By Kit Freeman
As the spring exhibition season awakens, a group of Dallas galleries have paired up with the Dallas Art Fair to produce Dallas Gallery Day on April 17, 2021. Aimed to generate conversations about contemporary art, Dallas Gallery Day offers gallery-goers the chance to visit area art spaces on their home turf. Participating galleries have created a host of events, including curator talks, tours, and artist conversations to breathe life back into the Dallas gallery scene. After a year of limited in-person events and exhibition programming, the bygone liveliness that was once the pre-COVID art scene has alas, safely, returned.
Proclaimed by the City of Dallas in 2013 as “Dallas Arts Month,” April is vital for the Dallas gallery scene, timed when the Dallas Art Fair usually takes place. With the Dallas Art Fair postponed until November, Dallas Gallery Day will be the engine for many galleries this month.
12.26, a gallery that focuses on bringing international perspectives to the Dallas gallery scene is a participant. Co-founder of the contemporary art gallery, Hannah Fagadau is grateful for the opportunities Dallas Gallery Day offers. “We love being a part of the Dallas arts community and we are excited to be among so many wonderful galleries,” says Fagadau, who directs the gallery alongside her sister Hilary. This River Bend gallery recently hosted Karla Garcia, a Texas-based Mexican artist. The show, Karla García: I Carry This Land With Me brought together clay sculpture and Mexican history to highlight the body, memory, and reflection. The exhibition delineated growth for Garcia.
Continuing the international conversation, 12.26’s upcoming show, Romantik, an exhibition presenting the work of two Canadian-born painters, Keer Tanchak and Janet Werner, will open on Dallas Gallery Day and will run for about a month, ending May 15. Romantik ignites the conversations 12.26 hopes to have with Dallas residents.
Fagadau describes the significance of April 17 and the role art has within the community. “The hope is that Dallas Gallery Day feels like a day for the community to come together and celebrate all of the art experiences the city has to offer.” Some twenty Dallas galleries will participate. “Though many galleries have been open to the public for quite some time now, this will be the first time since the pandemic that it will feel like a joint effort and a real community outing,” says Fagadau.
As the gallery scene slowly emerges from the COVID slumber, the community will be able to follow the growth of galleries surrounding the area. With an interactive map, made by Dallas Art Fair, residents can follow selected galleries. The day long gallery crawl’s first event will be an Artist Talk with Celia Eberle at Cris Worley Fine Arts. Eberle will be discussing her current exhibition, The Reanimation Project. Anchored by mythology and paradoxical tendencies, Eberle’s sculptural work juxtaposes themes such as nature and man, romance and loneliness, and time and the destruction of it.
Hopeful and passionate about the rebirth of in-person gallery attendance is another participating gallery, PDNB, a photo-based gallery that highlights artists that range from 20th century to contemporary. Also in the international conversation, PDNB believes that recognizing arts on ever level benefits both the artist and the community. “It is time to turn the light on,” emits the Co-director of PDNB Gallery, Missy Finger. “It’s an organic event organized by local galleries, and I think it is a statement,” she says. Dallas Gallery Day for PDNB, or Photographs Do Not Bend, means celebrating the “local gallery scene that Dallas needs to revisit,” according to Finger. Missing the annual spring season’s liveliness, Finger also adds that this season PDNB is in a new location, located at Riverbend, on Manufacturing Street, next door to Dallas Art Fair’s headquarters and gallery. “This will be the second spring season that the DAF has been absent from the cultural calendar. So Dallas Gallery Day hopes to fill that void. Hopefully it will be a beautifully sunny day that seduces people to get out and play and visit the galleries.”
The Dallas Art Fair, whose goal is to offer accessibility to modern and contemporary art for the Dallas community, has made Dallas Gallery Day possible due to its director Kelly Cornell. Cornell is proud that Dallas Gallery Day is in the month of April, as Dallas Arts Month is continuously celebrated and will be amplified during the Saturday event. “Dallas Arts Month began as just a week-long celebration many years ago. We worked with the Mayor’s office and museums to sync up everyone’s calendar so that we could really celebrate the arts around the timing of Dallas Art Fair when major players from the art world visit Dallas. This effort grew into Dallas Arts Month and became a larger city initiative to highlight the arts in our city. I am thrilled that Dallas Arts Month is returning this year and that Dallas Gallery Day can be an important event in the line-up,” she says.
Inspired to bring together modern and contemporary art and art initiatives to Dallas, the Dallas Art Fair has brought engagement and brevity to the art scene, and hopes to create more opportunities for collectors, artists, and visitors. “I am excited to see a unified calendar event and the high energy of the spring art season in Dallas return,” says Cornell. “The community of galleries in Dallas has been so creative over the past year with virtual programming, distanced visits, and responding to the times with ingenuity. The collaborative effort around DGD has been wonderful, and it feels like an exciting return to some of the things we’ve missed most,” shares Sarah Blagden, Dallas Art Fair’s VIP Director of Relations.
Also participating in Dallas Gallery Day is exhibition space CADD @ Siematic, a German kitchen design showroom located in the Dallas Design District. The space, which hosts group shows for CADD member galleries year-round, will open a group show titled Back to the garden for Gallery Day. Back to the garden recalls Joni Mitchell’s celebrated Woodstock lyrics. During a time of an unforgiving pandemic, political turmoil, and unspeakable violence, the exhibition harkens back to the need for communities to come together to forge new beginnings timed with Earth Day. The exhibition, curated by Terri Provencal, contemplates Mitchell’s message with artwork by multiple artists from CADD galleries such as Conduit Gallery, PNDB gallery, Cris Worley, Galleri Urbane, Holly Johnson, Craighead Green Gallery, Ro2 Art, Valley House Gallery, Kirk Hopper Fine Art, and ex ovo. Many of these galleries are also participating in the Saturday gallery programming.
Throughout the day, there will be live performances, food, and artist/curator talks, which will allow Dallas residents to enjoy their Saturday gallery hopping. Dallas Gallery Day sparks the beginning of an exciting and long spring exhibition season, and sets up the fall season with strength, as the Dallas Art Fair will commence in November 2021. “We are thrilled to help promote the event and work with all the galleries. We know that a strong art community starts here in Dallas, and we want to support this programming,” says Blagden.