PATRON Magazine's 2021-2022 Performing Arts Issue | December–January

PATRON DEC 2021/JAN 2022 BACK TO THE STAGE/AT HOME WITH THE FEARINGS/ABRAHAM ALEXANDER

THE PERFORMING ARTS Make a Comeback At Home With Wanda Gierhart Fearing & Dean Fearing

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Plus, Abraham Alexander

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EDITOR’S NOTE

Portrait Tim Boole, Styling Jeanna Doyle, Stanley Korshak

December 2021 / January 2022

TERRI PROVENCAL Publisher / Editor in Chief terri@patronmagazine.com Instagram terri_provencal and patronmag

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Like a still life, the bounty of talent within the performing arts retained their beauty but laid in waiting, bursting with readiness that only the pandemic deterred. In this issue, we applaud the full release of North Texas arts organizations mounting varied performances of all disciplines across our stages. Lee Cullum investigates ten of these in Ring Up The Curtain, a sequel to the story she wrote amid the predominance of stage lockdown one year ago.

From the small and bold theatres like Undermain Theatre and Theatre Three to full symphonic performances at the Dallas Symphony and Fort Worth Symphony replete with brass, and operas within sight at The Dallas Opera, we are so glad to be back in the audience.

Fort Worth’s Abraham Alexander weathered the COVID-storm too. We were hooked after seeing the singer and songwriter perform at the Thompson Dallas for Dallas Contemporary’s celebrations of its fall openings. Back on Track brings the work of the soul-stirring artist to life through the eyes and ears of Steve Carter.

Wanda Gierhart Fearing and Dean Fearing have many talents, but perhaps among their most impressive is their ability to combine two diverse careers and lifestyles into one stunning home. A Tasteful Retreat takes readers inside the home designed by Dan Nelson with architect Bruce Bernbaum and contractor Joel Greenwald. The couple’s own taste for art, music, food, their border collie Walker and Gumbo the cat, makes this home their signature.

From the visual arts front, read Milton Avery’s Great Independence in these pages. Here Nancy Cohen Israel highlights the exhibition on view at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Lilia Kudelia interviews Hungarian artist József Csató, who has a forthcoming solo show next year at Galleri Urbane, in Abstract Set of Rules, while Chris Byrne visits with gallerist Kirk Hopper about his own collecting habits in An Enriched Life.

For shop-ability look to the Nasher Sculpture Center’s collaboration with AMEICO, bringing the Connecticut-based company’s artisan wares to a holiday pop-up shop inside the Corner Gallery. In Let There Be Light, Abitare18 adds brilliance with the wispy yet dramatic Baxter Q2 suspension chandelier.

For gifts of opulence, awestruck by exotic flora, the dream team of Elaine Raffel, Nelly Adham, and Chris Plavidal collaborated to produce Tropical Brilliance, showcasing fine jewelry in our annual holiday installment.

Within our new department Morsel, Kendall Morgan catches up with Chef Dan Landsberg, who reigns over Ellie’s in HALL Arts Hotel, proving that, although ephemeral, the art of food and wine can be just as enticing.

In November 2019, before the world shut down, I was in Madrid with Honorary Consul of Spain Janet Kafka, The Dallas Opera’s Ian Derrer, and Dr. Mark Roglán. This proved to be a lasting memory, not only for the glorious trip to commemorate the signing of the cooperative agreement between the Meadows Museum, The Dallas Opera, and Teatro Real, but also for the chance stroll I took with Mark when I asked him the best way to get to the Prado from Teatro Real. With his signature grace, he offered to walk me there.

In Furthermore, we remember Roglán, who lost his battle with cancer this fall but won the hearts of all through his pivotal legacy. As the Linda P. and William A. Custard Director of the Meadows Museum and Centennial Chair of SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts, his influence on the establishment of the Custard Institute for Spanish Art and Culture before his passing will influence generations to come.

– Terri Provencal

CONTENTS 1

FEATURES 44 RING UP THE CURTAIN The performing arts come back to the stage for live audiences.

By Lee Cullum 54 MILTON AVERY’S GREAT INDEPENDENCE From plains of trees to planes of color, the American artist eschewed a single art movement and style.

By Nancy Cohen Israel 58 A TASTEFUL RETREAT Dean Fearing and Wanda Gierhart Fearing bring their varied lifestyles and talents to the table.

By Peggy Levinson 64 TROPICAL BRILLIANCE Fine jewelry and gemstones mimic exotic flora.

Photography by Chris Plavidal; creative direction and styling by Nelly Adham; produced by Elaine Raffel.

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On the cover: Yin Yue, founder/director of YY Dance Company. Photograph by Anton Martynov. Courtesy of Bruce Wood Dance.

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CONTENTS 2

DEPARTMENTS 4 Editor’s Note

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10 Contributors 20 Noted Top arts and culture chatter. By Anthony Falcon Of Note 32 HELLO FRESH SITE131 presents a lesser-known segment of The Rachofsky Collection.

By Terri Provencal Fair Trade 36 JÓZSEF CSATÓ’S ABSTRACT SET OF RULES Galleri Urbane introduces the Hungarian artist to US audiences.

Interview by Lilia Kudelia Contemporaries 38 PAULO NIMER PJOTA Every Empire Breaks Like a Vase. By Danielle Avram

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40 AN ENRICHED LIFE Kirk Hopper is authentically immersed in the visual arts through his own gallery and collecting. By Chris Byrne Performance 42 BACK ON TRACK Up-and-coming soulster Abraham Alexander’s career hit “pause” with the pandemic, but he’s back and unstoppable. By Steve Carter Space 72 LET THERE BE LIGHT Baxter Q2’s brilliance illuminates Abitare18.

73 CASTLING Nasher Sculpture Center collaborates with AMEICO to conquer holiday gift giving. By Terri Provencal

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Morsel 74 CULINARY ARTS Chef Dan Landsberg brings a creative flourish to Ellie’s in the HALL Arts Hotel. By Kendall Morgan There 75 CAMERAS COVERING CULTURAL EVENTS Furthermore 80 REMEMBERING MARK ROGLÁN As the Meadows Museum mourns the loss of its director, it looks ahead to the legacy he built. By Nancy Cohen Israel

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John Sutton Photography

CONTRIBUTORS

DANIELLE AVRAM is a curator, writer, and assistant professor of contemporary galleries and exhibitions and the director of the SP/N Gallery at UT Dallas.

She has held positions at Texas Woman’s University; SMU; High Museum of Art; and the Pinnell Collection. This issue she returns to The Power Station, where she once worked, to spotlight Paulo Nimer Pjota. Danielle has an MFA from the School of The Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University, and a BA from UT Dallas.

NELLY ADHAM is a Miami-based fashion stylist who brought the tropics with her in Tropical Brilliance. Represented

by RR&Co. in Dallas, Nelly’s timeless and distinctive style is credited to her artistic eye and love for visual expression. With an avid passion for style and aesthetics, Nelly’s unique perspective allows her to seamlessly combine striking yet classic styles with a one-ofa-kind modern edge to reflect current and upcoming trends.

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CHRIS BYRNE authored The Original Print (Guild Publishing, 2002) and the graphic novel The Magician (Marquand Books, 2013), within the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University; Rare Book/Special Collections Division, Library of Congress; Ryerson and Burnham Archives, The Art Institute of Chicago; Thomas J. Watson Library, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is co-editing Frank Johnson: Secret Pioneer of the American Comic Book for Fantagraphics with Keith Mayerson.

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STEVE CARTER offers a profile of Fort Worth’s Abraham Alexander, a soul-stirring singersongwriter who’s a rising star on the scene. Alexander recently completed an 18-date coast-tocoast tour as Leon Bridges’ opening act, and his second album is nearing completion.

“What a pleasure it was getting to know Abraham Alexander and his music,” Carter reports. “This guy’s got it—he’s the real deal, and you heard it here.”

PEGGY LEVINSON takes us inside the home of legendary chef Dean Fearing and his equally talented wife, the global chief marketing and content officer of Cinemark, Wanda Gierhart, in A Tasteful Retreat.

There she finds a love of art, design, food, and wine, as one would expect from the combined creative genius of this twosome. With design

by Dan Nelson and architectural updates

by Bruce Bernbaum, the home boasts warmth, eclecticism, and signature style.

LAUREN CHRISTENSEN has over two decades of experience in advertising and marketing. As a principal with L+S Creative Group, she consults with a wide variety of nonprofit organizations and businesses in many sectors, including retail, real estate, and hospitality. Lauren is a Dallas native and a graduate of SMU with a BA in advertising. Her clean, contemporary aesthetic and generous spirit make Lauren the perfect choice to art direct Patron.

CHRIS PLAVIDAL is a Fort Worthbased photographer, represented by Sisterbrother MGMT, known for his extraordinary shoots in beauty, still life, jewelry, interiors, and fine art. In this issue, he returns on assignment for Patron with Tropical Brilliance.

Here, working in concert with Nelly Adham and Elaine Raffel, he used his artistic eye for detail to capture the season’s finest jewels accompanied by flora flown in from Florida.

NANCY COHEN ISRAEL is Dallas-based writer, art historian, and educator. Over the past decade, she has had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Mark Roglán for many of the stories about the Meadows Museum featured in Patron.

As a member of this community, as well as in her role in the education department at the Meadows, she was devastated by his passing in October.

She was honored to write a tribute to him for this issue.

ELAINE RAFFEL is a local creative director who lends her fashion and luxury goods prowess to Patron’s pages, drawing from her experience working with the crème de la crème of retail. For Tropical Brilliance she cast Miami-based Nelly Adham as art director and stylist to work with Fort Worth photographer Chris Plavidal. “When Nelly spotted these stunners in a nursery, we agreed it was the perfect way to showcase worldclass jewels.”

LEE CULLUM is a Dallas journalist who is in love with the performing arts.

Ring Up The Curtain is a sequel to a piece she did during lockdown, when troupes were struggling to stay afloat. Of the few who performed at all was the Dallas Symphony, playing with a chamber orchestra of 40 distanced musicians to a small audience at the Meyerson Symphony Center. Now the DSO is back to full force onstage, as are its cultural neighbors, no longer waiting in the wings of limbo.

JOHN SMITH flexes his degree in architecture to photograph homes of distinction by the best in the trade. His years of experience provide him with a unique appreciation for his clientele’s vision. In A Tasteful Retreat, designed by Dan Nelson with architect Bruce Bernbaum and contractor Joel Greenwald, John captured Wanda Gierhart Fearing and Dean Fearing with their two cooperative pets Gumbo and Walker and Dean’s famous Lucchese boots collection.

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PUBLISHER | EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Terri Provencal terri@patronmagazine.com ART DIRECTION Lauren Christensen DIGITAL MANAGER/PUBLISHING COORDINATOR Anthony Falcon COPY EDITOR Sophia Dembling PRODUCTION Michele Rodriguez CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Danielle Avram Chris Byrne Steve Carter Nancy Cohen Israel Lee Cullum Lilia Kudelia Peggy Levinson Dara Mark, Etude No 55 (detail)

ALCHEMY DARA MARK AND SIGNE STUART

CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS Terrence McCarthy Karen Almond Gabriel Bienczycki Scott Newton Chris Plavidal Sharen Bradford Manny Rodriguez Bruno Tamytha Cameron Amitava Sarkar Jeffrey Schmidt Dave Carlin John Smith Sylvia Elzafon Kevin Tachman Hope Gray Kevin Todora Bradley Linton Cory Weaver Joan Marcus STYLISTS/ASSISTANTS Nelly Adham Elaine Raffel ADVERTISING info@patronmagazine.com or by calling (214)642-1124 PATRONMAGAZINE.COM View Patron online @ patronmagazine.com REACH US info@patronmagazine.com

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is published 6X per year by Patron, P.O. Box 12121, Dallas, Texas 75225. Copyright 2021, Patron.

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FOCUS: Frances Stark Th rough Januar y 9 Milton Avery is organized by the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in collaboration with the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. Above: Milton Avery, Husband and Wife, 1945. Oil on canvas. 33 3/4 x 44 inches.

Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Roy R. Neuberger. © 2021 Milton Avery Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Photo: Allen Phillips/Wadsworth Atheneum Right: Frances Stark, Behold Man (Nancy and Sluggo recto verso pendant pair), 2017.

Ink, spray paint, and gesso on canvas. 51 x 84 inches. © 2021 Frances Stark / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the Artist and Gladstone Gallery

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THE LATEST CULTURAL NEWS COVERING ALL ASPECTS OF THE ARTS IN NORTH TEXAS: NEW EXHIBITS, NEW PERFORMANCES, GALLERY OPENINGS, AND MORE.

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01 AFRICAN AMERICAN MUSEUM Through the Feb. 15, the museum will host Sepia: Past. Pride.

Power, an exhibition of photos of African American politicians, community leaders, and entertainers from Sepia magazine; and The History of the Prairie View Interscholastic League: Black High School Sports in Texas in the Era of Segregation, an exhibition about the players and teams and the impact and dominance of Black high school sports in Texas when racial segregation forced African Americans to create their own interscholastic sports league. amdallas.org

the artist’s first solo exhibition in America in over a decade. dallascontemporary.org

02 AMON CARTER MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART Mount Superior, featuring the watercolor landscape artist Thomas Moran, closes Dec. 12. Anila Quayyum Agha: A Beautiful Despair, the immersive contemporary exhibition that displays the artist’s multidisciplinary work and Imagined Realism: Scott and Stuart Gentling continue through Jan. 9. Explore the healing power of art through Sandy Rodriguez in Isolation, featuring 30 new works on paper created by the Los Angeles–based painter Dec. 18–Apr. 17. Stephanie Syjuco’s expansive multimedia installation transforms images of renowned works from the Carter’s collection and investigates narratives of national identity. See Stephanie Syjuco: Double Vision Jan. 15–Dec. 2022. Image: Gina Adams (b. 1965), Ancestor Beadwork: Prism 4: Rebel, 2018, inkjet print, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas. © Gina Adams. cartermuseum.org

06 DALLAS MUSEUM OF ART Van Gogh and the Olive Groves presents the first exhibition dedicated to Van Gogh’s olive grove series, through Feb. 6. The DMA presents five exhibitions for the winter season: Focus On: Henry Ossawa Tanner is currently on view; Slip Zone: A New Look in Postwar Abstraction in the Americas and East Asia continues through Jul. 10, along with Bosco Sodi: La fuerza del destino. Point, Line, Plane: The William B. Jordan and Robert Dean Brownlee Bequest continues through Jan. 9; and Naudline Pierre: What Could Be Has Not Yet Appeared, is on view through May 15. Sam F. by Jean-Michel Basquiat remains on view in the main concourse through Feb. 22. Pursuit of Beauty: The May Family Collection offers a look at the exemplary Dallas-based collection of American art that was built over nearly 60 years, through Jan. 9. Bamana Mud Cloth: From Mali to the World presents culturally significant designs on bògòlanfini through Dec. 14, 2022. For Drifting on a Memory, Guadalupe 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. Dec. 10–Jul. 10. Image: Naudline Pierre, To Make You Whole, 2021, oil on canvas, © Naudline Pierre, courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photograph by Paul Takeuchi. dma.org

