Dallas Art Exhibition
Dallas Museum Of Art
1717 North Harwood
Dallas TX 75201
https://dma.org/art/exhibitions

11/23/19-06/19/22

The DMA’s Conservation and Arts of Africa departments, in an exciting and cutting-edge collaboration with UT Southwestern Medical Center, will present CT scans of a Senufo helmet mask from the Museum’s African art collection. This kind of mask is worn like a helmet by a medium at initiations, funerals, harvest celebrations and secret events conducted by the powerful male-only Komo society, which has traditionally maintained social and spiritual harmony in Senufo villages in Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, and Burkina Faso. Visible attachments on the mask include a female figure, cowrie shells, and imported glassware. The CT-scans reveal unexpected materials beneath the surface and objects contained in the attached animal horns that empower the mask.

Dr. Matthew A. Lewis and Dr. Todd Soesbe, faculty members of the Department of Radiology at the Medical School of The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, assisted with this exhibition.

Press
The New York Times
“Where to Go to Watch the Paint Dry”
January 21, 2020
NBC DFW
“Science Uncovers Secrets of West African Helmet Mask at Dallas Museum of Art”
January 20, 2020
The Art Newspaper
“How medical experts helped curators discover the hidden secrets of a Senufo h…”
January 4, 2020

I presented a large exhibition over two galleries in Venice during the Biennale and mounted two exhibitions in Guadalajara and one in Montreal. Most of the work that I’ve been showing was made with Ceramica Suro. I’ve also been working on some sculptural lighting for a Hotel project in Canada, new drawings and prints for a streetwear label project and some paintings for an exhibition in Mexico City. Due to COVID, many things have halted, but I draw every day.

What has been the interest in making your drawings? Is it a precursor to your sculptures?

Drawing is at the core of my practice. Everything I do stems from drawing, though my sculpture process has been influencing my drawing over the past year.

Which artist or group of artists have influenced you the most?

I am a massive music fan. Most of the artists that have influenced or inspired me are musicians, some of them my friends, and I work on their projects.Artists inspire me for different reasons, some for their ideas and some for their process.

Pierre Soulages, Louise Bourgeois, El Anatsui, to name a few. I am influenced by several Mexican artists- Jose Guadalupe Posada was a great precursor of street art, his work has inspired me since I was very young. Also, the fantastic and almost obsessive work from “outsider” artists Ferdinand Cheval and Henry Darger. For Contemporaries – pretty much everybody at Sadie Coles – Lately, Alex da Corte and Jordan Wolfson ( I have yet to watch Split Earth )

In a league of her own – Rei Kawakubo’s whole body of work has been an important force and presence for the arts in general. Independently or in collaborations and initiatives, such as Dover Street Market, I highly respect and admire her.

How has your work evolved in the past three years?

I have developed new perspectives through my drawing and painting practice. I have learned more about electronics and mechanics as well. Combining these techniques across disciplines has set me on a new path that I have applied to my sculpture and textile work. This allows me to plan the creation of complete landscapes or more immersive environments.

How did ceramics integrate into your studio practice?

Ceramics form part of my roots. Growing up in Mexico, I was exposed early and always remained interested in the vast artisan works and folkloric traditions that are shared through generations.I was able to incorporate ceramic sculpture into my practice because of Ceramica Suro, which allowed me to have a studio in Guadalajara in addition to my Canadian spaces. At the factory, Jose Noe and his team have been able to push the boundaries in ceramic production stemming from the traditional ways of the past and opening a whole new – and almost limitless-world of possibilities.

When you are in your studio, do you work with the idea of creating a series of works or possibly for a specific project?

I tend to be very focused when developing work for specific projects, I am quite disciplined and become completely absorbed by everything it involves to achieve each one. I spend the rest of my time doing personal research, which involves drawing and painting.

What has been the underlining story for your most recent sculptures?

The search for identity and belonging in what has been my nomadic existence.Transformation.My relationship with my birthplace, Mexico, it’s past and it’s present, and the artisans I get to work with and how they live.I am very interested in humanity and what it represents, from kindness to violence and our attachment to the environment seen through the eyes of how we were brought up or the lives we lived so far.These stories morph into different monsters and fantastical characters that I then sculpt. The girl- in all its forms- being the most recurring one.

What have you been reading as part of your research for your current work?

I listen to audio-books while I work. I finally took up The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, El Otoño del Patriarca from Gabriel García Màrquez and revisited Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky.

My colleagues at Ceramica Suro got me into Relatos en el Campo ((Historias de Horror) podcasts, I listen to these when I am abroad for too long and get Saudade for working together again.

Who do you reach out to for critical feedback?

Josh Olson, who can be brutal but always in a constructive way Jose Noe Suro from Ceramica Suro. My best friend Clayton Evans, who is an incredible talent and highly cultured and informed across different disciplines. He is very generous but also a slayer.I like discussing with gallerists as well, and getting their pragmatic view on things.

What are your next steps in the studio? What are you focused on?

Exhibiting, producing and collaborating – in these current times – Staying alert and informed, open and nimble.

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about renata morales
Born in Mexico City to free-thinking parents with an obsession for water, Renata Morales grew up in constant movement and spent her childhood in Mexico, France, Texas, and finally rural Quebec. These journeys marked her in two significant ways. Early on, they awoke in her an animated inner life which fueled her artistic production and brought to life strange visions from within. Second, all the changes left her with an outward yearning for the complicated human soul. As a multimedia artist, Morales’ practice spans different mediums, from drawing to painting, costume, textile, and object design, to most recently ceramic sculpture in Guadalajara, Mexico.

Renata Morales: Inane and Mundane Evolutionary Tales of Fear Love and Horror is made possible with lead support from Rodger Kobes and Michael Keller and the generous support of LALO, Canada Council for the Arts and José

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Dallas Art Exhibition
Dallas Contemporary
165 glass street dallas texas 75207
https://www.dallascontemporary.org/onview

08/26/21-08/25/22

Dallas Art Exhibition
Dallas Museum Of Art
1718 North Harwood Dallas TX 75201
https://dma.org/art/exhibitions

09/14/21-07/10/22

Summary | Programs
Featuring works from the Museum’s collection, Slip Zone charts the significant innovations in painting, sculpture, and performance that shaped artistic production in the Americas and East Asia in the mid-20th century. The exhibition reevaluates the art historical legacy of the era to encompass the simultaneous and intersecting strands of international movements, including Japanese Gutai and Mono-ha, Korean Dansaekhwa, and Brazilian Neoconcretism. Slip Zone also highlights the integral influence of Black and women artists working in abstraction in this period, complicating common understandings of the canonic Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and Color Field movements in the United States.

Focus Installation
Admission is FREE.

Click here to read the full press release.

MASTERPIECE MOMENT
We partnered with Bank of America to bring you an in-depth video featuring Jackson Pollock’s Cathedral, on view in Slip Zone. Check out this edition of Bank of America’s Masterpiece Moment series with Agustín Arteaga, the Eugene McDermott Director at the DMA.

