Where Do We Go From Here? PATRON’s 2020-2021 Performing Arts Issue is out now.

By the time this issue reaches you, we will have just entered the twelfth month of a most trying year. While these months have been difficult, they’ve also revealed the resilience of North Texans, who continue to reinvent to save their own businesses and support others, including the arts. Thirty-one days remain in 2020 to make an impact before a new year unfolds, and with it, the first blush of promise. If there were ever a time to donate to the arts it is today.
Lee Cullum presents the hard truths of the suffering the performing arts have endured through the ongoing pandemic in The Show Must Go On. Within the story, she called on 10 arts leaders from Dallas and Fort Worth whose might, dexterity, and inventiveness through withered budgets, have emboldened the path to a brighter tomorrow for troupes and audiences. Our back page exemplifies these necessary pivots through The Dallas Opera. While the company’s stages remain dark, When the Going Gets Tough presents the hard work of two young minds who create the virtual content and programming of TDO Network.
On the cover, Mitch Epstein investigates urgency and resistance through Standing Rock Prayer Walk, which mirrors the plight of the Lakota nation created by claimed ownership and public access. Immersing himself in sub-zero temperatures within the Lakota community, Epstein spent time with Native American elders and for the first time made photographs on a reservation. Mitch Epstein: Property Rights also marks the first time these photos have been displayed at a museum. In Resistance, Steve Carter explores the mastery of this influential American artist’s large-format photography exhibition on view at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. John Rohrbach, senior curator of photographs at the Carter reminds: “Even as they force us to acknowledge their often-distressing subjects, they invite us to relish their color, light, and order, offering a microcosm for reflections in our country itself.”
Works sat in crates for months during the pandemic when a planned March exhibition opening was postponed. These significant sculptures and paintings have finally emerged in Alonso Berruguete: First Sculptor of Renaissance Spain, on view at the Meadows Museum. Nancy Cohen Israel writes of their heroic journey in Reframing The Retablo.
Even in a challenging year there were still milestones: Christopher Martin is riding on his twenty-fifth-anniversary high as a thriving artist and gallerist. Boldly expanding his Dallas and Aspen galleries, Martin invited new artists to share in the limelight, as detailed In All Transparency. Also, in The Present is Female, we take note of the new exhibition at Park House curated by Dallas Contemporary’s deputy director Christina Alvarez-Mathies who, in her first curatorial assignment, collaborated with Park House cofounder Deborah Scott to bring an all-women artists exhibition to its members.
When art meets collaboration, you find interior designer Dan Nelson inspired. In Avant Garde Appeal, Nelson works in hand in hand with homeowner Missy Gunn Falchi to add interest to an eclectic art collection through free-spirited design. Suite Dreams inspects Rosewood Mansion on Turtle Creek’s striking lobby and guestrooms transformed through the high design of Thomas Pheasant.
Fashion gets lustrous with jewelry from de Boulle, Eiseman Jewels, and Harry Winston. Photographed by Chris Plavidal with creative direction by Elaine Raffel, salon owner Patrick O’Hara augmented brunette beauty Taylor Harvick’s hair with the long, straight extensions of today in Fashion Your Future. A Brief Case of Cool shares the story of Franki Ray, a leather goods company three years in the making, birthed by besties Sasha Spivey and Stacey George.
Yes, reinvention is, I believe, the word for 2021 as the truths of 2020 persist in the new year. May these arts champions renew the spirit and stimulate us all.

-Terri Provencal