03 CROW MUSEUM OF ASIAN ART OF THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT DALLAS Born of Fire: Contemporary Japanese Women Ceramic Artists, and Vishnu: Across Time and Space continue through May. Carolyn Brown and Palmyra: An Ancient City Through the Lens is on view through Jan. 2. Ho Tzu Nyen: The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia closes Jan. 30. Image: Carolyn Brown, Severan arch at Palmyra, from the West, photograph. Courtesy of Carolyn Brown. crowmuseum.org 04 DALLAS CONTEMPORARY Three exciting exhibitions continue through Feb. 13: CELL GRIDS, Peter Halley’s first exhibition in Texas in more than fifteen years, presents a unique series of paintings made from 2015 to the present. Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s exhibition Paintings about Paintings resembles an outdated and rundown museum, incorporating neverbefore-seen paintings, interactive works, and installation. Shilpa Gupta’s installation For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit: 100 Jailed Poets is 20

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05 DALLAS HOLOCAUST AND HUMAN RIGHTS MUSEUM The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets, and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis details the true story of ghetto residents who rescued thousands of rare books and manuscripts by hiding them on their persons, burying them in bunkers, and smuggling them across borders; continues through Jan. 2. dhhrm.org

07 GEOMETRIC MADI MUSEUM Selected works from Austin-based artist Larry Akers, featuring kinetic sculptures, will be on view Dec. 3–Mar. 3 in GeomeKinetica. geometricmadimuseum.org 08 KIMBELL ART MUSEUM Turner’s Modern World explores J.M.W. Turner’s lifelong interest in the inventions, events, politics, society, culture, and science of his time, which resulted in many of his most original works and transformed his way of painting, through Feb. 6. kimbellart.org

N E W E X H I B I T O P E N I N G JA N UA RY 17 AT T H E G EO R G E W. B U S H P R ES I D E N T I A L C E N T E R

T H E CO N T I N UA L ST R U G G L E The American Freedom Movement and the Seeds of Social Change

JA N UA RY 17 - M A R C H 2 7 B U S H C E N T E R .O R G

NOTED: VISUAL ARTS

11 09 LATINO CULTURAL CENTER Marian Ichaso Lefeld: Tierra de Gracia showcases a selection of large-scale paintings that represent the artist’s perspective on the Venezuelan Modernist utopia resulting from the 20thcentury oil boom. Dec. 4–Feb. 26. lcc.dallasculture.org 10 THE MAC The MAC presents a solo exhibition for Ciara Bryant, winner of the 2020 CADD x Maddrey Artist Prize, in collaboration with CADD, through Jan. 8. the-mac.org

On view through JANUARY 9

CARTERMUSEUM.ORG/ IMAGINEDREALISM #GENTLINGART STUART GENTLING (1942–2006), [Landscape with pond and barn] (detail), ca. 1979, graphite, opaque and transparent watercolor on paper, Collection of Lee Lupton Tennison, © Amon Carter Museum of American Art

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11 MEADOWS MUSEUM Canvas & Silk: Historic Fashion from Madrid’s Museo del Traje pairs works in the Meadows collection with representative examples of the historic dress depicted to shed new light on the relationship between representation and reality, between image and artifact. On view through Jan. 9 along with Image & Identity: Mexican Fashion in the Modern Period. Image: Bartolomé González y Serrano (1564–1627), Portrait of a Lady, 1621, oil on canvas, 47.12 x 39.25 in. meadowsmuseumdallas.org 12 MODERN ART MUSEUM OF FORT WORTH Flora and Bust, which recently joined the Modern’s permanent collection, remain on view through Jan. 2. Milton Avery is considered one of North America’s greatest 20th-century colorists, and through Jan. 30, museumgoers will see a selection of approximately 70 paintings from the 1910s to the mid-1960s that are among his most celebrated works. FOCUS: Frances Stark showcases the artist’s ability to find humor and poetry in even the most mundane aspects of daily life and society, through Jan. 9. Next, FOCUS: Jill Magid, from Jan. 21–Mar. 20, features the film Tender: Balance and related works by the New York–based artist who implants herself into established systems of control and authority in order to study such structures from within. themodern.org 13 MUSEUM OF BIBLICAL ART Line Upon Line: Jorge Cocco’s Sacrocubist Images of Christ remains of view. Additionally, the museum hosts Remember 9/11, an exhibition of historical items in memory of the fallen alongside works from Texas artists such as James Surls, Sherry Owens, Barbara Hines, Michael Roque Collins, Pamela Nelson, Sharon Kopriva, and George W. Bush, as well as international artists

14 like Sean Scully, Robert Ballagh, Guggi, Eamon Colman and the Edge from the band U2 through Jan. biblicalarts.org 14 NASHER SCULPTURE CENTER Betye Saar: Call and Response continues through Jan. 2 and explores the relationship between Saar’s sketchbooks and her finished works. In the first major museum presentation focused solely on Carol Bove’s formidable steel sculptures, Carol Bove: Collage Sculptures brings together nine sculptures from the last five years, two of which have been made especially for the Nasher’s exhibition; through Jan. 9. The companion exhibition, Foundations: Carol Bove, will close Dec. 26. Italianborn American artist Harry Bertoia will open at the Nasher Jan. 29 alongside Sightings: Olivia Block. Bertoia will be on view through Apr. 23, Sightings: Olivia Block closes Apr. 24. Image: Installation view of Carol Bove, Amoureux, 2021, stainless steel, 113.50 x 75.75 x 40 in. nashersculpturecenter.org

Canvas & Silk

HISTORIC FASHION FROM MADRID’S MUSEO DEL TRAJE

15 PEROT MUSEUM The Perot’s exhibition of internationally renowned jewelry designer Paula Crevoshay’s designs remains on view through Apr. 20. The Shape of Matter —Through An Artist’s Eye is comprised of approximately 70 pieces that celebrate nature’s beauty. perotmuseum.org

September 19, 2021 – January 9, 2022

16 SIXTH FLOOR MUSEUM John F. Kennedy and the Memory of a Nation examines the life, legacy, and assassination of JFK within the events of November 22, 1963 and their aftermath. The multimedia experience advocates for cross-generational dialogue to foster interest and understanding in a historical context. jfk.org

MEADOWS MUSEUM • SMU meadowsmuseumdallas.org

17 TYLER MUSEUM OF ART Coreen Mary Spellman: Works on Paper spotlights works by the prolific Texas-based artist from the 1940s and 1950s; on view through Dec. 5. The Black Dress: Selections from the Texas Fashion Collection & Works by Nancy Lamb celebrates the impact of the little black dress on fashion and social gatherings since its popularization by Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel in the 1920s. The featured artifacts spotlight a variety of renowned designers’ takes on the iconic garment over the past century as well as complementary accessories including handbags, hats, and shoes. Through Jan. 30. tylermuseum.org

This exhibition has been organized by the Meadows Museum, SMU, Dallas, and the Museo del Traje, Centro de Investigación del Patrimonio Etnológico, Madrid, Spain, and is funded by a generous gift from The Meadows Foundation. Promotional support provided by the Dallas Tourism Public Improvement District.

Left: Ignacio Zuloaga y Zabaleta (Spanish, 1870–1945), The Bullfighter “El Segovianito,” 1912 (detail). Oil on canvas. 78 3/4 x 42 3/4 in. (200 x 108.6 cm). Meadows Museum, SMU, Dallas. Algur H. Meadows Collection, MM.71.08. Photo by Kevin Todora. Right: Traje de luces (Bullfighter’s Costume), 1876–1900 (detail). Silk, linen, cotton, and silver metal. Museo del Traje, Madrid. ©Museo del Traje Centro de Investigación del Patrimonio Etnológico, Madrid, Spain; chaquetilla CE005407–09. Photo by Jesús Madriñán.

DECEMBER 2021 / JANUARY 2022

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NOTED: PERFORMING ARTS

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01 AMPHIBIAN Amphibian Stage hosts Steven Castillo as part of their ongoing comedy series Dec. 2–4. amphibianstage.com 02 AT&T PERFORMING ARTS CENTER The Elf on the Shelf: The Musical begins the holiday season Dec. 11.

LeAnn Rimes: Home for the Holidays takes the stage Dec. 17. Vets of SNL brings the laughs Dec. 18. Lightwire Theater’s A Very Electric Christmas returns Dec. 18. Sarah Brightman is bringing her unforgettable Christmas spectacle, A Christmas Symphony, to the Winspear on Dec. 20. The Christmas sounds of Mannheim Steamroller fill the concert hall on Dec. 30. What the Constitution Means to Me, by famed writer Heidi Schreck, arrives Jan. 4–9. Pink Martini featuring China Forbes features musical fun Jan. 13. Mystery Science Theater 3000 LIVE! returns on Jan. 15. Neil deGrasse Tyson brings the science on Jan. 16. Spend An Evening with Dog the Bounty Hunter on Jan. 28. Herb Alpert and Lani Hall perform on Jan. 30.

Image: Lightwire Theater. ©Renato Mangolin. attpac.org 03 BASS PERFORMANCE HALL Bruce Robison & Kelly Willis’ Holiday Shindig opens the festive season on Dec. 1. Next, The Gatlin Brothers and Crystal Gayle – Holiday & Hits takes the stage on Dec. 13. Robert Earl Keen closes out the month, Dec. 30. Dear Evan Hansen brings Broadway to the Bass Jan. 4–9, followed by HAMILTON, Jan. 18–Feb. 6. basshall.com 04 CASA MAÑANA Rolling through the holiday season, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer transforms the beloved classic for the stage until Dec. 23. Next, Matilda takes the stage Feb. 4–13. casamanana.org 05 DALLAS BLACK DANCE THEATRE Back to Black commands the stage Dec. 3–4. The holiday tradition of sharing magical moments is authentically captured, bringing together the beauty of different cultures and showcasing them in Espresso Nutcracker. Dallas Black Dance Academy students take this classic story to another level by “jazzing” up select scenes set to Duke Ellington’s Nutcracker Suite, Dec. 11. Image: The Nutcracker featuring Paige Nyman. Photograph by Steven Visneau. dbdt.com 06 DALLAS CHILDREN’S THEATER DCT returns to live programming with Paddington Saves Christmas on Dec. 5–Dec. 23. Dragons Love Tacos is a hilarious, dancefilled journey into the field of “Dragonology” and is equal parts ridiculous and delicious. Jan. 23–Feb. 20. dct.org 07 THE DALLAS OPERA Boasting some of the most famous operatic music of all time, 24

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Madame Butterfly tells the beloved romantic tragedy of the gentle geisha Cio-Cio-San, who gives up everything to marry American naval officer B.F. Pinkerton—a heartless cad who ultimately abandons her and their little son with devastating results. Feb. 18– 26. dallasopera.org 08 DALLAS SUMMER MUSICALS HAMILTON takes audiences on a revolutionary journey at DSM though Dec. 5. A Drag Queen Christmas – The Naughty Tour is a magical evening of holiday performances featuring contestants from the reality television show on Dec. 11. Go behind the music and inside the story of Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons in the Tony and Grammy Award-winning true-life musical phenomenon Jersey Boys, Dec. 28–Jan. 9. Hadestown intertwines two mythic tales: that of young dreamers Orpheus and Eurydice, and that of King Hades and his wife Persephone. Jan. 18–30. Image: HAMILTON National Tour. Photograph by Joan Marcus. dallassummermusicals.org 09 DALLAS SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Dallas Symphony Christmas Pops returns Dec. 3–12. Christmas With Cantus takes the stage Dec. 6. Big Brassy Christmas & Organ Extravaganza celebrates the holidays Dec. 14. Experience the magic of the silver screen come to life with the DSO on Dec. 17–19. A Very Swingin’ Basie Christmas: The Legendary Count Basie Orchestra jazzes up the stage Dec. 21. Black composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s rhapsodic violin concerto features the young Mexican American violinist Elena Urioste, whose lightness of tone and tenderness paired with just the right amount of charisma reveals the rhapsodic character in Ravel + Urioste, Jan. 7–9. Ehnes Plays Elgar on Jan. 13–14 and Trifonov Plays Brahms on Jan. 20–23. Closing out the month, Revolution: The Music of The Beatles – A Symphonic Experience will perform Jan. 28–30. mydso.com 10 DALLAS THEATER CENTER Tis the season to be jolly when a Dallas favorite holiday tradition returns to the Wyly Theatre. DTC’s A Christmas Carol performs through Dec. 26. One of the most beloved American plays ever written, Our Town follows the Webb and Gibbs families as their children fall in love, marry and eventually, in one of the most famous scenes in American theater, die. Narrated by a stage manager and performed with minimal props and sets, Our Town depicts the fictional small town of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, through three acts: “Daily Life,” “Love and Marriage” and “Death and Eternity.” Jan. 27–Feb. 20. dallastheatercenter.org 11 DALLAS WIND SYMPHONY The Dallas Wind Symphony will close out the year with its holiday season show Christmas at the Meyerson Dec. 22. dallaswinds.org

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NOTED: PERFORMING ARTS

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12 EISEMANN CENTER Through the month of Dec., Eisemann sees the Royale Ballet, Collin County Ballet Theatre, and Tuzer Ballet. Each performs the holiday classic, The Nutcracker Dec. 4–22. Pegasus Theatre presents Prime Time for Murder! Dec. 29–Jan. 16. Lone Star Orchestra plays tribute to John Williams in Legacy of John Williams on Jan. 30. eisemanncenter.com 13 FORT WORTH SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Hadelich’s Mendelssohn: Debussy, Mendelssohn and Brahms takes the stage Dec. 3–5. On Dec. 12, musicians from the Fort Worth Symphony collaborate to present some of the most treasured chamber music of all time, including Mozart’s lighthearted Divertimento in D Major for Strings, and Dvorak’s Slavonic dance-like Serenade in D Minor for Winds. Swing is the Thing, Dec. 31, features a brilliant marriage of music and movement as four world-champion swing dancers take the stage to strut their stuff alongside the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra in a show that captures the swing era of the ’40s and ’50s. Robert Spano Conducts Scheherazade Jan. 14–15. fwsymphony.org 14 KITCHEN DOG THEATER The Kitchen Dog Theater returns with Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus by Taylor Mac, Feb. 18–Mar. 6. kitchendogtheater.org

23 18 TEXAS BALLET THEATER TBT’s annual performance of The Nutcracker will run through Dec. 26. A Tchaikovsky Evening showcases Tchaikovsky and world premieres by TBT’s Ben Stevenson and Tim O’Keefe, Feb. 11–20. texasballettheater.org 19 THEATRE THREE Maytag Virgin follows Alabama school teacher Lizzy Nash and her new neighbor, Jack Key, over the year following the tragic death of Lizzy’s husband. The play explores the ideas of inertia and selfenlightenment, and the bridge between the two. Jan. 27–Feb. 20. theatre3dallas.com 20 TITAS/DANCE UNBOUND Ballet Hispánico has stepped into the limelight of internationally touring dance companies with stunning dancers and luscious choreography. The company fuses Latin dance with classical and contemporary techniques, creating a new style of concert dance in which theatricality and passion are at the core. See the company on Jan. 14. Image: Ballet Hispánico’s Shelby Colona and Mark Gieringer in Carmen. Photograph by Marius Fiskum, Northern Lights Festival. titas.org

15 LYRIC STAGE In its effort to preserve the American musical, Lyric Stage has produced classic musicals featuring full orchestras playing the original Broadway orchestrations. Lyric Stage returns with Ragtime on Feb. 17–20. lyricstage.org

21 TURTLE CREEK CHORALE To wrap up its 41st season, the TCC will return to Moody Performance Hall and present their holiday production, Sure Stars Shining, Dec. 17–19. TCC welcomes world-renowned artist David Archuleta for a very special, one-night-only holiday engagement on Dec. 21. turtlecreekchorale.com

16 MAJESTIC THEATRE Taylor Tomlinson’s tour stops in Dallas on Dec. 2. The Majestic welcomes back Lindsay Buckingham on Dec. 9. Home Free’s Warmest Winter Tour showcases their original sound on Dec. 12. The Polyphonic Spree 2021 Christmas Show is back on Dec. 18. Girls Gotta Eat is back Jan. 15. The Life and Music of George Michael celebrates the late performer Jan. 29. majestic.dallasculture.org

22 UNDERMAIN THEATRE Undermain is a company of artists seeking to educate and challenge audiences and artists through its production of innovative theater with interest in poetic and language-driven work. A multiinstrumentalist, using a combination of harp and guitar loops evoking elements of ambient folk and celestial tones, Jess Garland will be in concert at Undermain in February. undermain.org

17 TACA “TACA Resiliency Workshop: The Comeback Collection: 4 Sessions to Reignite Revenue and Relationships” will dig into strategies and tactics to building stronger relationships with patrons and colleagues to drive results. Working collaboratively across departments to understand what patrons want and need will aid in the creation of high-impact, empathy-rich, results-oriented campaigns. Jan. 20. taca-arts.org

23 WATERTOWER THEATRE Ella’s Swinging Christmas is a musical treat for all ages featuring Dallas singer-and-actress phenomenon Feleceia Wilson. Conceived by WaterTower’s own Elizabeth Kensek and based on Ella Fitzgerald’s 1960 Swinging Christmas album, this show was filmed on the Terry Martin Main Stage in 2020. This holiday season, WaterTower season subscribers will be treated to an exclusive holiday party at the theatre featuring this film, Dec. 9–12. Image: Feleceia Wilson in Ella’s Swinging Christmas. Photograph by Evan Michael Woods. watertowertheatre.org

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End on a Sweet Note.