Art Exhibition |
Craighead Green Gallery
1011 Dragon St. • Dallas, TX • 75207
https://www.craigheadgreen.com/

11/30/21-11/30/21

Whether you view it through a microscope or an airplane window, our world is textured, diverse, pocked, and burnished in its splendor. It isn’t always pretty, but it’s always arresting, remarkable and unforgettable.

I love deep, deep forests, oceans, vast deserts, foggy weather and outer space – the mystery and the lure of what seems like endlessness. And, we can only see so far.

We can only see so far ahead.

For me, that’s pretty much the human condition; there’s something very human about being slightly blind, all the time. We are, in many ways in this life, operating with very limited sight.

We’re a little bit blind.

We make up stories and folklore to make sense of an existence that we don’t completely understand and will never completely understand as long as we’re in it. We build, and we worry, and we work so hard, and all the while, all the other creatures on the planet seem quite content to just sit and be and look.

Yet, we humans want meaning in everything. “Why?” is the first question we learn to ask. We want to understand the why.

My work is an attempt to engage with something fundamental and elemental about the human experience and the life we’ve all found ourselves living in. We’re a little bit blind. We don’t have all the answers and never will. Yet, we go on asking for meaning.

We go on through the fog.

And I want my work to be beautiful. Because this life we’re in – this human experience – is textured, diverse, pocked, and burnished into beauty.

ARTIST PAGE
WEBSITE
KENDALL STALLINGS | HUMAN/NATURE
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Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, Kendall began art instruction in 1965 at the age of 11 and continued with his interest in drawing and painting into college. He graduated in 1980 with a B.A. from the University of Arkansas where he focused on photography and printmaking.

After moving to Dallas, Texas, Kendall worked from 1982-2002 as a painter and art director for Prelim Architectural Illustration. Here he painted illustrations for such clients as Disney, Trammel Crow, HKS, American Airlines, Hyatt and Hilton. During this time he was also developing his style as a fine artist and is now represented by galleries in the Texas/Arkansas region.

ARTIST PAGE
ABHIDNYA GHUGE | FINDERS KEEPERS
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My work is centered on a broader perspective of the value of human life, dignity of labor and the power of people to come together to create change. Within this concept, I bring focus to the female life, its disposability, fragility and power.

The humble white paper plate is my material of choice for large scale installations and sculptural works, while ink and watercolor/gouache is used to created highly detailed drawings. These drawings explore the intricate relationships, personalities, and portraits of women who have faced hardships, difficulties and experienced victories in a male dominated society.

As a first-generation immigrant to the US, I have experienced a drastic shift in my ideas of human disposability. I grew up in a culture where a female life lives in a dichotomous state of a doormat and a deity, a burden to the parents and an object to be traded, sold and exploited. I have witnessed circumstances where a woman has a voice, yet she cannot speak, she is sacrificial yet powerful enough to destroy and devastate.

The process begins with hand carving a large-scale woodblock and printing thousands of white paper plates, sealing them and then creating an organic form that occupies and changes the space it resides in. I urge people to look at the form as it influences the space and creates new encounters. To think beyond the obvious form and explore the possibilities of simple paper plates – a metaphor for human life and mortality – coming together in large numbers, changing the space into a positive experience. The work of human hands is to be celebrated, encouraged and cultivated. The meticulous repetitive processes in my work is an offering to the dignity to human labor.

In this sense, my work is a call to all humans to come together to create a positive change in the physical and psychological space.

Dallas Art Exhibition
Dallas Museum Of Art
1719 North Harwood Dallas TX 75201
https://dma.org/art/exhibitions

03/13/22-08/07/22

Summary | Programs | Press
Spirit Lodge: Mississippian Art from Spiro is the first major exhibition dedicated to the art and culture of Mississippian peoples. Although underrepresented in history, they created one of the most exceptional societies in North America, characterized by the construction of large earthen mounds that served as important cultural and ceremonial centers. Spiro in Oklahoma is the only known ancient site in North America where thousands of extraordinary ritual objects from across the Mississippian world were amassed together in a hollow chamber dubbed the Spirit Lodge. Bearing images of people, deities, culture heroes, animals, and symbolic creatures, these objects demonstrate the complexity and expanse of Mississippian society.

Organized by the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in close consultation with the Caddo Nation and Wichita and Affiliated Tribes, this exhibition of nearly 200 ancient and contemporary works explores Mississippian ceremonial centers, the discovery of the Spiro site, cultural continuity, and the active power of Mississippian art.

Click here to read the full press release.

Programs

Late Night: Celebrating Art and Culture of the Mississippian Peoples
This event has already passed
Stay up late with us as we explore the art and culture of the Mississippian peoples. Enjoy artist demonstrations, art making, performances, films, and talks about the exhibition Spirit Lodge: Mississippian Art from Spiro.

details

Special Demonstration: Caddo Language and Songs: Ha’ahut danayoh, Hasinay dohkana’ah (Sing well, talk Caddo)
This event has already passed
Learn more about the songs and language of the Caddo Nation with this presentation by Alaina Tahlate and singing by the Caddo Culture Club Drum (Mike Meeks, Mason Meeks, Michael Meeks, and Chad “Nish” Earles).

details
Press
Arts and Culture Texas
“Ancient Wisdom: Spirit Lodge at Dallas Museum of Art”
March 4, 2022
National Geographic
“This little-known Native American society was once as powerful as the Aztecs …”
March 9, 2019

Art Exhibition |
Laura Rathe Fine Art
1130 DRAGON ST., SUITE 130 DALLAS, TX 75207
https://www.laurarathe.com/exhibitions

04/02/22-05/14/22

Dallas Design District gallery, Laura Rathe Fine Art, announces Midnight Blooms, a duo exhibition featuring new works by Stallman and Janna Watson. LRFA will be hosting an open house on Saturday, April 2nd, from 12-7pm, with an evening reception from 4-7pm.

Using bold contrasts of light and dark, Stallman and Janna Watson create an impactful experience through their distinctive techniques. Stallman merges painting and sculpture into one, while Watson strikes a balance between gestural brushwork and precision. Through contrasting vibrant colors against dark backgrounds and borders, both of their intricate and undulating forms energetically blossom and flourish.

By combining painting and sculpture, Jason Hallman and Steven Stum, collectively known as Stallman, have pioneered a new technique, forming a body of work dubbed “Canvas on Edge”. In these groundbreaking works, hand-cut canvas strips are meticulously twisted into dynamic compositions, each as unique as the organic cellular models that inspired them. While Stallman’s craftsmanship is unmatched, their magnificent use of color is what steals the show, combining hues that flow naturally together to create incredibly soft, yet powerful gradients that wax and wane with the light. The cut edge of the canvas creates an elevated line drawing that never ceases or breaks, allowing the eye to explore in an almost hypnotic state. The result is a kaleidoscope-like maze, equal part curve and color, that comes alive as the viewer ambulates.

