A cross-cultural exchange between The Meadows Museum, The Dallas Opera, and Madrid’s Teatro Real has drawn much attention of late. In November, we were in Madrid to witness the official signing of the agreement that shares their arts affluence through delegations, performance, and loans. We will host Teatro Real’s patrons in March. Read our firsthand account of the signing in By Way of Spain.
On the cover, artist Secundino Hernández portends another Madrid-based partnership between, again, the Meadows Museum and this time Fundación ARCO, the guiding force behind the contemporary fair ARCOmadrid. MAS: Meadows/ARCO Artist Spotlight is a six-year initiative that will exhibit the work of one contemporary artist from Spain on a biennial basis, the first in 2021. The museum offers a prelude with Untitled, 2019 by Hernández, on view through April. Visiting his massive studio, it’s easy to see why his work was chosen. Meadows curator Amanda Dotseth says, “He is constantly experimenting with new materials, techniques, subject matter, and forms of abstraction, never resting on one even successful type of work.”
The Dallas Art Fair collector preview story is an annual feature designed to get to know our local collectors and raise exhibitor awareness. This year we discovered three exceptional aficionados. Claire Dewar, Steven Riskey, and Deborah Scott don’t seem to share a single artist in their collections. Refreshingly diverse choices lined their walls, tables, and floors (a Tony Matelli weed sprouted from a corner in Steven’s home), acquired from both local and international gallerists exhibiting at the fair. Read about the artists they have their eye on for the April fair in Independent Study.
It’s a hard act to follow Doris Salcedo, Pierre Huyghe, Theaster Gates, and Isa Genzken as the first four Nasher Prize Laureates, and yet the Nasher Sculpture Center has done it again with the selection of Michael Rakowitz. Like Gates, Rakowitz is based in Chicago, and his reimagining of sculpture often takes the form of social practice. As an American artist, he mines his Iraqi-Jewish heritage to address cultural identity, displacement, and collective trauma. Arthur Peña visits with the laureate in Active Mourning.
TACA’s Silver Cup Awards Luncheon is right around the corner, and Patron is the proud media sponsor again this year. Lee Cullum, the always-impressive emcee, took the opportunity to visit with honorees Matrice Ellis-Kirk and former mayor Mike Rawlings. Their homes proved their arts chops. Both open their homes in the name of the arts, and both have beautiful works in their collections—including a mixed-media portrait by Janel Jefferson in hers, and his daughter Michelle Rawlings’ figurative work in his. Speaking of TACA, Steve Carter finds an amped-up Terry Loftis, the new Carlson director and executive president, at his alma mater, Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, in Coming Home.
We take a final look at the recently sold O’Neil Ford home that belonged to the great arts patrons Nancy and Tim Hanley. Though they were both from elsewhere, their ties to Texas were strongly rooted, and it shows in the work they collected from so many of our own great artists.
In our departments, Chris Byrne meets Laurie Ann Farrell, who curated Joël Andrianomearisoa: serenade is not dead, her first show as senior curator of Dallas Contemporary. And Brandon Kennedy investigates the broad practice of conceptual artist Jesse Morgan Barnett, aka jmb_2020.
And because March is a favorite time of year here—not too warm, azaleas blooming—we always look forward to our early spring fashion forecast. In Artful Accommodations, Elaine Raffel and fine art photographer Thom Jackson checked in at HALL Arts Hotel and took advantage of the beautifully installed collection curated by Virginia Shore.
Here’s to warm (but not too warm) Texas weather with skies in the perfect shade of classic blue, Pantone’s color of year, to greet our international guests.
-Terri Provencal