Megan Meister, The Dallas Opera
David Woo
Matthew Ritchie, Line of Play
Meet Phil Whitfield, Team Docent
all did huge-scale art.” It was particularly challenging for the artists due to the vastness of the facility and some of the massive spaces within the stadium that needed to be covered. “Museums really don’t have walls that large,” she adds. Eventually, about 50 works by more than 30 established and emerging artists, including renowned German abstractionist Franz Ackermann and Danish sculptor Olafur Eliasson, were selected. There is also photography by Uta Barth, Wolfgang Tillmans, Cory Arcangel, Ken Fandell, Rika Noguchi and more. “We found these key locations that we needed artists for,” explains Mrs. Jones. That meant appropriately intermingling high art with beer stands, condiment stations, entry/exit ramps and other wide-open places. Originally, the project included site-specific commissions as well as a number of acquired pieces. Upon the stadium’s
Gene Jones hopes her family’s stadium art collection will positively impact not only customers but employees, too. “It’s so rewarding to think, ‘Hey, a football stadium can be more than beer and hot dogs,’” she says. Phil Whitfield just may have been the inspiration for that. An employee for the Dallas Cowboys for two decades, Whitfield was once a security guard at Texas Stadium. Nowadays, he is known as the stadium and art ambassador, sort of a team docent. For his part, the experience of working with the many artists on their installations has been nothing short of transcendent. “It completely changed how I look at this world,” smiles Whitfield. “I learned more during that period of time than I could in a four-year span of college because it was so hands-on.” Whitfield assisted the artists on everything from travel logistics to actually putting the art in place. He worked closely with each one, on every detail, executing intricate plans involving massive pieces of art, sometimes for months on end. “The behind-the-scenes view of the artists, I can tell you better than anybody else in this entire world,” he says. “Art people have their own code. They have a passion for it. And as long as they know you have the passion, everybody in that group can accept you like one of their own.” A Dallas native, the Franklin D. Roosevelt High School and East Texas State University graduate grew up in Oak Cliff. He says he never gave art much thought. However, the stadium experience changed everything. “These artists all made me feel at home. I was thinking they probably wouldn’t accept me as a non-art person,” says an earnest Whitfield. “But I was wrong about that.” “Going to museums and galleries was something I would not have done five years ago. Today, not only do I go to museums — I went to the opera last year…ballets…stuff that a guy from an inner-city school would never think about going to.” In the meantime, Whitfield still leads his tours and carefully watches over the artwork. He recently supervised the building’s 50th installment, California artist Jim Campbell’s mesmerizing Exploded View (Dallas Cowboys) 2013. Last April, prior to a simulcast of a Dallas Opera production of Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot in the facility, Whitfield led cast members running joyously onto the field during a special stadium excursion. And no one had more fun than the Cowboys docent. Whitfield says he is grateful to his employers because they listened. “Mr. and Mrs. Jones wanted this stadium to be the ultimate entertainment venue. They got points of view from so many different people. They could have just as easily said, ‘We’re the owners of the Cowboys, and we’ll do it this way.’ That’s not how they built this stadium. They listened to the employees, too.”
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