Janna Watson’s compelling abstract compositions use color, line, and energetic brushstrokes to evoke emotion in the viewer. Her work possesses an elegant and powerful energy, created with a carefully balanced pairing of loose painting and concise gestural mark-making. Watson’s paint strokes are feeling, sensing, emotive “moments” that wholly refer to this artistic approach, transcending realms beyond the world of pure abstraction. Watson’s compositions are an intriguing assertion of bold gesture set against atmospheric expression.

Midnight Blooms will be on display through May 7th, 2022.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

STALLMAN

Represented across the States as well as internationally, Stallman have exhibited their work in such far-flung cities as New York, Seattle, Dubai, and Hong Kong. Recently awarded the Carol Duke Artist Award of Excellence from the Bellevue Art Museum Arts Fair, their work has also been featured in many publications, including Vanguard Seattle, My Modern Met, LUXE Interiors Design, and Fahrenheit magazine. Stallman is a part of the Deji Art Museum’s permanent collection in China, a museum dedicated to connecting the history of the East and West.

JANNA WATSON

Watson holds an honors degree in Drawing and Painting from the Ontario College of Art and Design, and since graduating has exhibited extensively across Canada and internationally in more than 20 solo exhibitions. Her work has appeared in notable public collections including those of TD Bank, CIBC, Nordstrom, Telus, the Ritz-Carlton, ONI ONE, the Soho Metropolitan Hotel, and Saks Fifth Avenue. In 2013, she was commissioned to create an impressive, 11 x 31-foot painting for the lobby of AURA, Canada’s tallest residential building. Watson was featured by Artsy in its list of “10 Works to Collect at the Seattle Art Fair.” Her work has been covered by publications such as The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, NOW Magazine, and House & Home.

Art Exhibition |
Conduit Gallery
1626 C Hi Line Dr. Dallas, TX 75207 tel: 214.939.0064
https://conduitgallery.com/exhibitions

04/09/22-05/14/22

Conduit Gallery is honored to present She Never Said That, a solo exhibition of recent work by San Francisco-based artist Jennie Ottinger.

Jennie Ottinger’s work attempts to capture that moment immediately before or after a pivotal event, the tension in that fleeting period of silence and stillness. The unfinished quality lends to the uneasy stillness by making them seem interrupted, as if something sudden and significant occurred.

Ottinger is currently going through a princess phase. She is collecting stories of women who were maligned by history which applies to basically any high-profile woman throughout time. Princesses were pawns used to build dynastic power and in many cases, they were scapegoats, in Marie Antoinette’s case, for all the poverty in all of France and also the downfall of the French monarchy. This applies not just to princesses but any strong woman with proximity to power, like Yoko Ono, Meghan Markel, Anne Boleyn, like Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna who never said “Let them eat cake” and never commissioned a $15 Million (in our current valuation) necklace then refused to pay, and never abused her children. She did what she was bred to do: have babies and look fabulous.

She Never Said That is a series of historically referenced paintings of Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna (AKA Maria Antoinette).

Jennie Ottinger was raised in Massachusetts and therefore knows a lot about the Revolutionary war and cranberries. Just kidding. She doesn’t know anything about either of those things. She does know a lot about princesses though and loves to paint them, among other things. She holds a BFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts, a BA in Art History from the University of the Pacific and received an MFA from Mills College in May of 2008. She has exhibited extensively in the Bay Area as well as in New York, London, Dallas, and LA. Her work has been reviewed in Art in America, Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, It’s Nice That, and other places that made her happy. She lives in San Francisco.

Artists in this Exhibition———–Conduit Gallery is honored to present Gods and Grifters, a solo exhibition of recent work by New York-based artist Annabel Daou.

Annabel Daou’s work takes place at the intersection of writing, speech and non-verbal modes of communication. Her paper-based constructions, audio/video works and performances explore the expressive possibilities of ordinary language and reveal intimacies between individual and collective experience. Frequently, her works evoke moments of rupture, chaos, instability and misunderstanding but always with the tenuous possibility of repair. The exhibition is comprised of text-based cut out paper artworks including one monumental piece titled Another Country, which explores existence in another place, the opposites becoming parallels in the constant roil of life.

Of Gods and Grifters, the artist says, “These works are about suspension and weight, rocks become rubble, fabric becomes threadbare, and we use the remains to imagine lives before ours and our own lives in retrospect, always contingent, everything shifting.

Looking at the peeled off bark of trees at the end of the summer, at the carved out lists of gods and places and bills and receipts in ancient Babylon, etched marks deciphered by juxtaposition, these works are both a search and a slow reveal, a stripping or cutting away to make place for words that are markers of our everyday lives and imagine other possibilities of connection.

The works are drawn and cut alternately, a jagged attempt at following a thread or weeding through excess, leaving a remain that blows in the wind, a garment, a tattered flag laying claim to very little.

The soft white porous paper is laid on the ground and drenched in ink and color that pools and dries like water on a stone, bright and liquid and then dry and silvery, worn copper, bare branches in the sun after the rain.”

Annabel Daou was born and raised in Beirut and lives in New York. Daou’s work has been shown at The National Museum of Beirut; The Park Avenue Armory, New York; KW, Berlin; The Drawing Room, London; and The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. Public collections include Baltimore Museum of Art; The Menil Collection, Houston; The Brooklyn Museum of Art; The Vehbi Koç Foundation, Istanbul; the Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita; and The Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven.

Daou’s sound installation DECLARATION is currently on view at the Ulrich Museum of Art in Wichita, Kansas through May 2022. The Museum acquired the work for its permanent collection in 2021. She is also currently the subject of the solo exhibition Global Spotlight: Annabel Daou at Arlington Arts Center in Arlington, Virginia from January through March 2022.————————-Conduit Gallery is honored to present Briefly Gorgeous, a solo exhibition of recent paintings by Dallas-based artist Marcelyn McNeil.

Through her experimental approach to painting and process, McNeil challenges traditional assumptions about abstraction to produce works that remind us of the lyrical power of painting in an ever-challenging contemporary moment. The tension in her work enables the chance to engage slowly with the macro-view of the composition and the micro-view of the palimpsest layers. Spare and deliberate forms celebrate the evocative power of color interfolded with soft pours to invite contemplation. Each thin layer on the raw canvas becoming a luminous veil to deeply sensuous effect.

Says McNeil: “In this iteration of paintings, “gravity fed pours” are the heart of the work. Somewhat raw, unfiltered and exposed, these canvases are the most vulnerable and personal to date. Gone are the whites, blacks and greys I have recently relied upon to edit and cover my grounds. This work grapples with ways of seeing, material presence, what is necessary, what’s unnecessary, and how to ride that illusive line where there’s just enough information for the paintings to hold together. Ocean Vuong’s title “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous”, captures a space I’d like to find in the work, a place that is at once affirmative and melancholic.