Following your next Dallas Arts District excursion this holiday season, enjoy an encore at Ellie’s with friends and family while savoring handcrafted confections from Executive Chef Dan Landsberg.

1 7 1 7 L EO N A R D S T R E E T, DA L L A S, T E X A S 7 5 2 0 1 | 9 7 2 . 6 2 9. 0 9 2 4 | E L L I E S DA L L A S.CO M

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01 12.26 12.26 will open a show of new work by Marjorie Norman Schwarz from Dec. 11–Jan.22. Schwarz’s paintings appear to the viewer as infinite abysses, a place to get lost and meditate that conjure both memories and discoveries. David-Jeremiah: I Drive Thee will run from Jan. 29–Mar. 5. David-Jeremiah is a Dallas-based multidisciplinary conceptual, emerging artist who addresses the tough conversations of racial injustice and police brutality through his practice. gallery1226.com 02 500X GALLERY 500X showcases their annual LGBTQIA+ juried exhibition, juried

by Odyssey Studios, an artist-run event space and collective studio.

The juried exhibition will run Dec. 18–Jan. 16. 500x.org 03 ALAN BARNES FINE ART The Lone Star Exhibition 2022, a select exhibition of Texas landscapes by Matthew Alexander, will commence in Jan. The gallery specializes in fine 19th- and 20th-century American and European paintings as well as drawings and watercolors. alanbarnesfineart.com 04 AND NOW New work by New York City–based Coco Young remains on view through Dec. 31. Additionally, through the new AND NOW/ WAREHOUSE, located in Dallas at 905 Fort Worth Avenue, the work of Dallas-based artist Greg Meza will be shown through Dec. 31. Meza’s work is informed by films and iconography of 1970s–’90s American pop culture. andnow.biz 05 ARTSPACE111 An exhibition of watercolors by Douglas Blagg and Suzanne Gentling closes Dec. 4. Wish you Were Here will feature the work of Carroll Swenson-Roberts Dec. 9–Jan. 29. Concurrently, Presents, Prints, and Paintings, in the Great Gallery, offers a selection of medium to small-sized works by rostered artists, ideal for holiday gift giving. offersartspace111.com 06 BARRY WHISTLER GALLERY Ann Stautberg: Times Change continues at BWG through Jan. 8.

Stautberg currently lives and works in Houston where she survived the pandemic but was provoked by 2021’s winter storm Uri, which gave her a new awareness of our relationship to nature and changing times. Image: Ann Stautberg, 11-20-20, P.M., 2021, oil on archival printed canvas, 85 x 64.75 in., Edition 1/3. barrywhistlergallery.com 28

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07 BEATRICE M. HAGGERTY GALLERY Groundswell: Ky Anderson and Vicki Sher, in collaboration with GUT Gallery, showcases their first exhibition in the Dallas area, with recent paintings, sculptures, and works on paper through Dec. 8. udallas.edu/gallery 08 CADD Contemporary Art Dealers of Dallas (CADD) is a nonprofit organization that was formed in 2007 for the purpose of promoting contemporary art in Dallas. caddallas.org 09 CHRISTOPHER MARTIN GALLERY The gallery presents the reverse-glass paintings of American artist Christopher Martin; the Rodeo series of Dallas-based photographer Steve Wrubel; the color-field paintings of New York–based painter Jeff Muhs; the work of Dutch image maker Isabelle Van Zeijl; the acrylic constructions of Dallas artist Jean Paul Khabbaz and the large-format paintings of Dallas painter Tom Hoitsma; the abstract work of California-based painter Chris Hayman; and the organic paintings of Atlanta artist Liz Barber; and rotates the work of other artists in the expanded gallery. christophermartingallery.com 10 CONDUIT GALLERY Through the winter, Conduit will be showing Heyd Fontenot Color! Pattern! Propaganda! and W. Tucker somehow, in the middle of all this nonsense until Jan. 2. Jan. will feature C. Meng and Matt Clark in collaboration with William Greiner, with Yana Payusova in the Project Room. Jan. 8–Feb. 12. Image: Heyd Fontenot, Imaginary Frenemy (Man vs Nature), 2021, latex paint on unstretched muslin, approximately 9 x 14 ft. conduitgallery.com 11 CRAIGHEAD GREEN GALLERY Chong Kuen Chu, Danna Ruth Harvey, and Kenda North will be on display through Jan. 8. Image: Chong Kuen Chu, Garden Walker #4, 2019, oil on canvas, 60 x 48 in. craigheadgreen.com 12 CRIS WORLEY FINE ARTS CWFA’s two shows, Simeen Farhat: The Shape of Words and Charlotte Smith: Catenate, both run through Dec. 31. Through Arabic, German, and Romance languages, including English, Farhat navigates complex contradictions we often face in everyday life. Smith, who came to painting midlife, creates works rooted in her process-heavy form of abstraction that shows off her signature drip painting style. crisworley.com 13 DADA The Dallas Art Dealers Association is an affiliation of established

19 38 independent gallery owners and nonprofit art organizations. dallasartdealers.org 14 DALLAS ART FAIR PROJECTS Dallas Art Fair Projects is an art and special projects space located in the Dallas Design District, formerly known as 214 Projects. On view through February, see Black Bodies, White Spaces: Invisibility & Hypervisibility featuring work from the Green Family Art Foundation. dallasartfairprojects.com 15 DAVID DIKE FINE ART DDFA specializes in late 19th- and 20th-century American and European paintings with an emphasis on the Texas Regionalists and Texas landscape painters. daviddike.com 16 ERIN CLULEY GALLERY/CLULEY PROJECTS Sara Cardona: Vas a Ver and William Atkinson: Storm and Shelter will be on view through Dec. 23. In Jan. a show for Catherine McMahon mounts. Curated by Leslie Moody Castro, Soft Veneers and Fresh Cycles features the work of Rabéa Ballin and Sara Cardona at Cluley Projects through Dec. 11. erincluley.com 17 FWADA Fort Worth Art Dealers Association funds and hosts exhibitions of noteworthy art. fwada.com 18 GALLERI URBANE Gail Peter Borden: Spaced will continue through Dec., as will Urbane’s annual exhibition Edit(ion), with Peter Frederiksen in the Project Room. Next, through Jan., the gallery will host Lori Larusso. Image: Gail Peter Borden, Untitled, 2021, acrylic and resin on panel, 24 x 24 in. galleriurbane.com

THE RESIDENT EXPERT

19 GREEN FAMILY ART FOUNDATION Aindrea Emelife curates the foundation’s inaugural exhibition, Black Bodies, White Spaces: Invisibility & Hypervisibility, counteracting the historical invisibility of Black narratives and the experience of hypervisibility as an act of resistance through the work of 21 artists. The show at Dallas Art Fair Projects remains on view through Jan. 30. greenfamilyartfoundation.com

214.520.8300

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20 HOLLY JOHNSON GALLERY Theresa Chong: Duino Elegies, is an exhibition of works on paper inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke’s the Duino Elegies. The exhibit will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue

DECEMBER 2021 / JANUARY 2022

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NOTED: GALLERIES K ittrell/Riffkind Art Glass Gallery 4500 Sigma Rd. Dallas, Texas 75244 n 972.239.7957 ROSS RICHMOND “ENRAPT”

33 with an essay by David Brody. Through Feb. 13. hollyjohnsongallery.com 21 KIRK HOPPER FINE ART Ending on Dec. 18, KHFA’s exhibition for Anne Wallace and Eric Avery explores the grotesque as a bludgeon against religion and politics, power, and predators. kirkhopperfineart.com 22 KITTRELL/RIFFKIND ART GLASS Holiday Treasures, featuring a myriad of treasures, large and small, in celebration of the holiday season, will be on display through Dec. 31. kittrellriffkind.com 23 LAURA RATHE FINE ART The Little Things is a holiday group exhibition featuring small works from the LRFA artist roster, including Zhuang Hong Yi, Stallman Studio, Michael Laube, Meredith Pardue, Robert Mars, Carly Allen Martin, Matt Devine, Charles Patrick, and many more, through Dec. 31. Next METAMORPHOSIS, opening Jan. 8 with an artist reception, will feature new work

by Charles Patrick and Paul Rousso. On view through Feb. 22. laurarathe.com 24 LILIANA BLOCH GALLERY The gallery hosts Nomin Bold through Dec. 30. Bold is a multidisciplinary artist, trained and specializing in Mongolian traditional painting, Mongol Zurag. Her work focuses on a critical approach to Mongolian society’s transition into modernity in a global era. Image: Nomin Bold, Pupa (detail), 2020, yarn, mixed media, dimensions variable. ilianablochgallery.com 25 MARTIN LAWRENCE GALLERIES Martin Lawrence Galleries specializes in original paintings, sculpture, and limited-edition graphics. The gallery is distinguished by works of art by Erté, Marc Chagall, Keith Haring, and many other artists. martinlawrence.com

Offering Dallas’ finest selection of art glass!

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26 OLIVIER FRANÇOIS GALERIE Morehshin Allahyari’s Kabous continues through Jan. 8. Kabous presents a djinn belonging to the race of those who bring different ailments, trauma, and nightmares to humans. She is depicted as a djinn possessing a human with a nightmare,

Think

Art

SOUTHWEST GALLERY 4500 Sigma Rd. Dallas 972.960.8935

W W W. S W G A L L E R Y. C O M

Fine Ar t  Sculpture Custom Framing  Ar t Glass

OF NOTE

From left: Two works by Ryan Nord Kitchen, Field and Garden View 3, line the sunlit gallery entrance.

HELLO FRESH!

The final gallery includes work by two German artists: Stefanie Heinze, Rise & Plummet (boy full of ambition), 2019, and Sophie von Hellerman, Untitled, 2006.

SITE131 presents a lesser-known segment of The Rachofsky Collection.

BY TERRI PROVENCAL

W

alking into SITE131 one might not expect a showing of the 24 less-familiar artists’ work on view, culled from The Rachofsky Collection, which is why they are fresh. Fresh Faces from The Rachofsky Collection is on view through December 18 and is a must-see on the exhibition circuit.

Curated by director Joan Davidow, the show exemplifies the deeply considered foresight of Cindy and Howard Rachofsky outside the Global Minimalism tastes they are known for: American Minimalism; postwar European art, particularly Italian Arte Povera; postwar Japanese (with a Gutai emphasis); and Korean art.

A chance encounter with Howard Rachofsky outside a gallery in Manhattan’s Lower East Side inspired the show, Davidow says. Two years later, she curated 29 works from among the 100-some artists within the Rachofsky’s emerging-art collection. The works, Glasstire founder Rainey Knudson writes, “are drawing from the history of painting as a bank of materials or techniques.”

Refreshing discoveries include two works by Ryan Nord Kitchen, who recently had a showing at 12.26 in River Bend; the sewn acrylic canvas by Sarah Crowner titled Green Screen (If you are a Park House member you may have dipped your toe into the artist’s

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serenely tiled rooftop wading pool.); Suspended in Green II, 1 of 2, and 2 of 2, and Suspended in Green 4a and 4b, both from 2005, are by the late Italian artist and architect Lauretta Vinciarelli. Judd-esque though distinctly hers, the work evokes her collaboration and partnership with Donald Judd in the late ’70s.

Other works of note include Waco-born, Rebecca Ward’s Intimacy.

In this delicate, mystifying canvas, the artist removed threads, revealing the wooden support beneath. And like Ward’s exercise in patience, the intimacy of the oil on gesso board in two Untitled paintings by Marcus Amm (b. 1969 Stuttgart, Germany) belie the countless weeks, sometimes years, of patience Amm requires of himself to bring about his signature luminous and intuitive use of color. Borna Sammak’s Untitled embroidery on canvas suggests unflappability in creation as well.

There is much to see here, including in the final gallery with the heroically scaled abstract figuration in Rise & Plummet (boy full of ambition) by German artist Stefanie Heinze, and Sophie von Hellerman’s Untitled canvas.

Today’s emerging artists are tomorrow’s in-demand, and there are plenty of opportunities for acquisition. site131.org P

Julie Lazarus Acquavenezia/ Murano 84”x60” Oil on Canvas

NOTED: GALLERIES

06 sitting on their chest while they sleep. In Kitab al-Bulhan and The Book of Felicity, Kabous is illustrated accompanied by two other djinn, whom Allahyrai names the Right and Left Witnesses. ofg.xxx 27 P.A.O. PROJECTS P.A.O Projects’ exhibition Flower Bomb, featuring the work of Sidney-based emerging artist dript, continues through Dec. 18. paoprojects.com 28 PHOTOGRAPHS DO NOT BEND PDNB Gallery features two solo exhibitions by gallery artists Patty Carroll and Bill Owens. This will be the first solo show for Patty Carroll, who is based in Chicago, Illinois. Bill Owens has had a large presence in the gallery since the early 2000s, when they first featured his groundbreaking series from the early 1970s, Suburbia. The exhibitions, Patty Carroll: Anonymous Woman: Domestic Demise and Bill Owens: Suburbia will be on view through Feb. 12. pdnbgallery.com

FINE ART. FINE FRAMES.

