Displaying items by tag: dallas museum of art

It’s an old story, this rivalry between Dallas and Houston, but it got fresh legs Tuesday, when the Texas Commission on the Arts awarded its largest single grant – a whopping $500,000 – to the Dallas Museum of Art.

In issuing its Cultural District Project Grants, for the 2016 fiscal year (Sept. 1, 2015, to Aug. 31, 2016), the commission earmarked $500,000 “to support bringing the exhibition, ‘Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots’ for its exclusive U.S. debut to the Dallas Arts District to attract visitors.”

The Dallas Museum of Art acquired a marble head of Herakles, the Greek hero the Romans called Hercules, at a Sotheby’s, New York auction of Egyptian, Classical, and Western Asiatic Antiquities in June. The marble head is from the late 1st century A.D. and is set upon an unrelated bust from the mid-2nd century A.D. This ensemble was composed by the 18th-century French sculptor Lambert-Sigisbert Adam (1700–59), who created sculptures for King Louis XV of France and Frederick the Great of Prussia.

The acquisition is a gift of David T. Owsley through the Alvin and Lucy Owsley Foundation, and strengthens the Museum’s collection of ancient art of the Mediterranean, of which a selection is on view in the Museum’s Level 2 Classical galleries.

Maxwell Anderson has resigned from the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA), where he has served as director since early 2012, the Dallas Morning News reported. The veteran museum director is headed to the New Cities Foundation (NCF), where he will serve as director of grant programs and “help develop ways of supporting NCF’S focus on urban innovation, with a particular emphasis on how digital platforms can improve the lives of city dwellers internationally,” the organization stated in a release.

The Dallas Museum of Art announced today the receipt of a $3 million grant from the Eagle Family to fund the renovation of the museum’s north entrance, which faces Klyde Warren Park.

Paired with an additional $1.3 million from the Hamon Charitable Foundation, the plans will transform the area outside of the museum’s Atrium Cafe into a plaza with outdoor seating for the restaurant. In addition, the driveways allowing access to the museum’s underground parking garage will be reconfigured, making room for wider sidewalks and new landscaping that are intended to create improved pedestrian access and flow between the park and the front of the DMA. 

The Dallas Museum of Art has announced the acquisition of the Rose-Asenbaum Collection, an exemplary group of over 700 pieces of modern studio jewelry created by more than 150 acclaimed artists from Europe and around the world. The Rose-Asenbaum Collection includes a broad range of works from the 1960s through the end of the century. It contains particularly strong holdings of jewelry designed by Georg Dobler, Emmy van Leersum, Fritz Maierhofer, Hermann Jünger, Daniel Kruger, Claus Bury, Peter Skubic, Francesco Pavan, Gert Mossetig, Anton Cepka, and Wendy Ramshaw, and reflects the diverse styles, techniques, and materials that defined the studio jewelry movement in the latter half of the 20th century.

Jackson Pollock, the master of Abstract Expressionism, reached an endgame with his groundbreaking drip paintings in 1950, and then experimented with a new technique, akin to drawing, of pouring thinned black enamel onto unprimed cotton duck.

“The power of Pollock’s allover drip paintings from 1947 to 1950 is so all-commanding that they’ve forced a blind spot in our ability to look at other aspects of the artist’s genius,” said Gavin Delahunty, senior curator of contemporary art at the Dallas Museum of Art. He began researching Pollock’s “black pourings,” made from 1951 to 1953, after conversations with artists including Wade Guyton, Jacqueline Humphries and Julie Mehretu, who discussed their influence.

The Dallas Museum of Art today announced the acquisition, for its European painting collection, of a remarkable life-size triple portrait by the neoclassical painter Jean Antoine Théodore Giroust (1753–1817). The painting, "The Harp Lesson (La leçon de harpe)," created a sensation when it debuted at the Paris Salon exhibition of 1791. The work is a significant addition to the Museum’s holding of 18th-century portraits and is an important example historically of the art of portraiture. The painting goes on view today, included in the Museum’s free general admission, in the DMA’s European Painting and Sculpture galleries on Level 2.

“This monumental painting is a transformative addition to the Museum’s galleries of European art at the end of the 18th century.

The Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami (ICA) has lost its interim director less than five months after announcing the appointment of Suzanne Weaver to the post.

The ICA, an institution set up by the former trustees of the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, informed the press in September that it had hired Weaver, a veteran of the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky and the Dallas Museum of Art, to help lead the institution as it prepared to open a temporary space in the Design District.

It has been several years since I have seen a more beautiful exhibition than “Bouquets: French Still Life From Chardin to Matisse” at the Dallas Museum of Art. Although not as packed with famous masterpieces as the Kimbell Art Museum’s current, exemplary “Faces of Impressionism,” “Bouquets” operates at the same consistently high level of quality, with major and minor artists represented in top form.

Initially, I was afraid that so many paintings of flowers in vases — nearly 70 — would overwhelm a delicate subgenre of French paintings. But the exhibition proves so interesting and the galleries build on one another so confidently that one feels refreshed by each room.

A measure of respect is due any artist who has the nerve to take on a revered masterpiece in the history of art, aspiring to remake it according to a conception of new conditions in the present. That's what Jim Hodges did in 2008 with a sculpture born of Albrecht Dürer's famous watercolor that shows a chunk of wet mud sprouting a clump of bristling weeds.

Arguably, Dürer's "The Great Piece of Turf" (1503) is the greatest drawing in all of Western art. Hodges' take on it, a delicate glass sculpture sealed inside a nearly 3-foot-tall bell jar, is one of 56 works in the 25-year retrospective of his career concluding its national tour at the UCLA Hammer Museum. "Jim Hodges: Give More Than You Take," jointly organized by the Dallas Museum of Art and Minneapolis' Walker Art Center, continues through Jan. 18.