The mechanics of a thing. Through systems of gravity fed pours, I’ve become a bit of a bystander in my own painting process. What I mean by this is my “hand in the work”, or my dexterity, are largely mute when pouring paint. Layers of thinned pigment are poured one atop another and left untouched to settle out, at will, on the canvas surface. The methods and systems I use in making paintings are slow, contemplative and to a degree beyond my control. Having said that, this wouldn’t be my work if I didn’t introduce graphic punctuations. Strong graphics serve as an influencer, conversation starter, and are structurally and spatially grounding.”

Marcelyn McNeil holds a BFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art (Portland, OR) and an MFA from University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work has been shown widely across the United States—including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, and Dallas—in commercial, nonprofit, university, and museum spaces. Within Texas, McNeil has exhibited in multiple biennials and at the San Antonio Museum of Art, Galveston Arts Center, Lawndale Art Center (Houston), Conduit Gallery (Dallas), and others. From 2012 to 2014, McNeil taught painting at the University of Houston as visiting artist faculty. She has participated in residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, 100 W Corsicana, and MacDowell Colony, and she has been a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant nominee. Additional awards include the Milton and Sally Avery Fellowship, Zeta Orionis Fellowship, Purchase Award (Portland Art Museum), and Community Arts Assistance Program Grant (the City of Chicago).

Her

Art Exhibition |
Galleri Urbane Dallas
2277 MONITOR ST DALLAS, TX 75207
https://www.galleriurbane.com/exhibitions-current

04/09/22-05/14/22

Here, the botanical subjects that have peppered D’Onofrio’s canvases in the past are arranged into representational depictions of flora seated in large porcelain pots. The artist’s investigations in the canon of Europe’s illustration masters, such as Basilius Besler’s (1561–1629) botanical encyclopedia Florilegium and Giovanna Garzoni’s (1600–1670) work, have been reconsidered as new compositions which allude to the legacy of botanical illustration while remaining mindful that images become kitsch with age. Formal considerations in the representation of plants is the most immediately recognizable element in D’Onofrio’s newest body of work, as it is the nature of depiction most endemic to the history of botanical illustration. The stem of a plant may be presented as separated from its root, so that both items can be shown in their differing characteristics. Flowers and fruit may be painted at a range of blossom and ripening. Leaves of a plant can appear full and lilting. Perspective and depth are impacted for the purpose of education; such is the nature of illustration.

Dallas Art Exhibition
PDNB Gallery
151 Manufacturing Street, Ste. 203. Dallas, TX, 75207
https://www.pdnbgallery.com/exhibitions

04/09/22-07/02/22

Santa Barbara photographic artist Cheryl Medow creates images that entice the viewer to enter the natural world and envision her wild birds, in imaginary and real environments. Using classical and contemporary tools, Medow layers her photographs, weaving them together to create visual narratives.

Cheryl Medow’s background in the arts is diverse. Medow studied ceramics at the famed Chouinard Institute and received a BA in Art from UCLA, concentrating on life drawing with charcoal and pastels. Continuing her art education, she studied printmaking at Hand Graphics in Santa Fe, New Mexico and digital printmaking with Mac Holbert and John Paul Caponigro in Santa Barbara. With this classical training in the arts and her new found twenty-first century tools, including digital photography and Photoshop, Medow found her calling: traveling around the world searching for birds to photograph and creating new images in her studio. Both worlds engage and enhance her curiosity about birds and puts her into the creative flow of life.

Since first exhibiting her work in 2006, Medow has received many accolades and her work is held in many private collections. There have been numerous articles written about her work including Proof.National Geographic – An Altered Reality by Becky Harlan and Inspire Adobe Photoshop For The Birds by Alyssa Coppelman. Medow was a featured artist in the August 2017 publication of LensWork #131.

In 2019, Medow had her first showing at AIPAD at Pier #94, New York City. Ten prints from her series were displayed at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum in Chicago, Illinois. And, CFPA Center for Photographic Arts in Carmel exhibited Crowned Crane Calling in the November International Juried Exhibition juried by Paula Tognarelli from the Griffin Museum.

In 2018, many of Medow’s prints from her Envisioning Habitat An Altered Reality series were on view at the Wildling Museum in Solvang, California. Medow’s image Grey Crowned Cranes won the Best Of Show award in the Altered Reality category in NANPA’s Showcase 2018 along Two Snowys which received the Judges’ Choice Award. Both and more were featured in NANPA’s publication Expressions 2018. The jurors were George Lepp, Roy Toft and Darrel Gulin. She received both a Gold and Portfolio Awards in San Francisco Bay International Photo Show and Night Heron In Tucson was exhibited at the ACCI Gallery, in Berkeley, California, during the San Francisco Bay Month of Photography in September of 2018. The Texas Photographic Society featured Burrowing Owls at the ArtWorks Gallery in Austin, Texas and received Honorable Mention from the juror, Roy Flukinger.

Six prints were featured in Currents 2017 at the Ogden Museum in New Orleans juried by Richard McCabe in conjunction with PhotoNola. Tri-Colored Heron And A Skimmer is now part of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art permanent collection.

Over the years, many of her images have been displayed in galleries across the United States.

Medow hopes that by embracing her hyper-real bird images, her audience will also create more space for birds living on our planet and be mindful of the fragility and beauty of life itself.

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EXHIBITIONS
2020

Cheryl Medow: New Works, PDNB Gallery, July – August, 2020

2019

Envisioning Habitat, Chicago Academy of Sciences Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, Chicago, Illinois – July 1 through August 25

Second Look: A Review Of Two Art Fairs May 18 – July 6

Dallas Art Fair – PDNB Booth B-10 April 11-14

The Photography Show presented by AIPAD PDNB/Booth 604

2018

TPS 31st Annual Member’s Only juries by Roy Flukinger, September in Austin, TX

Nature Imagined, Wilding Museum Solvang, CA, July 20, 2018 – January, 2019

Palm Springs Photo Festival – Slideshow Night

Highlights: New York & Dallas, PDNB Gallery, May – June, 2018

NANPA Showcase 2018 online and Expression Magazine

2017

Currents 2017 NOPA Members’ Showcase Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, LA juried by

Richard McCabe, Curator of Photography at the Ogden

Avian – Birds In A Changing World Sierra Arts Trails and Yosemite, Audubon Gallery 5 Oakhurst, CA

CfPA Members’ Exhibition juried by Corden/Potts Gallery, Carmel, CA

LAPC Members Exhibtion, DNG Gallery, juried by Paula Tognarelli Griffin Museum Bergamot Station, SM, CA

Aviary Lafayette City Center Passageway, Griffin Museum, Boston, MA

2016

Critters PDNB Gallery, Dallas, TX

Flight PhotoPlace Gallery, Middlebury, VT

Animalia PhotoPlace Gallery, Middlebury, VT

Slideshow Night, Annenberg Theater at the Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, CA

2015

Solo Exhibition – Cameraworks Gallery, Portland Oregon

Members’ Juried Exhibition, Center For Photographic Art, Carmel, CA, juror Richard Gadd, Director,

Weston Gallery, Carmel, CA

Flock: Birds On The Brink, Lotusland, Montecito, CA, Curator Nancy Gifford 2015 Nature LA: Cheryl Medow,