29 THE POWER STATION Through the winter, the exhibition space will show Paulo Nimer Pjota: Every Empire Breaks Like a Vase. Referring to the precarity of colonialist and imperialist practices that inform today’s globalized world, Pjota’s work synthesizes ancient history and mythology with the aesthetics of contemporary and urban street culture. powerstationdallas.com

WILLIAM CAMPBELL

30 RO2 ART Through Jan. 8, UNCOMMON THREAD sees the work of Candace Hicks, Bumin Kim, and Erica Stephens. Additionally, SOUTH/REALISM/X will showcase the work of Edgar Cano. Cano is a Mexican postwar and contemporary artist who uses irony to create a reflection of modern society and visual heritage. ro2art.com

G A L L E R Y

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31 SAMUEL LYNNE GALLERIES Opening Dec. 3, Changing Lanes will feature the work of David Yarrow through Feb. 5. samuellynne.com 32 SITE131 Fresh Faces from The Rachofsky Collection gives an expanded look at the younger artworks from 2006 to present day in Cindy and Howard Rachofsky’s collection. The exhibition, curated by Joan Davidow, continues through Dec. 18. site131.com

4935 Byers Avenue Fort Worth Texas 817/737-9566 williamcampbellcontemporaryart.com

DECEMBER 2021 / JANUARY 2022

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NOTED: GALLERIES

37 33 SMINK ART + DESIGN SMINK, an art and design showroom on Dragon Street, presents, ALCHEMY on view through Jan. 7. Curated by Fernando Alvarez Caraccioli, the show includes work by established Santa Fe artists Dara Mark and Signe Stuart. Image: Dara Mark, Shape of Water, watercolor on Yupo paper. sminkinc.com 34 SMU POLLOCK GALLERY SMU Pollock Gallery provides a space for critical engagement with art and pedagogy, bringing together historical scholarship, contemporary artistic practice, and experimental methodology.

The SMU Division of Art Faculty Show highlights the diverse talents of current and emerita faculty working in a variety of media through Jan. 22. pollockgallery.art

TO

TO THE

BEETHOVEN BEATLES SIBELIUS STAR WARS The Dallas Symphony Orchestra offers a great night out for every interest.

Live at the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center.

dallassymphony.org

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35 SOUTHWEST GALLERY Through the winter, SWG will feature the work of Clinton Broyles, who consistently explores the beauty of detail while reflecting on the enduring history of days gone by. His passion to examine the allure of light as it punctuates his meticulous creations gives reverence to a sense of calm that’s needed today. swgallery.com 36 SWEET PASS SCULPTURE PARK Through Dec. 11, Nearly Natural, appropriated from the American company by the same name, ref lects the contemporary status of the landscape as a massively collaborative, mediated plain where a multitude of disparate technologies have made marks, sculpted its meaning, and exchanged its elements. sweetpasssculpturepark.com 37 TALLEY DUNN GALLERY David Bates: Grassy Lake closes on Dec. 4. While the gallery plans its next exhibition, be sure to see gallery artists represented in exhibitions throughout the metroplex, including Anila Quayyum Agha’s A Beautiful Despair at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. Image: David Bates, Ibis and Snake, 2018, oil on canvas, 60 x 72 in. talleydunn.com 38 VALLEY HOUSE GALLERY Winter exhibitions at Valley House Gallery include Mary Vernon: Paintings, on view through Jan. 8, and Bob Stuth-Wade: Present Work (Paintings, Watercolors, and Drawings) opens Jan. 15.

Vernon is the professor emerita of art of the Meadows School of the arts. Stuth-Wade is known for his still life and landscape oil paintings picturing Texas. Image: Mary Vernon, White Jug, 2021, oil and graphite on Yupo. valleyhouse.com

18 39 WAAS GALLERY Curated through a lens of sustainability, W.A.A.S. (We Are All Stars) empowers artists of all disciplines to connect to their communities and facilitate societal change while offering an interstellar sanctuary to communicate artistic expression and immersion. waasgallery.com 40 WEBB GALLERY Webb Gallery has been selling “soul” through contemporary and visionary art with a focus on folk and the obscure for 33 years in Waxahachie. webbartgallery.com 41 WILLIAM CAMPBELL GALLERY FWCAP, founded by Jadz Pate, Clayton Snodgrass, Tim Locke, J.W. Wilson, and Peeler Howell, purchased William Campbell Gallery and Gallery One Frames earlier this year from legendary Fort Worth gallerists Pam and Bill Campbell.

Howell has worked as the Campbell’s gallery assistant since August 2017 and will continue to manage the gallery in its dayto-day operations. Through their second location, Foch Street Gallery, the gallerists expand their repertoire by mounting large-scale works and new artists to their program, williamcampbellcontemporaryart.com

Tom Hughes

AUCTIONS AND EVENTS

Founding Partner at Compass Dallas

01 DALLAS AUCTION GALLERY Purchased in 2020 by Katy Alexander and Gabe Echeverry from the Shuford family, the new owners bring a combined 25-plus years of expertise in fine and decorative arts to DAG and look forward to continuing its legacy. Currently accepting quality consignments in all categories. dallasauctiongallery.com

214.649.3323 tom.hughes@compass.com

02 HERITAGE AUCTIONS HA slated auctions for the winter are Urban Art Showcase Auction on Dec. 1, Ethnographic Art Auction on Dec. 2, Holiday Luxury Accessories Signature Auction on Dec. 5, Decorative Art Signature Auction on Dec. 7, In Focus: Op Art Showcase Auction on Dec. 7, Depth of Field: Photographs Auction on Dec. 8, Fine & Decorative Arts Showcase Auction on Dec. 9, The Art of Anime and Everything Cool II Animation Art Signature Auction on Dec. 10–13, Friday Night Jewels Auction on Dec. 10, Asian Art Showcase Auction on Dec. 14, Prints & Multiples Showcase Auction on Dec. 15, Urban Art Showcase Auction on Jan. 5, Jewelry Auction on Jan. 6, In Focus: Banksy Showcase Auction on Jan. 11, Fine & Decorative Arts Showcase Auction on Jan. 13, Prints & Multiples Showcase Auction on Jan. 26, and the Design Signature Auction on Jan. 27. ha.com

Tom Hughes Team is a team of real estate agents affiliated with Compass. Compass is a licensed real estate broker and abides by federal, state and local Equal Housing Opportunity laws.

DECEMBER 2021 / JANUARY 2022

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FAIR TRADE

József Csató in his studio. Courtesy of the artist and Galleri Urbane.

JÓZSEF CSATÓ’S ABSTRACT SET OF RULES Galleri Urbane introduces the Hungarian painter to US audiences.

INTERVIEW BY LILIA KUDELIA

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D

rawing from his “sketchbook mythologies,” József Csató unites art-historical references with a visual language orbiting around nature, “marvelous creatures,” and humor with the hand of a surrealist. Galleri Urbane represents Csató and mounted a solo show for the artist in September, included his work in their Dallas Art Fair booth in November, and donated a work to the TWO x TWO for AIDS and Art 2021 auction. Other recent shows include Semiose Paris and Gallerie Krinzinger, which exhibited Csató at FIAC Paris. His editioned book launches next month with an essay by Lilia Kudelia, who caught up with the artist here:

e.

Lilia Kudelia (LK): What are the first few things you normally do at the studio to get ready to create?

József Csató (JC): I have to change my clothes immediately, no sitting around, no rest. The next thing is to choose the right drawing I want to work with. It is hard to predict which one is good enough to develop into a painting. If I am lucky, I have prepared my new canvas on the wall the day before so I can start working. I stretch my canvas to the wall at the first phase of the painting because I do a lot of scraping with different tools. This way the texture of the wall sometimes appears on the canvas like a frottage. There is something magical seeing these textures in other spaces, like a gallery for example. It feels like it has also teleported the air from my studio.

LK: I have seen lots of animated faces and cavernous shapes in your paintings lately. What ideas do you seek to convey through these motifs?

JC: I mix, match, and often repeat elements on my paintings: shapes of plants, hybrid figures resembling geometric shapes, tubes, drops, tiles, and purely fictional signs appear and reappear.

I like mixing still life parts with body parts. Figurative and nonfigurative elements. I like the excitement of rendering a kind of semifigurative painting into an abstract set of rules. I would like to melt past and present together. I look for the ways that show us a world where our suffering, anxiety, everyday feelings, and the ability to reflect about it in a simple and sometimes funny way can have one shared platform.

LK: The contents of your children’s pencil cases apparently impact your choices in the studio—particularly, your daily drawing practice. What are the kids challenging you to explore now?

JC: Ha-ha, yes. Their supplies are not really changing, maybe it is just me seeking new adventures with the different crayons, colored pencils, etc. At the moment I am in love with water brushes, but all these treats have meanings only in my drawings.

Changing techniques is important in my process, helps to keep a fresh eye and attitude, which is the most important thing about art for me—not to be bored, or not working from routine. In my vocabulary, the opposite of the word “art” is “boring.”

LK: What are the most ungraspable or challenging aspects of your paintings

when it comes to photographing and looking at them on the screen?

JC: People are surprised by the real-life scale of the paintings sometimes, which are bigger than expected. The other thing I would mention is the surface, which sometimes reminds me of frescos; this matte and dry quality is hard to catch from a shiny screen. And the tiny paint freckles, of course. Most of the artworks have an aura of working energy, which also comes with certain scents. This is missing as well. Sometimes when I see my own painting on a screen, I can recall the smell from the studio.

LK: Is there a specific scale that feels particularly appropriate for your paintings at this time?

JC: In general I prefer working on a bigger scale; that is where my gestures feel more natural. Another advantage is the ability to get lost in a painting, when you can be too close and then “come out” of it and see the big picture. This walking in and out process is exciting to me. On the other hand, I hate waste, and I always have some leftover small-sized canvas hanging around my studio.

I started making puzzle-like bigger paintings with these scraps; I am having real fun with them.

LK: What period in the history of art of your country interests you most?

JC: After World War II, there was a short period in Hungarian art history called the European School (1945-1948). It included artists like Dezső Korniss, Endre Bálint, Margit Anna, Ernő Kállai, and others. It was a strange mix of very different artistic approaches containing bioromanticism, nonfigurative, and even surreal elements. Every artist had their own way of looking at that hard period in the world.

LK: What is on your mind map for the upcoming solo show in Dallas in September 2022?

JC: I know it will be here sooner than it feels [right] now. The fact that I have almost a year to prepare makes me feel comfortable and easy, ha-ha. I won’t do a spoiler for the show, but it will have something to do with prehistory. I am looking forward to having my second solo show in Dallas with Galleri Urbane, and I hope this time I can be there. It would be great to meet their amazing crew in person finally, and to enjoy Dallas! P

József Csató, Waiting For Guests, 2021 acrylic, oil on canvas, 59 x 68 in.

József Csató, All My Calmness, 2021 acrylic, oil on canvas, 60 x 52 in.

DECEMBER 2021 / JANUARY 2022

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PAULO NIMER PJOTA: EVERY EMPIRE BREAKS LIKE A VASE Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates.

Hermetic Principle 3, The Kybalion

BY DANIELLE AVRAM PHOTOGRAPHY BY KEVIN TODORA

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ow a decade old, The Power Station has hosted over 30 exhibitions, serving as ground zero for thought-provoking endeavors encompassing seemingly everything but the kitchen sink: stacks of cardboard boxes and a pile of shell casings, a giant canvas sail, numerous vehicles, a Vegas-style stage complete with a go-go dancer.

A former Dallas Power and Light substation dating to 1920, the building has retained its industrial nature—a blessing (and sometimes a curse) for contemporary artists, who are free to do what they want within and around the architecture. Unlike many reclaimed spaces The Power Station refuses to ornament its bones, showcasing the wear of its years and different iterations, the brick walls and concrete floors layered with flaking paint and imprints of the past. The building acts as an artistic cauldron, a continuously reused vessel whose surfaces are seasoned and thickened by each intervention.

Paulo Nimer Pjota is precisely the kind of artist who thrives in such an environment, a sentiment expressed by artistic director Rob Teeters, who states, “Paulo’s work is well suited for the unique character of The Power Station. While he very much considers himself a painter, the installation operates successfully as sculpture with a defined architectural quality.”

Pjota’s exhibition, Every Empire Breaks Like a Vase, features a series of paintings that echo the gallery’s weathered interior. A native of Brazil, Pjota’s work is inspired by the accidental art of the streets, iconographies created by the passage of time and the remnants of everyday human activity. “I’m interested in how the city can provide painting,” he says. “All of the marks and scribbles are traces that someone was there before you.”

To that end, Pjota routinely employs salvaged metal sheeting as backdrops for his paintings, their pre-scratched and worn surfaces imbued with tangible histories. They are contemporary artifacts whose previous lives we can only attempt to discern by decoding the visual records etched across their faces. Surface is a primary concern for Pjota, and he moves between the metal sheeting and large swaths of unstretched canvas covered by paints he creates from powdered pigments inspired by the colorful homes of Brazilian favelas.

The artist opts to work with pigment so the final product doesn’t immediately read as a painting but rather as a building wall or the exterior of a house—a living, functional space as opposed to a static two-dimensional object. The resulting canvases are soft and gauzy, the pigment and fabric interwoven into an ethereal landscape atop which his images can float.

Pjota often works on up to 15 paintings at a time, shifting between pieces as the narrative of each emerges through the careful melding of colors, images, and objects. However, he is anything but precious about his process. While in his studio, the paintings function as living diaries, recording movements both artistic (painterly gestures and drawings) and pedestrian (hastily scrawled notes and phone numbers).

This organic approach channels the vicarious nature of urban life, the way we momentarily subsume the thoughts and actions of others via totemic remainders: bathroom-stall graffiti, names etched in oncewet cement, an accumulation of stickers, a telephone pole pocked with staples. All these actions are proof that someone once occupied that exact spot, designating it as a point of consideration, a historic site, a portal through which to travel space and time.

Like the surfaces, the images that occupy Pjota’s landscapes

From Paulo Nimer Pjota’s Cinzeiro series, resin, porcelain, and bronze, each 10.25 x 9.5 in.

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Paulo Nimer Pjota, Every Empire Breaks Like a Vase installation view.

CONTEMPORARIES serve as connective threads, bridging different historical eras and cultures through parallels drawn between repetitive and recognizable iconography. Images are culled from sources that span the ages: Greek and Roman mythologies and antiquities, Egyptian artifacts, alchemical texts, ancient demonological figures, horror movies, Disney cartoons, and stoner pop culture. Pjota posits a series of identifiers that stretch from myth to meme, forming a Frankensteinian type of language that reflects the lurching way we communicate in an info-glut, post-truth world. He is fascinated by how we record and identify ourselves through visual language, particularly when it incorporates elements of fantasy, mysticism, and horror—allegorical lenses through which to unpack the destabilization of contemporary power structures and the social and economic inequalities set forth by colonial and imperial forces.

Filled with disembodied faces, floating fanged mouths, funeral urns and vases, and feet ranging from the marbled to the monstrous, Pjota’s works exist in an otherworldly realm that veers from the sublime to the nightmarish. Alchemy and Hermetic theory are of great interest to the artist, and one can think of his paintings and sculptures as alchemical experiments, the coalescing of vibrating elements in the quest for universal truths.

In Terror, decaying jester-esque pumpkins float in a midnight sea of bats, ghoulish hands formed by cast gourds reach into this existential plane. The Giant on the Landscape pointedly addresses the political climate of Brazil; it is a lumbering stone monolith cobbled together from feet and fangs. The titular painting, Every Empire Breaks Like a Vase, features a totemic figure with the head of a jacko’-lantern and body of a Greek vase ornamented by the monstrous visage of a Gorgon—an allegorical tale of the self-destructive nature of empires, entities that devolve into the obscene, destined to crack and shatter.

The most striking works of the exhibition are an army of Cinzeiros (ashtrays), which sit amongst the paintings, their rotund bodies adorned with grimacing faces. Formed from a cast of a humble vase found in Pjota’s studio and topped by bronze ashtrays filled with ceramic cigarettes, they are the transmutation of garbage into valuable objects. Pjota’s cinzeiros are the populace antithesis to the empiric bodies, beings that consume and transform the smoke and ashes of fallen civilizations into the mystical. P

Paulo Nimer Pjota, Teeth Showing (detail), 2020/2021, oil, acrylic, synthetic enamel ink, pencil, and pen on canvas and metal sheet with bronze object on metal support, 79.12 x 100.75 in.

