Housing the Drama: An Update on Dallas Theater Spaces
Experimental plays and intimate dramas set in homes typically belong in black box theaters. The nuance and detail of these productions cannot be captured in larger theaters.
Editor’s Picks
Fantastic Spaces: Where Will a Former Architect Take the DMA?
Given the centrality of immigration to the 2016 election and Texas’s status as a red state with an ascendant Latino population, this summer’s announcement that the Dallas Museum of Art had hired Agustín Arteaga, a museum director in Mexico City, and that he would be moving, with his husband, to the Lone Star State to run the Dallas Museum of Art, was bound to turn heads.
Performania: Texas Dance Ambassadors
I spend a lot of time outside of Texas, for work, family, but mostly to keep up with my home artform: Dance. Nothing makes me happier than running into Texas dance artists doing work outside of Texas. So when a friend came up to me during my time at Jacob’s Pillow asking me if I knew that a Houston dancer was performing with the renowned choreographer Jonah Bokaer, my response was a proud, “Why, yes I do!”
Nothing Is What it Seems: Monika Sosnowska at the Austin Contemporary
In Warsaw, Monika Sosnowska lives across the street from a forest that was once a Jewish cemetery. During the Second World War, Germans destroyed it to use headstones as material for construction work. Polish people quickly responded by planting trees. They eventually started a project to restore the cemetery, which continues to this day
On Book: Readings Take Center Stage in Houston
Scene: a bare stage anywhere—in a theater, a rehearsal hall, even on an outdoor platform under a tree.
Musical Evangelists: Houston Symphony’s Embedded Musicians Engage the Community
David Connor lets his double bass rest on the floor. Cradling an iPad and speaker in his arms, he circulates through the classroom as jazz icon Ella Fitzgerald cuts loose onscreen in It Don’t Mean a Thing if It Ain’t Got That Swing.
SHOW UP: Lily Cox-Richard
“I'm trying to shake up my practice,” Lily Cox-Richard says, as we stand in her installation-in-progress at Artpace.
The Becomer: Early Monet at the Kimbell
Monet: The Early Years at the Kimbell Art Museum kicks off with a startling contrast between Claude Monet’s earliest exhibited work—View Near Rouelles, a crisp, placid, highly finished 1858 landscape—and Farmyard in Normandy (1863), which is striking for what exhibition curator George T. M. Shackelford notes is “a surface that, in its final form, appears to be still in progress.”
Lines, Lots of Lines: Degas at the MFAH
Degas: A New Vision will end its only U.S. presentation at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston on Jan. 16, meaning its departure will roughly coincide with the fifth anniversary of director Gary Tinterow’s arrival from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he spent the bulk of an impressive curatorial career.
Space Commander: Frances Bagley Fills Kirk Hopper Fine Art to the Brim
“I’m really interested in space,” says Frances Bagley, as we walk through her east Dallas studio.
Clara’s Big Dream: Houston Ballet’s New Nutcracker
Snow, a Sugar Plum Fairy and a gigantic Christmas Tree are three things we all expect from any production of The Nutcracker.
Wonder & A Whale: Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer Transform American Classics into Opera
This November, Moby-Dick journeys safely back to its home port, as the Dallas Opera once again flies the doomed ship Pequod’s colors.