The G2 Gallery, Venice, CA

2014

TPS: Members Only Show, Odessa, TX

TPS:23 The International Competition Texas Photographic Society, TX

2013

TPS 26th Annual Member Only Show, Texas Photographic Society, TX

Map It Riverside Art Center. Los Angeles, CA

Animals, Santa Fe Photographic Workshop Competition

Birds In The Garden Solo Show, G22 Gallery, Boca Raton, FL

2012

Nature LA: Cheryl Medow, G2 Gallery, Venice, CA

Group Show, Perfect Exposure Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

2011

In The Company of Birds, TAG Gallery, Bergamot Station, SM, CA

2010

Wild Wings, TAG Gallery, Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, CA

2009

Flight of Fancy, Solo Show, TAG Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

2008

37th Annual National Juried Exhibition: Works on Paper, Here and Now, Glendale CA

Julia Dean Alternative Show, The Julia Dean Photo Workshops, Venice, CA

2007

“Why Animals”? Topanga Canyon Invitational – Topanga Canyon Gallery, Topanga, CA

ANIMALIA, TAG Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

Dallas Art Exhibition
PDNB Gallery
150 Manufacturing Street, Ste. 203. Dallas, TX, 75207
https://www.pdnbgallery.com/exhibitions

04/09/22-07/02/22

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, DALLAS, TX – PDNB Gallery is featuring two solo exhibitions in their Spring calendar. The exhibitions celebrate new work by photographer and birder, Cheryl Medow, and ceramic artist, Robert Milnes.

This is Cheryl Medow’s first solo exhibition in the gallery. In the summer of 2020, PDNB presented an online exhibition for Cheryl, and she has been featured in several PDNB group exhibitions.

Medow travels to locations local and international to photograph many species of birds. Her birds are placed in an imagined landscape. None of these feathered friends find themselves in their true environment in Cheryl’s final composition.

For example, a beautiful sleeping great egret is found with tropical trees in the background under a dramatic night sky with the starry Milky Way. In another photograph, a crowned crane is seen perched on a snarled tree stump, seemingly focused on calling to its mate. The misty background of grassy shores of what looks to be a river under a blue sky contrasts mightily with the crane’s vivid black, white and red feathers.

Cheryl Medow’s photographs have been exhibited in the Ogden Museum, New Orleans, LA, The Wildling Museum, Solvang, CA, and the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, Chicago, IL.

An exhibition catalog is available.

Robert Milnes, Pod, 2022

Robert Milnes was also featured in an online exhibition with PDNB in 2020. His upcoming solo show will feature work he has created this past year. Robert’s inspiration for this body of work was kindled on his 2021 trip to the Yucatan peninsula. He found pieces of dead coral on the beach which had an organic, modular form that intrigued him.

With this, Robert engaged with the Austrian philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, incorporating his seven propositions, sometimes using those propositions as titles to his ceramic sculptures. Wittgenstein discusses language as a picture. But, philosophy aside, these ceramic works are wondrous objects to behold.

Robert Milnes has exhibited extensively in group and solo exhibitions throughout his career, including Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, PA, the Northwest Craft Center, Seattle, WA and the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, LA, His works are in included in the collections of the Arizona State University, Ceramics Research Center, Tempe, AZ, and the Erie Art Museum, Erie, PA and other private, corporate, and public collections.

He is Dean Emeritus of the College of Visual Arts and Design at University of North Texas, in Denton, Texas. Robert Milnes currently lives in Asheville, North Carolina, working in his Arbitrary Forms Studio.

Both Cheryl Medow and Robert Milnes will be present for the opening reception, Saturday, April 9, 2022, from 5 – 8 PM.

Dallas Art Exhibition
Kirk Hopper Fine Art
1426 N. Riverfront Blvd. Dallas, Texas 75207
http://kirkhopperfineart.com/future.html

05/14/22-07/02/22

Drawings: Lee Baxter Davis and James Surls
May 14-July 2, 2022
Opening reception Saturday, May 14, 6:00-8:00 pm
Gallery open noon to 8:00 pm on opening day
Artists will be in attendance

Essay by Susie Kalil

They have been friends for over five decades—each other’s “point person” beginning in the early 1960s as undergraduates at Sam Houston State University and as they pursued MFA degrees at Cranbrook Academy of Art. Kirk Hopper Fine Art is honored to present a major exhibition of drawings by Lee Baxter Davis and James Surls. Combining some 50 works on paper and spanning from 1979 to the present, it is the first time the two protean Texas artists have been paired in a gallery show. For Davis and Surls, the landmark event comes full circle from the formative period to the latter years of their prodigious art careers.

James Surls, Dark Eyes, 2017, graphite on paper, 16″ x 20″
Skilled storytellers, Davis and Surls have thought deeply about the forces, spiritual and otherwise, that connect people. Over the decades, they have created drawings that put everything on the table, pouring into a melting pot of personal and universal images. In doing so, they opt for a raw, fragmentary art that embodies their divergent points of view, as well as the ambiguities, contradictions and dislocations of this age of insecurity. From the outset, the drawings lay bare basic links between the human body, human existence and nature. Some works investigate the notion of identity and metamorphosis, a kind of reassembling of the spirit, the mind, the body and the drawing itself. Others suggest a role for art in the world and a set of problems for it to address, works that bring with them a sense of contingency, of quirks and commotions of our daily lives. All of them, however, convey an overwhelming sense of obsessions; it’s as if they had to be made according to some intensely personal urge or interior force.

Confronting these drawings, you sense the recurrent longing for a return to something more deeply rooted, to something seemingly earlier and hence primal. Their attention to both the micro and macroscopic aspects of the world and their intuitive sense of those relationships, their rejection of barriers and boundaries, their commitment to a wide range of sources, has generated two distinct bodies of art that elude easy classification. Davis and Surls have created their own universes, according to their own special visions. At KHFA, you enter these worlds at your own peril. There may be aspects of life, of psychological and theological wounds, you would prefer not to know, and you will have to trade a former state of innocence for a new and complex awareness of unsettling forms and dissonant images. But in such worlds there is wondrous and erotic beauty.

The KHFA exhibition locates Davis and Surls working from thorny, imperfect, driven selves. It is centered on a building of narrative richness that has gained in speed and multilayered complexity throughout recent years. You don’t simply “view” these drawings, but must encounter them, meet them on their own terms, one at a time, to see what they are trying to say, and what they are aiming to bring about as a result of that encounter. It’s as if mark making connects them to the very nerve of their universes by becoming the conduits of their messages, their visions. The core of this work is in the psychological conflicts in which we are all engaged. With an admixture of hope and uncertainty, shaded by eroticism and paradox, Davis and Surls both evoke and confirm the relevance of human frailty and pathos.