Paulo Nimer Pjota, 27 ceramic vessels with glaze, 2021, installation view, dimensions variable Production courtesy of Cerámica Suro, Guadalajara. Behind: O gigante na paisagem (The Giant on the Landscape), 2020, oil, acrylic and tempera on canvas and metal sheet, 90.5 x 107.25 in.

DECEMBER 2021 / JANUARY 2022

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CONTEMPORARIES

AN ENRICHED LIFE

Kirk Hopper is authentically immersed in the visual arts through his own gallery and collecting.

INTERVIEW BY CHRIS BYRNE PHOTOGRAPHY BY SCOTT NEWTON

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ike many gallerists, Kirk Hopper went to art school, began collecting, and by way of a circuitous route, at last opened an art gallery. His interest in American Modernists informed his own collection and contemporary art gallery on North Riverfront Boulevard, augmenting a roster of mid-career artists. The gallery is also appreciated for its scholarship, with an online journal called Passages that shares opinions within the art community. Chris Byrne met with the behind-the-scenes gallerist here.

Chris Byrne (CB): When did you begin collecting?

Kirk Hopper (KH): Just like a lot of gallery owners, I went to art school and enjoyed associating with like-minded people. My mother was a weekend artist, so there were art supplies around the house that I could dabble with.

I grew up, got married, and worked 60 hours a week, with no time for art. I started a roofing company. I liked working mostly with my hands, up high where I didn’t have to deal with anyone.

After decades of working, I had disposable income. I would take long weekends off and travel to galleries and museums.

I was drawn to American Modernists such as Arthur Dove and Marsden Hartley but couldn’t afford their work. My first purchases were a couple of oil sketches by the Dallas artist Olin (Herman) Travis, from whom I took lessons from in my teens. My first notable purchase was a Big Bend painting by Alexandre Hogue. I also collected other early Texas art. When I could afford it, I bought the American Modernists.

I got to know Houston artist Bert Long through collecting, and he encouraged me to open a gallery—art and artists have enriched my life.

CB: Can you tell us about the paintings we viewed in your home?

KH: Each of those artists I have collected and sold over the years.

Arthur Dove’s Swamp (1935) I bought from a galley in New York 30plus years ago. It’s double sided. The reverse has a somewhat realist scene.

I bought Marsden Hartley’s Fish In The Sky (1938) from an auction house after it went unsold. I love its simpleness. Finally, a catalogue raisonné should be out soon with all of Hartley’s’ works.

I bought Forrest Bess’ Tree of Light (1953) from an architect in Houston who knew Bess. He told me Bess inspired him to become an

Arthur Dove, Swamp, 1935, oil on canvas.

Kirk Hopper at his Oak Cliff home.

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Marsden Hartley, Fish In The Sky, 1938, oil on board.

architect. It’s one of my favorite works by the artist. It has two titles (also Sign of the Hermaphrodite), depending on if it’s hung horizontally or vertically.

CB: I understand your involvement also includes the artist’s archive. Did you know Bess’ friend and patron Harry Burkhart?

KH: No, but I’ve met several folks who personally knew Bess when they were kids. They and their parents kept scrapbooks with photos, catalogs, and newspaper clippings. I’ve also copied a lot of pages from the Smithsonian archives concerning Bess. I have kept all these records.

CB: I recently visited Alexandre Hogue: The Modern Work at your eponymous gallery; Hogue’s paintings from the early 1960s were a complete revelation.

KH: Thank you for all the accolades you had for the exhibition. I believe you have become a Hogue admirer, especially his later pieces.

CB: I have. How did the exhibition come about?

Forrest Bess, Tree of Light, 1953, oil on canvas.

KH: It came about through the arts writer Susie Kalel and Hogue’s daughter, Olivia. We wanted to showcase this work and how it interlocked with his earlier works, from his line design to his brushwork.

CB: And you’ve worked with the curator/critic Susie Kalil in the past?

KH: I’ve been working with Susie for many years. It started with me cold-calling her and inquiring about her research on Forrest Bess.

She has written numerous catalogs and press releases and curates shows for my gallery. She’s presently working on a book on Texas artist Kermit Oliver. She is a champion of the Texas arts.

CB: What upcoming projects can we look forward to?

KH: We have an exhibition of all new works by local artist Benito Huerta. Also upcoming shows with James Magee, Annabel Livermore, Matthew Bourbon, and Bryan Florentin. Currently up at the gallery is a fantastic exhibition with Texas artists Anne Wallace and Eric Avery. P

Marble Falls, Texas

DECEMBER 2021 / JANUARY 2022

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Singer-songwriter Abraham Alexander. Photograph by Hope Gray.

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PERFORMANCE

BACK ON TRACK

Up-and-coming soulster Abraham Alexander’s career hit “pause” with the pandemic, but he’s back, and unstoppable.

BY STEVE CARTER

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f you haven’t yet made the musical acquaintance of Fort Worth’s Abraham Alexander, get ready to be knocked out.

The soulful singer-songwriter is blowing up as we speak, hot off the road from his first major US tour, opening for his buddy and renowned musical associate, Leon Bridges.

Alexander’s acclaimed self-titled EP was released in late 2019, but a certain pandemic rolled in shortly thereafter, putting a massive kibosh on his momentum. And while the pandemic may not have left the building entirely, Alexander’s hard at work, with a new album percolating, bookings filling up his calendar, and a burgeoning fan base of converts—it’s all coming together.

Abraham Alexander’s trajectory hasn’t been what you’d call typical. Born in Greece, his family moved to Texas when he was 11, settling in Arlington. After high school, he attended Texas Wesleyan University in Fort Worth, playing soccer there until an ACL injury took him out of sports completely. Enter music. Alexander’s thengirlfriend gave him a guitar and suggested he learn to play. “That was when I really started to fall in love with music, and really fell in love with the process,” he says. “And it’s strange that something that you’re not necessarily really too familiar with starts to unravel and explain things that you’d questioned your entire life—that’s exactly what happened when I started to play.”

Soon he was frequenting open mics, honing his chops, learning his craft. But a chance meeting in 2014 was the catalyst that charted his course. Walking past Fort Worth’s Niles City Sound, Alexander noticed a couple of guys loading amps into the studio and struck up a conversation; the two turned out to be the producers of Leon Bridges’ underway debut studio album, Coming Home, and they invited him back for the next day’s session. “They were like, ‘Hey, we’re going to be recording this individual, and if you can hum you should come out,’ ” Alexander recalls. “I thought ‘cool,’ and I came the next day, and I was like a kid in a candy store…all these amps, drums, gear, and all these people coming together to create something that was bigger than themselves—that was really inspiring.” He and Leon hit it off, and Bridges encouraged him to keep working the open mics. Besides Bridges, Alexander counts Bill Withers, Austin blues-rocker Gary Clark Jr., and John Legend among his other key inspirations. “I’d say those four really helped me find my voice and be as ‘myself’ as possible,” he assesses. “They lit a fire within me.”

Alexander’s 2019 eponymous EP is a masterfully produced, infectious marvel. Recorded at London’s hallowed Abbey Road Studios and tweaked and mastered in Texas, its four songs are a diverse intro to the breadth of his artistry. Lovers Game, the debut single, is a moody, first-person chronicle of the games people play when it’s all going south. 335 is a rockin’ paean to one of Alexander’s favorite axes, the Gibson ES-335; it’s equal parts guitar love, legacy, and “my-six-string-can-kick-your-ass” braggadocio. The mellow, introspective Stay finds Alexander pondering his voyage of selfdiscovery, torn between his love affair with London and his undying

affection for the Lone Star State. Alexander wrote the anthemic America shortly after the 2016 Downtown Dallas sniper attack.

Name-checking MLK and Rosa Parks, along with historical and biblical allusions, his impassioned vocal performance here is a standout, and the song’s questionings are as timely as today’s headlines.

Back in September, Alexander and his band hit the road as the opening act on Leon Bridges’ Gold-Diggers Sound fall tour—a month of dates, East Coast to West Coast. A major tour baptism by fire, Alexander dug it all. Working with his keyboard player and three background vocalists, all of whom appeared on his EP, he found that life on the road really agreed with him. “It was so much fun,” he says. “This is what we pray for, and we’re getting exactly that. There was a lot of impromptu within our set, but everyone was in accord, and it just flowed really well. The tour was such a blessing, and to be on the road with one of my best friends was such an honor.”

What’s Alexander’s next chapter? He’s been recording his follow-up with Grammy-nominated producer and songwriter Brad Cook (Bon Iver, Waxahatchee, Ani DiFranco), and he’s palpably excited. “We’re still putting bows on it, and dotting i’s and crossing t’s,” he explains. “It’s definitely going to be about a lot of the past, and everything that’s happened until now… it’s very personal, and me sharing my heart.” Some of the songs have taken shape with big production values, while others are stripped-down to their intimate essentials—it’s a full-range portrait of who he is musically. “I’m super grateful and elated with everything that’s been transpiring,” he enthuses. Catch this rising star—Abraham Alexander is on his way. P

Photograph by Hope Gray.

DECEMBER 2021 / JANUARY 2022

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Ring Up The Curtain

THE PERFORMING ARTS COME BACK TO THE STAGE FOR LIVE AUDIENCES.

BY LEE CULLUM And there was only one way out—the artist had to fling himself into the abyss in the belief that when he reached the bottom, he would not be dead, but would be newly born. –El Lissitzky

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nd so the abyss is where they are now, those actors, musicians, dancers, and singers, flinging themselves onto the stage, hoping for an audience, hoping to keep their health, hoping to make a living, hoping to survive as artists.

The times are surreal, but Suzanne Césaire, anti-colonial French activist, and writer from Martinique, said in 1943, “Surrealism is the tightrope of our hope.” Mezzo soprano Joyce DiDonato, who sang spectacularly in a recital for The Dallas Opera earlier this year, put it like this: “We are going to have to create our way out of this pandemic.”

As Hemingway put it, “Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so?”

From left: The Barber of Seville. Photograph by Cory Weaver for Minnesota Opera; Madame Butterfly. Photograph by Terrence McCarthy for San Francisco Opera; Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s Music Director Fabio Luisi. Photograph by Sylvia Elzafon.

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The Dallas Opera

Dallas Symphony Orchestra

“Music takes the sting out of the day.” That’s how Ian Derrer responds to my rant about the FDA; the CDC; the Texas Legislature, notorious no matter who’s in charge; and Bosch for stopping at season seven on Netflix. But Derrer is right, and as general director and CEO of The Dallas Opera, he’s certainly doing his part to give us happy alternatives for our evenings. Opera’s Greatest Hits was a big success, the Winspear no longer lonely but filled only to 50 percent, with a masked audience. A lighter-hearted version was offered free in Strauss Square.

Next came the Hart Institute for Women Conductors, not only still alive but actually live again, with a concert featuring all the aspiring, inspiring maestros at the Winspear. One of the past participants, Lina Gonzalez-Granados, has turned out so impressively she is leading The Dallas Opera Orchestra in The Barber of Seville in March. Also, all the stage directors this season are women.

A past winner of TDO’s vocal competition, also reprised in the fall, Latonia Moore is a sensation in Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones, which opened the Met in September. Moore will launch The Dallas Opera’s long-awaited season as well in February, in Madame Butterfly—in the title role, of course.

The Dallas Opera has scored another casting coup in Will Liverman, the principal star of Fire Shut Up in My Bones. He’ll appear in March in Flight, an English-language work by Jonathan Dove.

That production will also bring to Dallas the formidable soprano Karita Mattila, who did the most riveting Salome at the Met anybody has or will ever see. After strenuous work at the gym, she performed the Dance of the Seven Veils for Herod, stripping finally, for an instant, to nothing but her well-toned self. She will not do that in Dallas, but no doubt could if called upon.

As president and CEO of the Dallas Symphony, Kim Noltemy has turned survival into an art form. Deep into the pandemic, with no vaccines and no hope, she presented her musicians on the stage of the Meyerson. There were only 40 at a time, half the full force, carefully spaced for maximum protection. Tested every day they played, these masters of strings, timpani, woodwinds, and brass were under contract, being paid, after all. So why not invite a limited audience, mainly subscribers, into the hall to see them? That number has grown along with public confidence and now has reached about 50 percent of capacity. There it will stay until further notice from the CDC. After a daring year with Fabio Luisi conducting the DSO and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra in Mahler’s First Symphony; a dynamite gala performance by violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter (probably the best in the world; her former husband Andre Previn used to say so) playing John Williams’ Second Violin Concerto, written for her; the Mozart Requiem; and soprano Renée Fleming singing Letters from Georgia, in O’Keeffe’s own words, the DSO will turn to Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin as an opera in concert in April, and in May to Beethoven’s Ninth with Angel Blue, another star of Fire Shut Up in My Bones, as well as bass-baritone Soloman Howard, who made news during the bows after Tosca at the San Francisco Opera by proposing to soprano Ailyn Pérez, frequent luminary at TDO. She said yes.

Never one to miss an opportunity, Noltemy has moved decisively into digital, installing below stage a control room equipped to video concerts for streaming and broadcast. Indeed, Bloomberg will air the Mozart Requiem starting Dec. 4 and a holiday show with CEOs on the podium starting Dec. 18.

DECEMBER 2021 / JANUARY 2022

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Dallas Theater Center Kevin Moriarty, artistic director of the Dallas Theatre Center, can make you feel you are the one person he’s been yearning to talk to. “Great to hear from you,” he responds quickly to my entreaty for an interview. “I’m emailing from an airplane flying back to Dallas from Chicago, where last night we celebrated opening night of DTC’s production American Mariachi at the Goodman Theatre.

Today when I land, I go into rehearsals for The Supreme Leader, and in the evenings we are currently running both Tiny Beautiful Things and Cake Ladies at the Wyly. So after 17 months of no indoor theater, we’re now fully back!”

Jonathan Norton, the gifted writer of Cake Ladies and Penny Candy is now in residence, on full-time staff and paid. DTC will do one of his plays each year. Moriarty plans to put his resident company under contract and pay them a salary, then expand from eight to 11 or 12 actors—although actors are as hard to hire today as restaurant workers. He started out with smaller, intimate plays such as The Supreme Leader, about North Korea’s Kim Jong-un when he was a student prince in Switzerland, but The Sound of Music, on a grander scale, is waiting in the wings, hoping for a spring production uncurtailed by variants of COVID.

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Masks are the order of the hour at both DTC theaters, the Kalita Humphreys and the Wyly, and there are special seats with social distancing for those who want them. The Goodman in Chicago requires proof of vaccination to get into the theater, but that is not possible for the DTC, which receives money from the Texas Commission on the Arts and cannot risk losing that or the liquor license held by the AT&T Performing Arts Center. Governor Abbott is adamant about this.

The last play of the season may be the most interesting of all. Alice Childress wrote Trouble in Mind in 1955 and almost became the first Black female playwright to have a work on Broadway. The producers liked the play but wanted Childress to change the ending to make it more palatable for white audiences. She said no, and Lorraine Hansberry became the first Black woman to put a play on Broadway with A Raisin in the Sun. “There’s a white director in the show who’s a ‘blowhard,’ ” says Moriarty, and the Black actors question his choices.

