years in California, she returned to New York City in 1920 and, forsaking narrative subject matter and the loaded-brush paint application she had learned from Henri, developed the stripped-down modernist approach demonstrated in Waterfall. The inspiration for this bold composition came, most likely, from her explorations of Maine and Canada during the summer of either 1921 or 1922. When her semi-abstractions debuted in a New York gallery in January of 1923, they were widely discussed by critics, who immediately and positively compared them with works by Georgia O’Keeffe then on view at another gallery across town.
On Wednesday, August 19, learn more about the newest addition to the DMA’s American Art Galleries during our lunchtime gallery talk.
Sue Canterbury is The Pauline Gill Sullivan Associate Curator of American Art at the DMA.
In our second installment of “30-Minute Dash” DMA Registrar Reagan Duplisea shares her solution to the tough task of only 30 minutes in the DMA.
A DMA highlights tour for me would begin by taking the elevator to the second floor galleries and turn left to be met with a wall of compelling and dramatic emotion and color, which begins with the despair of Ramon Casas’ Tired, the treacherous sea-swept cemetery of Adolf Hiremy-Hirschl, and ends on the idyllic pastoral note of Hans Thoma’s Olive Grove at Lake Garda.
Take the small staircase up to the third floor and take a quick turn through the Northern Decorative Arts gallery. Bask in the glow of the Tiffany windows and Front doors from the Robert R. Blacker House and admire the sturdy yet stunning craftsmanship of the Stickley workshop. Then take a few more steps into the light-infused foyer of the Reves period rooms. Don’t miss the Winston Churchill room, especially his oversized brandy glass and self-portrait in the guise of a portly pig.
As you exit the decorative arts galleries, make a right to marvel at the delicate Japanese ceramics, pause for a contemplative moment in the calming ambiance of the gallery of Japanese screens and take a quick wander amidst the sly smiles of the Oceanic figures. Take the stairs to the fourth floor and veer left on a path that will lead you past the harmonious and fine lines of Charles Biederman’s Work no. 3, 1939, the Viktor Schreckengost Jazz Bowl and Charles Sheeler’s Suspended Power.
This reverse route through the American galleries will ensure that you pass by the majestic Gothic bed before you exit and make a quick beeline for the Ancient Arts of the Americas. The first gallery features objects of jade, in amazing shade variations, and the second will dazzle you with an array of gold. As you leave the final gallery, throw a glance over your right shoulder to catch a glimpse of the charming Yup’ik Mask with seal or sea otter spirit. The Mixtec Crouching frogs outside the galleries will stick their tongues at you, playfully suggesting that you didn’t allot nearly enough time for your visit and goad you into planning another, longer visit soon.
Reagan Duplisea is the Associate Registrar, Exhibitions at the DMA