Flowers, birds, fish, angels, eyes, boats, helicopters, guns, reptiles, wild animals, male and female figures, molecules, prisms and spirals—symbols anchored and floating, contracting and expanding. All of these undergo continuous metamorphosis of time and space, body and spirit. Through the use of symbols—the language of sacred art—Davis and Surls undertake heroic quests to uncharted realms. They function mainly as enchantments for your sensibilities, enticing you to pay attention, and then be led inward toward deeper and fuller dimensions of being.

Lee Baxter Davis, “Penney” Arcade, 2020, ink, H2O, graphite, 28″ x 20″
Taken together, their drawings are permeated with themes that emphasize psychic experience as transmitted through the primordial, the mythic and ritual acts, referring to the drama of birth, death, war, home, sex, beauty and decay, faith and sacrifice. Their subjects extend to what they have seen, sensed and imagined to include everything from compassionate renderings of feathered creatures and voyaging souls to images of the broadest human and metaphysical significance.

A profound artist changes our lives and freely gives countless aspirations and consciousness. Wishing to function where art and life intersect, both Davis and Surls show us that the structure and poetics of vision can merge on a kind of secular wonder. Through drawing, they reflect the natural and spiritual world in order to heighten our place in the universal order. At KHFA, each artist, each work, responds in a flux of resilience, impulse and consequence. All, however, open new worlds, let us see invisible things, invent cosmologies, explore consciousness and aim to make the mysterious magic of the world palpable. Davis and Surls are artists who have followed their own lights and essentially created their own frames of reference. Their drawings catch something in the air, addressing environmental fragilities and presenting narrative entanglements that stretch across time, alternate universes and at least several multiple realities.

All great drawings instill absolute believability in us, a feat achieved through a visionary mind as much as a skilled hand. Drawing, for Lee Baxter Davis, is the life force of the artist, functioning as a resource and constant reference to investigate and rethink his prerogatives. His works on paper, utilizing ink, graphite and watercolor, exude a sense of drive or quest that strives to find release with a degree of animation rarely present in the refined skills of a traditional artist. For James Surls, whose well known sculptures have always sought to awaken the imagination, from visible nature to the inner eye, the graphite drawings represent the “bare bones” of his very being—the closest of his interior world and often the spark of the three dimensional work.

Both artists imbue their drawings with a poetic and moral truth, attempting to make some mark for the spirit and soul rather than exist as empty signing of profundity. Ferocious in their archetypal intensity, their hell-bent images hit us with the force of speeding bullets. Beneath their surfaces, however, lurk provocative often intensely probing questions about the seeds of human nature. For both Davis and Surls, drawing is a self-fulfilling medium, not simply an adjunct to printmaking or sculpture. Each uses the mark—tenuous, fluid, seismic, fierce—as conduit for language, identity and communication.

James Surls, Wave, Wave, Wave, 2017, graphite on paper, 32″ x 40″
Line and stroke carry the message in drawing, the most immediate, least self-censored way of working. More than any other medium, it approximates most closely the artist’s mind. The reduced scale, the openness to invention, the close physical contact between hand, marker and surface often convey a more intimate and revealing work. Drawing is always in motion, offering the more extraordinary range of possibilities. In many respects, drawing is the extension of sight, as logical and instinctive response to seeing as language is to thought. Accordingly, the images that arise in the drawings of Davis and Surls often hold powerful and personal significance for each artist. They are landmarks or weigh stations on a psychic map and, as symbols, become part of a glossary of visual elements that frequently occur in the work. The personality of marks and lines serves to reflect their personalities, while also involving us in the process of the hand shaping and making visible certain emotions and experiences. For Davis and Surls, to draw is to explore. it is an autonomous medium that reveals a world of untapped images, providing insights into the subconscious—of dreams and fantasy, wishes and fears. In drawing, time itself is the only space and it is alive, open, vibrating, mutating.

Traversing the mythological, theological and philosophical complexities of Lee Baxter Davis’s drawings demands involving oneself in narratives that are as delirious as they are profound, and whose points of departure are entwined in epic visual spectacles. Davis is an avatar of the power inherent in recognizing the radical impurity of human experience. Packed to all four edges with incident, Davis’s labyrinthine drawings are dominated by symbolic figures from his personal vernacular. Davis covers the entirety with precise black and white crosshatchings or jewel-toned washes, like meditative mantras that seem intended to lure us closer to his seething marks and high-pitched dramas. The artist Gary Panter, a former student of Davis, once commented that “Lee’s art is a revelation, a falling away of scales. Therein William Blake and Hieronymus Bosch meet in East Texas at Lee Baxter Davis’ kitchen table.” Indeed, recurring themes include the conflict between the reality of death and immortality, the Fall of man, and the relationship between man and woman in a cosmic setting.

Growing up in rural Texas towns, Baxter immersed himself in the complex stories of Southern writers—William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor—the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe, and stacks of Post

WW II comic books, especially MAD, tarot cards and covers of paperbacks. But Davis’s morality tales and horror vacuii are charged equally by vitriol and wit. Like his predecessors, Davis aspires hope that the imagination will triumph over all forms of oppression. The images are often dreamlike and haunting: boats, tanks, helicopters frequently occur in the drawings where they may appear beside crumbling civilizations or sexually-charged vignettes.

Lee Baxter Davis, Theo Cactus, 2020, ink, H2O, graphite, 27″ x 20″
In Thin Ice (2012), a woman dressed in a skimpy slip attached to garter belts, duck in her arms, skates toward a man who conjures a world with paintbrush amid whirling clouds and ether. He holds a heart-shaped vessel from which emits a spiritual flare. For A Place, A Time (2013), a frontiersman strides toward the viewer, while a nude woman lounges with her arm over the back of a steer. In Burning Man (2015), a figure in military outfit brandishes a pistol by its barrel. Alongside him, a skeletal figure holds a baby on a platter. At left is a beehive structure with flowers, angels and a bevy of nude women. A recent drawing, Animal Spirit, explores our duality of being in both visible and invisible worlds. A ferocious wild boar dominates the landscape. Surrounding the beast are smaller, subtext narratives: an animal lunges at the throat of a fallen man, blood spurting into the air; a medivac military helicopter hovers in the distance—a kind of steel chariot to evacuate and restore the wounded. At bottom, a snake with the phrase on its skin, “Giving Birth is a Noble Act,” signifies the cyclical life of animals, food, procreation. Is the holy spirit an animal? How do the two come together? As with dream imagery, the male figure is often Davis himself; his wife, Waynette, often plays the role of the female temptress. Figures, animals, boats—what Davis calls “cosmic ships” are all carriers of the spirit from life to death, thereby binding into his art the things that make up his life.

Davis’s use of compelling imagery, a mixture of oblique and direct iconography, transmit powerful afterimages in our minds as his protagonists take us on a search for transcendent human truths. As a beloved and respected professor of printmaking and drawing at East Texas State University for over three decades, Davis’s expressiveness inspired succeeding generations, including nationally recognized artists Trenton Doyle Hancock, Robyn O’ Neil, Joo Young Choi, Mark Burt, Georgeanne Deen, Greg Metz, Katherine Taylor, Joachim West and many more. For them, Davis has represented something of a spiritual father, operating in part as a direct influence, in part as a role model. As a renegade, going against the grain, and seemingly eschewing accepted standards of high art, he also gave these artists freedom.