“All the characters think of themselves as progressives,” Moriarty points out, “but some want to keep things the way they are. It’s funny and smart” and it’s a matter of “discovering a work that nobody has seen.”

From left: Cast of Tiny Beautiful Things. Photograph by Karen Almond; The Supreme Leader with Oscar Seung. Photograph by Karen Almond; Recipient of Katherine Owens/Undermain Fund for New Work, Gregg Deal and his daughter perform in Invisible Loss Movement. Courtesy of Gregg Deal.

Undermain Theatre Kevin Moriarty had to sign off from our conversation because he was headed to the Undermain to catch Stronger Than Arms, an extraordinary tour de force by Danielle Georgiou and Justin Locklear. Based on the premise that “fear is stronger than arms,” this is typical fare at the Undermain, where Bruce DuBose and his late wife, Katherine Owens, kept the torch aloft and burning for theatrical experience at its most elemental, where ancient wisdom dares to speak sense to modern sensibility.

DuBose, a brilliant actor as well as cofounder and producing artistic director of the Undermain, followed with a live production of his streaming sensation, Conor McPherson’s St. Nicholas, which was discovered by Terry Teachout of the Wall Street Journal and justifiably praised as a masterpiece of online drama. This one-man show was directed by Blake Hackler, chair of SMU’s Drama Department.

In bringing his audience to the Undermain, DuBose has had to revamp the HVAC system, installing UV light filters, to make his basement space habitable in the age of COVID. Now the audience

is limited to 36 carefully distanced people. The good thing about all this, DuBose admits, is that the air conditioning is quieter.

Music performances came next and will continue into the new year. Then will arrive Whither Goest Thou, America: Festival of New American Play Readings and Lonesome Blues about “Blind Lemon” Jefferson, a Texas singer in the early 20th century, when Deep Ellum was “a crossroads for the blues,” notes DuBose. Lonesome was one of the last shows Katherine Owens directed, in the summer of 2018, off-Broadway, he recalls.

Another Owens legacy is the Undermain Fund for New Work that bears her name. The first award, a $10,000 commission, went to Lenora Champagne for Feeding on Light, a play about the French philosopher Simone Weil, whom Albert Camus called “the only great spirit of our times.” The theatre will hold a staged reading in the spring. The latest beneficiary of the fund is Gregg Deal, a Native American performance artist. His creation, The Punk Pan-Indian Romantic Comedy will close this year’s festival.

DECEMBER 2021 / JANUARY 2022

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Theatre Three It’s been “one curve ball after another,” laments Jeffrey Schmidt, artistic director of Theatre Three. COVID has kept him out his theatre in the Quadrangle, but so has massive construction. The center is being overhauled by new owners. Schmidt’s space will be pretty much the same, though the lobby will be larger, and he’ll have more visibility from the street—a fortunate change, since Theatre Three can be hard to find.

Theatre Three was the first professional company to come back live after the Ides of March minus two, 2020. It was The Music Man that brought this troupe out of the shadows and into the streets in June, performing wherever they could find an outdoor venue, from Coppell to Cedar Springs to the Texas Discovery Gardens at Fair Park.

For all the joy they generated, “this way of working [where everybody does three or four jobs at once] is not sustainable,” Schmidt acknowledges, but “I don’t know what the alternative is.” Nonetheless he’s pressing on. Theatre Three did Little Shop of

Horrors in the Samuell-Grand Amphitheatre in October, presented in repertory with the Shakespeare Dallas production of Romeo and Juliet, and now plans to open two new plays in 2022, culminating in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Schmidt is the only one I spoke to who admits he would love to require proof of vaccination, especially if the union would decree it and he could blame it on them. He was joking, sort of, but even without help from the union, he hasn’t given up hope on this front.

He also feels “we have exhausted digital…and people’s goodwill to donate” to quasi-occasions online. “No more live events,” he declares, “no more live theatre.”

When he spoke of curve balls, Schmidt was more serious than at first I realized. He tells me he lost his father to COVID in December, followed by his grandfather three weeks later. So now his mother and grandmother are alone on a farm in East Texas where he grew up, dreaming, perhaps, of theatre, but not the desperate drama of the past two years.

From left: Little Shop of Horrors, Ben Stegmair and Rodney M. Morris as Audrey II, Alejandro Saucedo as Seymour. Photograph by Jeffrey Schmidt for Theatre Three; DBDT Espresso Nutcracker, 2019. Photograph by Amitava Sarkar.

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Dallas Black Dance Theatre The last time I spoke with Melissa Young, artistic director of the Dallas Black Dance Theatre, we were like Cole Porter sang, “Down in the depths, on the ninetieth floor” of COVID, and she was working hard to hold tight to her nerve, touting real success in the virtual afterlife, and looking ahead to more. Now, however, she is herself again, ebullient and bursting with projects and plans.

“Everything is possible with a good plan,” she insists, and she has plenty of them.

Dallas Black Dance Theatre returned triumphantly to the Wyly in November with Directors Choice. Designed to celebrate the company’s 45th anniversary, the program showcased favorite dances that audiences adore plus some that current dancers wanted to perform but never had. It’s all part of Young’s effort to “begin again, shake things up and reinvigorate minds, bodies, and spirits.” She won’t “close the virtual door”—they’ve done too well with it for that— but will livestream one evening of each show at the Wyly, keeping it available for two days afterwards. She’ll continue Black

on Black in DBDT’s studio in December and treat her audience to newly choreographed works by members of both companies using the music of “Black legends.” Who? I ask. “I don’t want to give that away,” she replies but promises it will be “like a jukebox.”

For the holidays the Dallas Black Dance Academy is presenting Espresso Nutcracker at the Majestic Theatre—“shades of brown,” as Young describes it, featuring not only Tchaikovsky but also Duke Ellington. Last year, this show attracted the most viewers of all their 21 events on offer virtually.

Working from a wall in her office papered with gigantic Postits—she calls it her “vision board”— Young looks ahead to her Cultural Awareness program in February, when jazz guitarist Toni Kitanovski and his band will arrive from North Macedonia to continue a collaboration with DBDT begun before COVID. It’s all the magic of movement at Dallas Black Dance Theatre, where truth is a consequence of fantastic artistry. After all, says Young, “Art is the very thing that has gotten us through this.”

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Bruce Wood Dance “On or about December 1910 human character changed,” wrote Virginia Woolf, and this brought about a shift in human relations.

“And when human relations change,” she continued, “ there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature.” She might have added art. It is that shifting ground that Joy Bollinger, artistic director of Bruce Wood Dance, sees in the painting Cathedral

by Jackson Pollock. She has been giving a lot of thought to this work ever since the Dallas Museum of Art commissioned her to use it as the basis for a dance. It’s all part of Slip Zone: A New Look at Postwar Abstraction in the Americas and East Asia.

Painted in 1947 and given to the DMA, Cathedral, Bollinger believes, is a picture of an artist “unsettled.” “It was after World War II,” she observes. Pollock saw that “art must change to express the change young people experienced at a very young age. Art… an important way to heal from trauma.”

Bollinger is choreographing all this into dance for the DMA’s Horchow Auditorium in April with a repeat performance at the Moody in June as part of the company’s SPRING production.

Invigorated by the “sedimentary layers” of postwar abstraction, Bollinger and her company will also create a full suite of dances, including duets and ensembles, inspired not just by Cathedral but by five or six other paintings in the museum’s collections.

Company executive director Gayle Halperin, who started the company with Wood just over ten years ago, launched the first Dallas

Fall Arts Festival in Klyde Warren Park in October. Co-producing with the Dallas Conservatory, she gathered Bandan Kora African Drum and Dance Ensemble, Anita M. Martinez Ballet Folklorico, the Greater Dallas Youth Orchestra Jazz Combo, and B. Moore Dance among others for an afternoon of free family festivity.

This marked a moment of reemergence for Bruce Wood Dance after months of rehearsing, masked, five-hours a day, in a studio equipped with a refurbished air-conditioning system buttressed by ionizers and UV lamps. The company has created films in a new way, segmenting dances into themes, then repeating shots from different angles and editing them into videos far more sophisticated than the archival footage they had done before. Searching for places to make those films they found a park in Grand Prairie, among other spots, and an especially haunting setting on Mountain Creek Lake.

There they explored in tragic movement the life of Reuben Johnson, who was lynched near that same site in 1874. Choreographer Adam McKinney, professor of dance at TCU, created a startlingly powerful dance for dancer Matthew Roberts, placing him in a field, on a tree, and, finally, in the water, disappearing beneath the waves.

By November Bruce Wood was back at the Moody, open to a full house, with masks. ReNEW, highlighting Elemental Brubeck, revives the reassuring ’50s, choreographed by Lar Lubovitch. The beat goes on at Bruce Wood. It’s as if this company never missed a beat at all.

From left: Yin Yue’s Begin Again. Photograph by Sharen Bradford; BalletX dancer Francesca Forcella. Photograph by Gabriel Bienczycki.

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TITAS DANCE/UNBOUND Charles Santos, executive director of TITAS, is quick to point out that his is a presenting, not a producing, company. Hence salvation by streaming was not as available to him as it had been to others. There are too many rights involved when dealing with traveling troupes, which can be expensive and not always easy to get. So TITAS is mostly all live all the time by necessity as well as by choice.

Santos has spent the past several months rebooking dancers he had to cancel because of COVID, struggling to get visas for some of them, and hoping it will all work out. He still speaks candidly about the strain of keeping art alive in the world of COVID. Only weekly calls with other impresarios in the Dallas Arts District kept him afloat. After those sessions, now every other week, he would get in touch with smaller groups to pass along the latest angst and ways of coping.

Now Santos is back in the saddle, riding that bronco again, staging productions of Alice with MOMIX in September; Somewhere from West Side Story, abstracted into pure, plotless movement by Doug Varone and Dancers in October; and Rubberband from Montreal in November.

Coming up in the year ahead are Ballet Hispanico, celebrating its 50th anniversary in January; A.I.M. by Kyle Abraham—notable as the company of Dallas’ Catherine Kirk—in March; Compagnie Marie Chouinard dancing before a projected triptych of Hieronymus

Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights in April—Santos warns that this garden has nudity; and BalletX of Philadelphia in June. Amid all this, in April TITAS will mark its own 40th anniversary and Santos’ 20th at Command Performance in the Winspear.

TITAS has operated in a bubble, putting touring artists up in a hotel, where they spend all their time when they’re not at the Moody or the Winspear. Full vaccinations are required by contract, and breakfast, lunch, and dinner are delivered to the dancers in individually wrapped packages. There is “no ambiguity,” Santos stresses, adding that it will take “time and education” to get the audience to return. He would love to have 100 percent capacity in the hall, but “the general public is not here yet.” To nudge them along he’s inviting a few people, maybe eight, to dress rehearsals.

TITAS, he knows, is lucky to still to be standing. “Some groups around the country are “on the brink,” he points out. “Dancers have left the field.” One is in the jewelry business, another is a fireman, another a police officer. Some have gone back to school or into real estate or teaching. And Santos, while warding off calamity, went into surgery for two ruptured discs, possibly caused by an old dance injury. When we speak, he is back in the office two to three hours a day and just beginning to drive again. Even so, he’s convinced that this is “an extraordinary time for problem solvers. We can do this, figure it out.”

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Dallas Winds

Kim Campbell is a bass trombonist; an ordained minister (state of California) who has performed five weddings in the past five years; and the founder and executive director of Dallas Winds, one of the few bands of its kind in the country. These 50 brass, wind, and percussion players are freelance musicians who also work as software programmers, financial planners, accountants, and in other professions when they’re not performing at the Meyerson. Some of them started playing in school then let it go. Campbell has given them a chance to “pick it up again.” Luckily for them, they live in a part of the country that has 22 community bands. Houston has eight.

There is “huge talent” here, says Campbell.

Right now, Campbell is preparing for Christmas at the Meyerson in December, with more John Williams in February; The Planets, op.

32 by Gustav Holst in March, with projections from the Hubble Space Telescope; Canadian Brass teaming up with the Dallas Winds

in April; and A Star-Spangled Fourth of July to wrap up the season.

Band Camp is a major summer project for Dallas Winds.

Working with DISD, they teach music to 600 middle and high school students, at $25 each for a week of instruction at Booker T. Washington School for the Performing and Visual Arts. After that it’s off to the Meyerson, where they play in a concert. Making videos became the order of the hour at Dallas Winds, as it was everywhere during the COVID lockdown. So young musicians at DISD were not abandoned; they had a musical life online.

Kim Campbell hopes to retire to Taos in another year. Then he’ll “return to the trombone” he expects, and “do a few weddings.” It’s impossible to overstate what he and all these impresarios mean to all our lives. They are subsidizing the culture, saving civilization, and helping the arts redeem the alienated life we for too long have been living.

From left: Dallas Winds Come Sunday; Dallas Winds founder Kim Campbell. Photography courtesy of Dallas Winds; Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra’s music director Robert Spano onducts at the Will Rogers Auditorium. Photograph by Karen Almond; FWSO Pulling Back the Curtain: Sibelius, Dvořák, and Brian Raphael Nabors. Photograph by Karen Almond.

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Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra

In Fort Worth, Keith Cerny, president and CEO of the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, collected three seven-figure gifts during the height of the pandemic, and one of them, from board chair Mercedes Bass, was, “transformative,” he says. It meant there were no furloughs, no layoffs, and now, with the orchestra over 90 percent vaccinated, they are back in Bass Hall, at full capacity but with the audience in masks. “We have gone from zero to 100 mph,” he reports, and they ended their fiscal year with what looks like a $350,000 surplus.

“Stay live.” That’s the motto at the Fort Worth Symphony, and they have done just that, starting with a sold-out show of video-game music in August (these scores have been a big hit in London too, and at the Tokyo Olympics) and continuing with film soundtracks

by John Williams (who wrote the electrifying violin concerto that Anne-Sophie Mutter played in Dallas). Now they’re looking ahead to three concerts led by new conductor Robert Spano, soon to arrive for his first full season (2022-23) from Atlanta, where he built an international reputation for himself and his orchestra.

The Hart Institute is represented yet again by Lidiya Yankovskaya, who’ll lead the Fort Worth Symphony in a March celebration of

George Gershwin and William Dawson. She also presided over a tribute to Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the DSO. Dallas and Fort Worth are thinking along similar lines for the holidays: the music of the ’40s and ’50s, when life may not have been easier but at least there was clarity, and the “Greatest Generation” had the situation in hand.

That seems to be the idea behind A Very Swingin’ Basie Christmas at the Meyerson and Swing Is the Thing to ring in a welcome new year at Bass Hall. Who isn’t ready for Blue Skies?

Cerny is resuming his chamber music series at the Kimbell Art Museum along with his “Meet the Composer” sessions, also at the Kimbell, where he asks what the composer is trying to accomplish.

Was it successful? Certainly, Cerny has been successful in keeping the Fort Worth Symphony alive during a siege that only someone with a “war games mentality” as he puts it, could survive. Part of the answer, he notes, is keeping everybody informed about everything.

This helps avoid the kind of upheaval suffered by the San Antonio Symphony, where musicians went on strike, forcing concerts to be postponed. Quite true. As 17th-century British philosopher Francis Bacon warned, “Nothing makes a man suspect much, more than to know little.” P

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Milton Avery’s Great Independence FROM PLAINS OF TREES TO PLANES OF COLOR, THE AMERICAN ARTIST ESCHEWED A SINGLE ART MOVEMENT AND STYLE.

BY NANCY COHEN ISRAEL

This page: Milton Avery, Blossoming, 1918, oil on board, 11 x 15 in. Photograph by Adam Reich. © 2021 Milton Avery Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and DACS, London 2021.

Opposite, from left: Milton Avery, Breaking Wave, 1959, oil on canvas, 32 x 42 in. Private collection. Photograph by Adam Reich. © 2021 Milton Avery Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and DACS, London 2021; Milton Avery, Fishing Village, 1939, oil on canvas, 32 x 48 in. The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation. Photograph by Adam Reich. © 2021 Milton Avery Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and DACS, London 2021.

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M

ilton Avery is an American original. A prolific painter, he spoke through his work. Milton Avery, which opened last month at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, is the first time in nearly 40 years that audiences are able to enjoy a major survey of his work. The exhibition was conceived and organized by Edith Devaney. In her two decades at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the organizing venue for the exhibition, Devaney championed the work of American modernists.

Through her curatorial efforts, she found that Avery served as the inspiration for many of these 20th-century masters. And therefore, “This is a much overdue exhibition,” she says.

For The Modern, this is a homecoming of sorts. “I’m personally thrilled to have this exhibition in Fort Worth,” enthuses director Dr. Marla Price. Not only did the last retrospective make a stop at the museum in the early 1980s, but Avery was the subject of Price’s doctoral dissertation. Devaney called upon her for guidance during the early planning stages of the retrospective. “To have her contribution is brilliant,” Devaney says. The exhibition includes about 70 paintings, ranging from Avery’s earliest work in the 1910s until his death in 1965.

“For those who don’t know his work, it will be a great introduction,” offers Price.

Avery’s artistic journey followed a unique path. He was born into a working-class family in Connecticut in 1885. Lured by the promise of higher wages than what he earned at his factory job, he enrolled in a night class at the Connecticut League of Art Students to learn commercial lettering. He eventually enrolled in the school’s life drawing class on the recommendation of the League’s director, Charles Noel Flagg. By 1911, Avery listed his occupation as “artist.”

His earliest works, such as Blossoming (1918), depict the landscape around him. American Impressionist painters such as Childe Hassam, George Inness, John Henry Twachtman, and J. Alden Weir offered early inspiration. Avery even followed their example of painting en plein air.

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"This is a much overdue exhibition."

-Edith Devaney

Clockwise from top left: Milton Avery, Boathouse by the Sea, 1959, oil on canvas, 72 x 60 in. Milton Avery Trust courtesy Victoria Miro and Waqas Wajahat © 2021 Milton Avery Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and DACS, London 2021; Milton Avery, Coney Island, 1931, oil on canvas, 32 x 40 in. The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation. Photograph by Adam Reich © 2021 Milton Avery Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and DACS, London 2021; Milton Avery, March in Brown, 1954, oil on canvas, 44 x 32 in. Private collection.

Photograph by Adam Reich. © 2021 Milton Avery Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and DACS, London 2021; Milton Avery, Excursion on the Thames, 1953, oil on canvas, 40 x 50 in. The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation © 2021 Milton Avery Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and DACS, London 2021.

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Exhibition opportunities followed and in 1915 his work was included in the Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts’ Fifth Annual Exhibition of Oil Paintings and Sculpture at the Wadsworth Atheneum’s Annex Gallery. It is fitting, then, that this museum is the other collaborating venue for the exhibition.

While his style continuously matured, throughout his life, landscape painting remained an important part of Avery’s oeuvre. Beginning with a summer spent at an art colony in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1920, his work became informed by the places he visited along the Eastern Seaboard. In 1925, he moved to New York City to be closer to Sally Michel, whom he met in Gloucester. They married the following year.

Just as Avery was a great observer of the natural world, he was equally curious about what was happening in the art world. In New York he took advantage of every opportunity to visit exhibitions, galleries, and museums to see new work by American and European artists. It was during this time that he was exposed to the work of Henri Matisse, to whom his style is often compared. Avery absorbed what he saw. Before long, his work entered into conversation with modernism.

His landscapes began to flatten. His palette became increasingly muted, and the perspective began to shift.

By the 1930s, perhaps inspired by New York’s dense population, he started to put people in his work. He depicted urban life, as in The Auction (c. 1930s), in a manner that seems to cross Expressionism with the Ashcan School. “He embodies a sense of history with European modernism as well as his own particular development,” explains Devaney.

At the same time, portraiture became part of his practice. Family and friends, including his new acquaintances Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, became his sitters. And Avery’s influence can be seen in the early work of these artists, who would soon come to define Abstract Expressionism. According to Price, “Milton Avery is an artist that artists admire.” Devaney adds, “Avery sat between American Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism. He had a foot in both camps but was affiliated with neither.” Of these younger artists she says, “They were hugely inspired by Milton Avery, and they were happy to say it.”

In 1938, Avery traveled to the Gaspé Peninsula in Eastern Canada.

“Gaspé was one of the most important encounters of his career,” says Price, adding, “The total environment is always shaping him.”

Here, the built environment and natural world started merging into unified wholes. And, as seen in Fishing Village (1939), Avery employed contrasting textures to define space. This trip yielded a significant body of work, and the experience influenced his work throughout the following prolific decade, during which time he achieved critical and commercial success. His palette also began to shift, and landscapes as well as portraits were increasingly reduced to planes of color. Two Figures at Desk (1944), for example, is lighter and seems to explore the entire tonal range of red. “The developments that he made towards attitudes of form and color in the ’40s were a seismic change. They have a new way of looking at the world,” explains Devaney. But his frenetic pace took its toll and in 1949, Avery suffered a heart attack.

In the ensuing years, Avery’s work took on a greater simplicity. As Price relates, “Sally Avery said that the health scare gave him a new focus and determination. When he goes to Provincetown [in 1957], we see an incredible blossoming of paintings that refocused him.” At that point, his work became monumental. Nature continued to provide a source of inspiration, as in Boathouse by the Sea (1959), just as it had in his earlier work. These pure abstractions, however, are reduced to harmoniously balanced form and color.

From the staccato energy of Avery’s earliest works to the calmness of the later works, this exhibition, Devaney anticipates, will inspire museumgoers. As she says, “I hope visitors see the joy of his work. I always say, ‘You always feel better when you see a Milton Avery.’” P

Top: Milton Avery, Hint of Autumn, 1954, oil on canvas, 53 x 34 in. Milton Avery Trust. Photograph by Adam Reich © 2021 Milton Avery Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and DACS, London 2021. Bottom: Milton Avery, Studio View (Chop Suey), ca.

1930’s, watercolor on paper, 22.12 x 15.25 in., Private collection.

Photograph by Adam Reich. © 2021 Milton Avery Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and DACS, London 2021.

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Walker sits tucked beneath Wanda Gierhart Fearing while Gumbo strolls by Dean Fearing.

A Tasteful Retreat DEAN FEARING AND WANDA GIERHART FEARING BRING THEIR VARIED LIFESTYLES AND TALENTS TO THE TABLE.

BY PEGGY LEVINSON PHOTOGRAPHY BY MANNY RODRIGUEZ AND JOHN SMITH 58 PATRONMAGAZINE.COM

A photograph in the kitchen by Greg Booth features Dean’s grandmother’s spoon in his son Jaxson’s hand.

Cassina dining chairs and custom counter chairs with counter stone from Marble Boutique, Dallas.

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ny discussion of celebrated chef Dean Fearing’s home would need to include his kitchen. Likewise, an article about marketing executive Wanda Gierhart Fearing’s home would include a room-sized closet filled with designer and couture clothing for the many high-level events she hosted during her time as chief marketing officer of the Neiman Marcus Group. It took architect Bruce Bernbaum and designer Dan Nelson, along with contractor Joel Greenwald, to help meld the furniture, art, and lifestyle of these two powerhouses into one perfectly styled Bluffview home. Art consultant Kristy Stubbs helped with the selection and placement of the art, combined with the couple’s own acquisitions.

Dean Fearing, the award-winning chef whose time at the Mansion on Turtle Creek introduced the culinary world to tortilla soup and lobster tacos, actually grew up “in every river city in the Midwest,” as he likes to say. He sampled the foods of America’s heartland, but it was St. Louis barbecue ribs that turned on his tastebuds. It was then he knew he had to recreate that taste. As one of the founders of the Southwestern cuisine movement, along with Stephan Pyles and Robert del Grande, he has been bestowed with almost every culinary prize there is, including the prestigious James Beard Award.

Unlike Dean’s small-town roots, Wanda’s marketing career has allowed her to live and work in many of the great cities, including London, Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington DC. She incorporates the styles of all these locales in her home. She has been

One of Dean’s legendary pizzas.

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Above the fireplace hangs Hung Liu, Apple, mixed media on panel; custom sofa in Holland & Sherry fabric; Holly Hunt lounge chairs in Créations Métaphores fabric; Créations Métaphores sheer shades; Rose Tarlow glazed linen drapery.

From left to right: Clothespin console from Scott + Cooner with Jan Barboglio candelabra; above it hangs Rivers by Jim Yarbrough from Woodstock, Georgie. Above: Leah Rosenberg, Convergence, 2009, acrylic on panel—the artist describes it as dripping like frosting on a cake; Andy Katz, Tuscany Forest photograph is installed above a bar cart from Antique Row, Dallas; vintage floor lamp, a Wanda find; rug

by Liora Manne.

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In the library: custom chairs by Dan Nelson in Kelly Wearstler fabric; custom rug by Liora Manne; vintage light fixture by David Weeks; Elitis wallcovering inside the bookcase.

chief marketing and merchandising officer for Design Within Reach; chief marketing officer for Neiman Marcus Group; and she is presently global chief marketing and content officer for Cinemark, the American movie theatre company, overseeing the company's relationship with Hollywood studios and determining which and where movies will be released in theaters. Design and the creative process have always been part of her storied career.

The couple decided their shared home would be the one Dean had lived in with his sons, but they also created a space for Wanda’s daughter, Celese, who comes home on breaks from college at Vanderbilt. They had some work to do. Wanda worked closely with Bruce Bernbaum and Dan Nelson to create a home that combined both their lifestyles. “Dean and I interact so much with the public in fast-paced jobs that we need a place that is a quiet retreat— comfortable yet stylish. So when we walk in the door, we feel instant relaxation.” A warm “welcome home” comes by way of two permanent residents—a cat named Gumbo, and Walker, a border collie.

The design team of Greenwald, Bernbaum, and Nelson moved a door in the front entryway, converted the little-used dining room into an elegant and cozy library, and opened most of the back of the house to the backyard with a seamless sliding-door system. The porch has fans and electric screens that raise and lower as needed, providing a year-round temperate and mosquito-free environment.

The lacquered library shows off Ariamna Contino, Camino al Eden Corredor Entre, hand-cut paper, 200-gram Fabriano cardstock, acquired from the Robert Miller Gallery at Dallas Art Fair.

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Th an su rig

Wanda discovered the original Richard Avedon Look magazine Beatles posters in a vintage poster shop.

For most of the pandemic, the couple retreated to their new patio and enjoyed the massive pecan trees and a wall of fragrant wisteria.

The focal point of the open kitchen is a large photograph. The late, great photographer Greg Booth captured then-six-month-old Jaxson, Dean’s son, holding a mixing spoon that belonged to Dean’s grandmother. It’s a multi-generational tribute to a kitchen that gets a lot of use. “I do all the cooking, and Wanda sets a beautiful table and pours a mean glass of wine,” Dean says. And there is always taco night. “We love them and are the luckiest people to live in the part of the world that knows how to cook tacos right,” says Dean. He also likes to cook Indian curry and Asian, Italian, French, and other dishes that he doesn’t serve in his restaurant. Entertaining is casual and unpretentious—he doesn’t want to spend all evening cooking when that’s what he does all day. Think pizza from their pizza oven (a gift from Wanda) and barbecue chicken off his Hasty Bake grill.

Every space in this home is put to use. The living room has an angular custom-designed sofa that invites conversation. The mixedmedia painting over the fireplace, Apple, is by celebrated Chinese artist Hung Liu. The walls, ceiling, and bookshelves of the study are lacquered in a celestial shade of blue that creates a reflective, Zen atmosphere.

The shelves are lined with art, books, and there is a special place for Dean’s many culinary trophies and awards. A custom cloverleaf table is perfect for table games, writing, and reading. The mixedmedia, hand-cut work on paper, Camino al Eden Corredor Entre, is by

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Dean Fearing’s collection of custom-made Lucchese boots.

Cuban artist Ariamna Contino, a discovery at the Dallas Art Fair.

In the great room, a custom sectional by Nelson provides ample comfortable seating with sculptural cutaway backs that keep the room open and the conversation going while food is being prepared in the kitchen. Above the fireplace is Sugar by Wes Lang. Bruce Cascia’s iconic image of a horse and rider is synonymous with Jackson Hole, Wyoming, one of the couple’s favorite places to visit. To the right of the bookshelves hangs Portrait of Young Woman #3 by Gugger Petter, made entirely of rolled-up newspapers.

Drawing from an eclectic lens, up the staircase hang four psychedelic prints of the Beatles, photographed by Richard Avedon for Look, a find

by Wanda at a San Francisco vintage poster shop. And you can’t miss a custom display case for the iconic chef’s collection of boots in a range of colors and designs, each pair beautifully handmade. And they’re not just for show: Dean pulls out a well-loved pair he wears every day.

He also points out one of his favorites: red custom-tooled Lucchese boots given to him in 1985 by the president of the distinguished boot company.

Dean collects vintage guitars as well; two of his dearest are a 1935 Martin Shade Top D-28 and a 1952 Fender Telecaster. Not just for show either: he plays regularly on his own and in his alternative country band, The Barbwires, along with his good friend, the accomplished chef Robert del Grande of Cafe Annie fame in Houston. He also strums at home after the evening meal, and of course The Barbwires perform regularly at charity events—talk about a musical feast! P

The great room shows off a custom sectional sofa in Perennials’ fabric with Artifort Tulip chairs from Scott + Cooner and a rug by the Scott Group Studio; Wes Lang’s Sugar adds dimension above the fireplace with a patinized steel surround by The Nelson Line. Gugger Petter’s newspaper-and-hemp Portrait of Young Woman #3 hangs to the right, with two paper collage faces by Brenda Bogart opposite left.

The patio respite features lounge furniture by RH.

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Tropical Brilliance Fine jewelry and gemstones mimic exotic flora.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHRIS PLAVIDAL, SISTERBROTHER MGMT CREATIVE DIRECTION AND STYLING BY NELLY ADHAM, RR&CO. PRODUCED BY ELAINE RAFFEL

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Harry Winston Forget-Me-Not ring featuring sapphires and diamond set in platinum; Harry Winston Sparks ring featuring tanzanite, blue sapphire, spessartite garnet, yellow diamond, and diamond set in 18k yellow gold and platinum; Harry Winston Emerald 18mm timepiece featuring diamonds in 18k white gold. All Harry Winston, Highland Park Village.

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de Boulle High Jewelry Collection Floral Bracelet with fancy-colored diamonds 74 ctw glitters with tsavorite garnets over 16 ctw and Paraiba tourmalines 2 ctw in floral motif, set in 18k yellow gold. de Boulle, Preston Rd.

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Van Cleef & Arpels Bouton d’or necklace, bracelet, and ring in yellow gold, chrysoprase, diamonds, and onyx.

All at Van Cleef & Arpels, Highland Park Village.

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Mallary Marks pointy scarf-shape 17.25 in.

18k necklace with emeralds 200 ctw and emerald briolette 2.55 ct. Exclusively at The Conservatory Park Village.