Similarly, James Surls’s art has never followed compass course. Rather, it wanders and meanders, revealing an underlying core that is all the greater for its dualities, digressions and gaps. Surls’s drawings remind us that we are but temporary sojourners on a strange planet. Anything can happen to anyone at anytime: lives can change abruptly, sometimes by chance, by risk or accident. This very “opening of the eyes” brings about an awareness of life as it is at this moment. Surls’s symbols—the hand, flower, bird, bridge, needle, knife—evoke a sense of ancient present and future worlds. Like nature, nothing is ever still. Look into Surls’s drawings at any given point: the world of it is growing, extending, solid and moving in time. Throughout, reality is in a constant flux with no hard boundaries, moving freely to the transformations of the mind.

Surls’s unabashed sensuality and attention to process—to full throttle gesture and minute calibrations of the hand—give his works an undeniably tactile presence, while his fantastic and enigmatic imagery reaches down to the primal and out to the frontiers of space and the cosmos. Significantly, the drawings are mesmerizing meditations on dissonance and harmony. Looking at them can induce vertigo, as if we’ve been through some kind of maelstrom and have yet to reach a state of calm. For Surls, the body holds a contentious, fragile and elusive truth. He honors the body as our primary means of experiencing the world, revels in its infinite mystery as the vessel of life, and respects it place in the cosmos. It is a universe animated by hidden forces, abundant in potentials, but scarce in certainty.

In A look through the thorn tree (1979), Surls depicts the East Texas landscape with touchstones of his world. A church in the far woods suggests his rural Baptist upbringing. Within his overlayed profile, which holds a large mazelike mirror, are a felled tree and a child, who also bears a pair of mirrors emblazoned with eyes. Surls’s alter or spirit ego rides a cow (the female) across a bridge toward the psychic scene. The abiding theme here is about the difficult life journey of innocence, experience and knowledge. In All I ever wanted was to go home with you (2010), a womblike form seemingly floats in its own separate cosmos, morphing and vibrating before our very eyes. Circles, antennae and multiples of loose, pulsating lines form a protective barrier. The free, dense accumulation of myriad graphic strokes gathers momentum and fills the sheet in a dance to its own rhythm. Surls’s ability to make each gesture an intuited yet carefully considered unit of sublimated feeling is what gives the vibrant lines their hypnotic power. Writhing embryonic shapes and molecular systems are turned into cosmic personifications of our battles of the flesh. Here, the male and female are engaged in a fluid pool formed by syntactical energy patterns, reflecting the arbitrary nature of even the most solid emotional bonds.

in Me and Ascot Ash (2010), looping tracks and S-curves stream like rivers with luminous intensity. There’s the feeling of a buried past, of everything—even the ascot around a man’s neck—turning to ash for the sake of renewal. In Worlds and Waves (2016), black circles and dot patterns of planetary eurhythms—churning, seismic moments and nebulae structures—move the eye across, in and through the concentrated energy fields. Both may be viewed as psychic hurricanes revolving around the primary terms of existence and the passion they engender—male and female, reason and instinct, need and want, aggression and vulnerability. Rhythm binds the many strokes or paths into complex interweavings with counterpoints of skittish bursts and wistful lyricism. Again and again, however, Surls casts himself—and us—adrift in spatially ambiguous territory empty of navigational markers. In these drawings, he seemingly pulls apart the physical and psychological fragments of his world.

In 2021, Surls went through a period where he fasted for 24 days, each of the days spent sitting on the edge of his bed, leaning over an old dresser with his paper on top. “My time was given to what lay between my head and hands,” he recalls. ‘How does the migratory traveler thread the dark other than by looking up and out then following the Dipper’s Edge?” Set in an expansive multiverse, Surls’s drawings remind us that identity is not fixed, but fractured into a constellation of possibilities. Heads-Up, Shadow Bird, Flight Path, Being Me, generate subtle recalibrations that both revisit the past and surge forward.

At the core of KHFA’s exhibition of drawings by Lee Baxter Davis and James Surls is a persistence to be deeply moved by the extraordinary capacity for regeneration, the vital force within. All of their works manifest a feeling of personal wonder—and conflict—at nature and our very being. Their drawings are marks of passage: intense tightly coiled thoughts of rapture and pain, of rituals enacted and life passed by, of dreams, people and things loved and remembered—a fount of anguish and a source of fecund mystery.

Lee Baxter Davis, Pillar of Salt, 2021, ink, H2O, graphite, 20″ x 25″

James Surls, Bulb, Bulb, 2015, graphite on paper, 20″ x 15″
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Kirk Hopper Fine Art represents contemporary artworks in all media, emphasizing emerging and established Texas artists.

Dallas Art Exhibition
Laura Rathe Fine Art
1130 DRAGON ST., SUITE 130 DALLAS, TX 75207
https://www.laurarathe.com/exhibitions

05/21/22-07/02/22

Dallas Design District gallery, Laura Rathe Fine Art, announces Lyrical Moments, a two-woman exhibition featuring new works by Carly Allen Martin and Nina Tichava. LRFA will be hosting the opening reception on Saturday, May 21st from 4-7pm with an artist talk at 6pm. Artists will be in attendance.

Lyrical Moments reflects upon Carly Allen Martin and Nina Tichava’s individual artistic processes. Each artist draws from personal experience to create delicate yet purposeful compositions. The distinct and various components are glimpses into the story of each dynamic painting, expressing their own emotions in an imaginative and lyrical way. Layering details over time, both artists use moments of creativity and inspiration to generate autobiographical and visually complex artworks.

Carly Allen Martin juxtaposes the careful placement of lines and gestural moments of color, which allows one to get lost in the subtle textural nuances hidden within every brushstroke. She lays each work on the floor and begins spontaneously mark making, only to then pause to reflect on her next step. Allen Martin states “I have learned that the pause is as critical as the mark”. In layering these moments of quietude, she captures bursts of movement and suspends harmonies in their stillness. Moving amongst drawing, painting, and reflection, she completes works that are rich in detail and rooted in each painting’s history.

Inspired by nature, architecture, and textiles, artist Nina Tichava relies on the processes of layering and intricate patterning. While Tichava’s work is seemingly geometric, dominated by leitmotifs of circles across parallel and intersecting lines, upon closer inspection, each painting is rendered organic and delicate by the underlying texture. Her unique system of collaged dots punctuate the work with a three-dimensional quality, drawing the viewer even closer to appreciate every moment. Tichava explains “My focus is the complex subtleties of detail and transient moments, as well as the materials themselves. The paintings are romantic, emotional and imperfect reproductions of the ‘things’ that make up daily life—they represent a tangle of images and objects depicted with a beautiful inaccuracy.”

Lyrical Moments will be on display through July 2nd, 2022.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

CARLY ALLEN MARTIN

Carly Allen Martin studied at Santa Reperata International School of Art in Florence, Italy, The European Academy of Art in Trier, Germany, and Aoyama Gakiun University in Tokyo, Japan. She holds a BFA in painting from Texas Christian University. Public collections of her work include BBVA Compass Bank, Texas Oncology Hospital, and Texas Christian University. Allen Martin has been featured in a variety of notable publications including LUXE, FortWorth Magazine, 360 Southwest, Food Network Magazine, and The Dallas Morning News.

NINA TICHAVA

Nina Tichava was raised in both rural northern New Mexico and the Bay Area in California. She was influenced by her father, a construction worker and mathematician, and her mother, an artist and designer. The reflections of these dualities—country to city, pragmatist to artist, nature to technology—are essential to and evident in her paintings. Nina is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award Grant in 2007 and has exhibited professionally since 2009. She received her BFA from California College of the Arts [ Crafts] in San Francisco/Oakland.

Gravity & Levity presents a curated selection of paintings and sculpture that embody a new sense of depth through shapes and patterns oscillating over the borders of lightness and density. Moving freely across a variety of media, the artworks are unified in their exploration of suspended motion, through abstract forms appearing to be simultaneously pulled and released, transcending the laws of nature. Each of the four exhibiting artists engage in different subject matter through their uniquely developed techniques to collectively delve into the marriage of gravity and levity.

Dallas Art Exhibition
Laura Rathe Fine Art
1130 DRAGON ST., SUITE 130 DALLAS, TX 75207
https://www.laurarathe.com/exhibitions

07/09/22-08/20/22

Guadalupe Rosales works to document Latinx experiences in the United States, and especially in her native Los Angeles, through her ever-growing repository of communally-sourced archival materials including photographs, memorabilia, and artifacts. She develops installations combining photography, ephemera, and sound that intersect with her archival practice. For Drifting on a Memory, Rosales collaborated with Dallas-based lowrider artist Lokey Calderon to create an immersive work that nods to lowrider culture and uses sound to replicate the aural experience of cruising in East LA.

With origins in Los Angeles in the mid-20th century, lowriders—customized cars that often feature intricate designs, opulent interiors, and glittering finishes—have become a prominent expression of Mexican American culture throughout the United States. The rich colors and finely detailed designs spanning the 153-foot walls of the Museum’s Concourse evoke the iridescent surfaces of the customized cars on a monumental scale. In orchestrating this sensorial space, Rosales activates memories and invites viewers to collectively share in the experience.

Focus Installation
Admission is FREE.

Programs

Drifting on a Memory: A Lowrider Celebration
This event has already passed
Join our community celebration of the exhibition Guadalupe Rosales: Drifting on a Memory with art making, an artist talk featuring Guadalupe Rosales and Lokey Calderon, lowrider cars, music by Oak Cliff Soul Collective and DJ Pintalabios, and more!

details
Press
D Magazine
“At the Dallas Museum of Art, a Customized Culture in the Concourse”
April 11, 2022
NBC DFW
“Immersive Mural at the Dallas Museum of Art Celebrates Lowrider Culture”
February 12, 2022
KERA Art Seek
“In Dallas, a vibrant tribute to lowrider culture transports you to the street…”
January 28, 2022

Dallas Art Exhibition
Dallas Museum Of Art
1717 North Harwood Dallas TX 75201
https://dma.org/art/exhibitions

12/11/22-07/10/22

Summary | Programs | Press

A common bond that holds the power to connect one to all, paper has historically existed as a foundation of communication, untethered by boundaries or biases. Paper has the ability to travel through space and time, transporting one to a different reality. Art of Paper presents a roster of esteemed artists united by one simple medium universally known – paper. Whether gestural or structured, calculated or organic, each of the featured artist’s work highlights the eternal repetition of small elements combined to create a moment greater than themselves. Sequenced architectural wall reliefs, encaustic sculptures, ever-shifting floral patterns, and hyper-sized sculptures of everyday print objects – just a few of the ways in which artists continue to expand on the medium’s creative potential and inspire all who view their work. Together, this dynamic group reiterates the notion that humans around the world are connected in more ways than one – even by the simplest of objects.

for over three decades, american artist shepard fairey has been challenging the establishment through the creation and dissemination of iconic imagery with resounding impact. the power of shepard’s art is in the combination of the compelling narratives inherent in the pictures he creates and his ability to adapt to a continuously changing society. he has established a long-standing career as a master storyteller who uses images to help us navigate the complicated world we inhabit.

thematically, his exhibition at dallas contemporary – the artist’s first-ever solo museum exhibition in texas – highlights the evolution of fairey’s career from the confrontational D.I.Y. style of defiant youth to a narrative of hope, equality and shared humanity. in terms of material, shepard’s medium of choice for public art changed in 2010 from modular wheat pasted paper murals to more durable painted murals – several of which were commissioned by dallas contemporary and on view at the museum and around the city in 2012. fairey returns to dallas this fall with an exhibition featuring new and recent works highlighting important transitions in his career. some of his most iconic visuals and repeated motifs will be on display that comment on the state of contemporary life in the united states, as well as texas.

“my exhibition backward forward addresses many crucial issues facing america and the planet at large. the work takes many approaches aesthetically and conceptually but consistently asks the questions – ‘are we moving forward or backward?’ and ‘what do we want the future to look like?” said shepard fairey. “i’m excited to share this body of work at dallas contemporary because i think the venue and the institution’s vision provide me with a powerful opportunity to share my art. i also think that dallas is a vibrant cosmopolitan city that represents a diverse group of cultures and political ideas, which is ideal for a robust social, political, and creative conversation.”

“shepard’s artworks help us to see and understand the complicated world that we live in. his constant presence in the public realm questions hierarchies of power and celebrates our shared humanity, which has had a profound influence on how we see ourselves and others,” said pedro alonzo, adjunct curator at dallas contemporary and long-time fairey collaborator. he remains rooted to his core values of what we now call social justice while having adapted to major changes such as social media and society’s embrace of street art, which was once considered a form of vandalism.”

about shepard fairey

shepard fairey was born in charleston, south carolina. he received his bachelor of fine arts in illustration at the rhode island school of design in providence, rhode island. in 1989, he created the andre the giant has a posse sticker that transformed into the OBEY GIANT art campaign, with imagery that has changed the way people see art and the urban landscape. after more than 30 years, his work has evolved into an acclaimed body of art, including the 2008 hope portrait of barack obama, found at the smithsonian’s national portrait gallery. in 2017, the artist collaborated with amplifier to create the we the people series, which was recognizable during the women’s marches and other rallies worldwide in defense of national and global social justice issues.

shepard fairey has painted more than 110 large-scale murals across six continents worldwide. his stickers, guerilla street art presence and public murals are known across the globe. his works are in the permanent collections of the boston institute of contemporary art, museum of modern art (MoMA), the museum of fine arts boston, the san francisco museum of modern art, the smithsonian’s national portrait gallery, the victoria and albert museum and many others