68NYC, Highland PATRONMAGAZINE.COM

All Lydia Courteille rings. On left: 18k gold, red sapphire, orange sapphire, tsavorite, opal; Top right: 18k gold, blue opal, Australian opal, orange sapphire, purple sapphire, tsavorite; Lower right: 18k gold, purple jade, ruby, pink sapphire, amethyst, diamond. exclusively at Grange Hall,

DECEMBER 2021 /AllJANUARY 2022 69Travis Street.

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Eiseman Estate Collection, Seaman Schepps bracelet in 18k white and yellow gold features a vine set with diamonds 3.05 ctw winding through a bed of cabochon citrines of varying shades, 123.11 ctw; 18k white gold earrings set with two oval citrines, approx. 32 ctw, with pave diamond snakes set with diamond and round emeralds .04 ctw. Exclusively at Eiseman Jewels, NorthPark Center.

Nan Fusco for Carefully Curated Luxury from left: Choupee Flower of Life pendant in yellow gold on 24 in. diamond-cut heavy cable chain; Right: one-of-a-kind hand-cut natural druzy leaf, gold, diamond stem and prongs on 24-in. snake chain; Below: one-of-a-kind hand-cut natural druzy leaf, diamond, and gold prongs on 28-in. diamond-cut cable link, all by Nan Fusco, Laguna Beach. @carefullycuratedluxury.

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SPACE

Let There Be Light!

BAXTER Q2’S BRILLIANCE ILLUMINATES ABITARE18.

Known for elevating the Made-in-Italy ethos that engenders fine leather furnishings, Baxter creates an element of surprise now and again with lighting. Intricate as a spider web and just as considered, Baxter’s Q2 suspension lamp is made of curved nickel filaments connected with integrated lamp holders. Find it at Abitare18 in the Decorative Center Dallas. Lighting never looked so luscious. P

Baxter Q2 suspension lamp is available through Abitare18.

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SPACE

From top left: Tät-Tat Ornamental Pencils; Bauhaus ornaments; Banshu Hamano Ikenobo flower scissors; Man Ray Chess Set pieces; All AMEICO at Nasher Sculpture Center.

CASTLING

Nasher Sculpture Center collaborates with AMEICO to conquer holiday gift giving.

BY TERRI PROVENCAL

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asher Sculpture Center has a new pop-up shop for the gifting season occupying the Corner Gallery at Flora and Olive streets through January 9, 2022. In the Nasher’s brilliant partnership with AMEICO, a Connecticut-based distributor catering to lovers of art and design, find inventive European-made gifts of jewelry, objects, notecards, historical reproductions, and other artisan-made products. They also offer a wonderful mix of Japanese and Korean contemporary crafts, like Banshu Hamono shears and razors, each a work of art. During the darker days of winter, when sake is in order, look to Japanese ceramics by Kumagai for soul-warming vessels.

“Given the national and international reputation of the Nasher as well as the timeless and stunning Renzo Piano building it is housed in, we could not be happier to have found such a good new ‛home’ in Dallas, albeit on a limited-time basis” says AMEICO’s founder Peter Kahane of the 20-year partnership with the Nasher.

Kahane splits his time between Switzerland and the US. Switzerland has birthed many iconic designers, including the famed architect Le Corbusier, who left a legacy of form and function as well as followers.

That tenet threads through many of these Swiss brands. Consider the artfully utilitarian, like Tät-Tat’s laser-sculpted pencil set. These makers also create mobiles and charming garlands, a whimsical addition to any room. Plus, the Zurich-based company, founded by husband and wife, both former teachers, collaborates with social work programs and employs some 300 special-needs persons.

The reissue of the 1920 Man Ray Chess Set, based on the original from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, will delight titled players and woodpushers alike—or lovers of the highly COVID-streamed Queen’s Gambit. Other reproductions include Bauhaus ornaments

and handcrafted marionettes by Dada artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp in collaboration with the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich. AMEICO’s headquarters is somewhat of a reissue itself; a two-story brick and limestone, it was previously the home of the Southern New England Telephone Company, built by Dowling & Bottomley Co. Other artisan goods include useful pickups like reading glasses from French eyewear brand IZIPIZI, La Mollla’s curly necklace made entirely out of springs, and the Siri Siri jewelry collection named after the Swahili word for chain.

And like all things at the Nasher, the pop-up is greatly considered.

AMEICO’s curation is lovingly interspersed with finds from the late Donald Fowler, the Nasher Store’s former director of retail and a multidisciplinary artist whose charisma enveloped chance encounters into his world of friendships. Following his passing, the museum reimagined the shop space into the Nasher Windows gallery honoring his memory. Kristen Cochran’s site-specific neon fare well was a poignant reminder fashioned after his handwriting, remembering Fowler and all those who we lost to the tragedy-ridden 2020. On the eve of the pop-up opening in November, AMEICO’s director of retail stores Daniel Basiletti recalled “I remember Donald really fondly. I thought he was really sharp and quite clever; he had a good way of merchandising and positioning products.”

Stuck on the hardest person on your gift list? Fowler was a lover of books, and here an assortment is interspersed throughout, including many art titles, collection tomes, and Nasher Sculpture Center exhibition publications such as Betye Saar: Uneasy Dancer and Isamu Noguchi: A Sculptor’s World.

Pop into this pop-up without paying admission fees. P

DECEMBER 2021 / JANUARY 2022

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CULINARY ARTS

Chef Dan Landsberg brings a creative flourish to Ellie’s in the HALL Arts Hotel.

BY KENDALL MORGAN

Clockwise from left: Ellie’s Lounge at HALL Arts Hotel; Glazed Pork Belly Lollipops with Truffled Popcorn; Ellie’s Reverberita; Hall Red Wine; Artisan Cheese & Charcuterie.

Photographs by Dave Carlin for HALL Arts Hotel.

W

hen food and culture meet, the results can be nothing less than delicious. So it is with the evolutionary menu of Ellie’s under the helm of chef Dan Landsberg. “It’s Napa cuisine with a Texas flair, which is how I like to cook,” he explains. “Cooking on the lighter side of things—seasonal and regional. What I was looking for was exactly what this place had to offer.”

Named for owner Craig Hall’s mother, an art collector and artist, Ellie’s reflects its namesake’s passion for delicious food and the beauty found in ordinary life. And the bistro is a welcoming companion to its cultural neighbors.

Dan Landsberg took over the kitchen reins earlier this year. Fresh off a decade-plus stint at ZaZa Hospitality, where he led the culinary efforts at Dragonfly and managed operations for the Hotel ZaZa’s four outposts, Landsberg’s passion for seasonal ingredients and local purveyors assured that his dishes would be both ambitious and thoughtful.

Landsberg comes by his culinary appreciation organically. Raised in Sacramento, California, he started his career washing dishes in a local restaurant. “I fell in love with the energy and rhythm of the restaurant.

Even on a tired day, the pulse of the customers and business going on picks you up and makes your day better.”

By the time he had worked his way up to the role of sous chef, he had decided to make his career official, attending the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco while moonlighting at the city’s historic Fog City Diner (now just Fog City). Upon graduation, he brought the Fog City concept to Dallas. Stints at the Dallas Museum of Art and as Stephan Pyles’ executive chef further honed his skill set. Landsberg says Pyles in particular set the stage for his approach to food. “His perspective is, he looks at it all. The food is very important, but it’s about the whole experience, down to the tiniest details. Just his use of different spices really expands your mind. You taste different things you’re unfamiliar with, so you’re going down a rabbit hole of flavor. All those nuances that Stephan taught us is a well that will never run dry.”

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Pyles’ last restaurant was Flora Street Cafe situated on the thoroughfare of the Dallas Art District. “The cool thing about being in the Arts District is there’s so much visual creativity; you can’t help but be inspired. The Arts District [diner] is a very discerning palate, so we’re making sure everything we’re doing is in line with their expectations and exceeding them.”

Because we’re in Texas, Landsberg knew he had to include a couple of classic ribeye options—in this case, steak spiced with a coffee and chili blend and pork glazed with red miso. But vegan and vegetarian diners will find plenty to please their palates, too. With a full range of purveyors in his back pocket, the chef is equally enthused by the coral reef mushrooms he has discovered to create ambitious vegan options.

And whatever entrees and apps he may devise, each dish has to have an aesthetic harmony all its own. “It can’t be like oh, those Brussels sprouts are good, that steak is good. It has to be more like, ‘Wow, that was a fantastic bite!’ The plate is like a symphony: you can hear the horns and percussion, but when you hear them at the same time, it comes together perfectly.”

This includes the wines. As owners Craig and Kathryn Hall also oversee the acclaimed Hall wines brand, Ellie’s caters to the oenophile, and every bite must be effortlessly complemented by the perfect glass.

“For me, with the food, nothing needs to be too acidic or spicy so it blows out the plate; it needs to be right on the edge of what a wine can handle. I’m curating an experience for each table—it’s a big deal, and I enjoy the challenge.”

The food also has to enhance the experience of dining in the artaccented room. Patrons can enjoy works from Kristin Baker, Cerith Wyn Evans, and Lava Thomas while they admire Landsberg’s creative plating.

“With the dining room being so light and airy and monochromatic, it opens the door to the food coming out of the kitchen being as colorful as can be,” he says. “And the plates in different shapes and colors play into your canvas; it’s your backdrop for each dish. It’s true you eat with your eyes first—it looks delicious as a collection of different flavors and colors and textures.” P

TWO x TWO for AIDS and Art artist honoree Yoshitomo Nara.

Photograph by Kevin Tachman.

THERE TWO x TWO FOR AIDS AND ART 2021 GALA AND ART AUCTION WITH PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRUNO AND KEVIN TACHMAN

Yoshitomo Nara

Catherine Rose

T. Ryan Greenawalt, Kevin McClatchy, Howard Rachofsky

Alex Looney, Matthew Looney, Cindy Rachofsky, Brian Bolke, Meghan Looney

Carlos Gonzalez-Jaime, Dr. Agustin Arteaga

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Rita Ora

Simon Bland, Kaleta Blaffer Johnson

Alvise Orsini, Cornelia Guest, Geoffroy Von Raemdonck

Christen Wilson, Deena Abdulaziz

PRESENTING SPONSOR NANCY C. ROGERS AT THE RACHOFSKY HOUSE

John and Jennifer Eagle

John Roberts, Stephanie Roberts

Lele Sadoughi, Armand Sadoughi, Elisa Summers, Stephen Summers

Brittney Webb, Mark Solomon

Brian Bolke, Ceron, Faisal Halum, Todd Fiscus

Jessica and Dirk Nowitzski

Hassan Pierre, Nancy Rogers, Adam Lippes

Paul Arnold, Wes Gordon

Gayle Stoffel, Gene Jones, Jerry Jones, Haley Anderson

DECEMBER 2021 / JANUARY 2022

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THERE TWO x TWO FOR AIDS AND ART FIRST LOOK AT HIGHLAND PARK VILLAGE PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRADLEY LINTON

Annika Cail, Arisha Smith, Abigail Perpall

Piper and Ryan Beal

Elisa and Stephen Summers

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Preston Evans, Audrey Defforey, Stephanie Seay

Hilary Fagadau McCluskey, Hannah Fagadau

Highland Park Village Theater

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Cindy Rachofsky, Howard Rachofsky, Nancy Rogers

Lisa and John Runyon

Brian Bolke, Todd Fiscus

Mike and Dana Arnold

Robyn Wedgeworth, Meghan Looney

PATRON 10TH ANNIVERSARY EXHIBITION AT PARK HOUSE PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRUNO

Brandon Kennedy, Francisco Moreno

Liliana Bloch, Alicia Eggert

Geoff Green, Erin Cluley

Jeremy Strick, Marlene Sughrue

Johnny Floyd, Annette Lawrence

Grace Cook, Darryl Ratcliff, Michelle Wong

Kelly Cornell

Terri Provencal, Deborah Scott

James Cope, Hannah Fagadau

DECEMBER 2021 / JANUARY 2022

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FURTHERMORE

Dr. Mark Roglán. Courtesy of the Meadows Museum.

Remembering Mark Roglán As the Meadows Museum mourns the loss of its director, it looks ahead to the legacy he built.

BY NANCY COHEN ISRAEL

“M

ark’s superpower was bringing people together,” says Dr. Amanda Dotseth, Meadows Museum curator and interim director. Over the past few months, the Meadows Museum family has been united in their grief over Dr. Mark Roglán’s passing. Our community lost a beloved leader, respected scholar, and brilliant visionary.

Roglán arrived from his native Madrid in 2001 to be the museum’s curator. Within five years, he became its director. In this capacity, he catapulted the institution onto a global stage.

According to Linda Custard, chair of the Meadows Museum Advisory Council, “He turned a sleepy institution into one with an international presence.” Many recall him as a dynamo who made things happen. “Mark was always sitting on ‘go.’ He never put the brakes on any idea,” says Janet Kafka, Honorary Consul of Spain and advisory council member.

Maintaining that energy even as he battled cancer, Roglán oversaw the museum’s most recent acquisitions, including the spectacular Portrait of a Lady (1621) painted by Bartolomé González y Serrano. Members of the advisory council purchased it collectively in honor of Roglán’s 20th anniversary with the institution. It was an easy decision for the group. As Kafka states, “Mark’s standards were always excellent. We followed his lead on anything he needed for the museum. He always thought of the institution first.”

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Dr. Mark Roglan (left), and Janet Kafka (right) at Linda P. Custard's (center) decoration ceremony sanctioned by King Felipe VI of Spain. Photograph by Tamytha Cameron.

Roglán’s final legacy is the establishment of the Custard Institute for Spanish Art and Culture at the Meadows Museum.

“Mark and I had been talking about this for five years,” Custard says, adding “The institute is his vision. He did everything in his power to make this happen.” The generosity of Linda, along with her husband, William A. Custard, and the Meadows Foundation, brought Roglán’s dream to fruition. Custard also credits SMU president Gerald Turner for his supportive role as plans for the institute coalesced.

In many ways, the Custard Institute embodies Roglán’s strengths of diplomacy and connection. “He had that skill set that combined a level of expertise with a tremendous skill of coalition building,” Custard explains. It was also a logical next step as a follow-up to the fellowship program he established. “The goal of the fellowship program is to support the next generation of scholars,” says Dotseth, an alumna of this initiative. She adds, “The Custard Institute represents an opportunity to bring in new voices, new subjects, and new ideas, which will tangentially inform the collection. The institute is very much the research arm of the museum. For Mark, it was the thing that would put the Meadows on the top.”

Roglán was present at the announcement of the Custard Institute and was instrumental in the selection of P. Gregory Warden as the inaugural Mark A. Roglán Director of the Custard Institute. The decision to name the director’s position for Roglán, according to Custard, came at the suggestion of Peter M. Miller, president and CEO of the Meadows Foundation.

Warden spent over 30 years at SMU before moving to Switzerland to serve as president of Franklin University. Prior to his move, he worked closely with Roglán, of whom says, “Working with Mark was very much like latching onto a whirlwind, and he was just as energetic even while dealing with crushing health issues. It [the institute] is his legacy, and I think he thought of it that way.”

Of the vision, Warden says, “Obviously, this kind of ambition will take time to realize, but the groundwork has been laid, thanks to Mark’s outstanding accomplishments at the Meadows Museum.

An institute that is connected to a first-class museum at an excellent university such as SMU has enormous potential.” P

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THE PERFORMING ARTS Make a Comeback At Home With Wanda Gierhart Fearing & Dean Fearing

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Plus, Abraham Alexander