The Dallas Art Fair in collaboration with Arts+Culture Texas magazine announces Student Sunday on April 9th, a day of free admission for students.
The Dallas Art Fair will be held Friday, April 7th through Sunday, April 9th. The Dallas Art Fair’s Kelly Cornell talks with participating SMU professor Noah Simblist, Chair and Associate Professor of Art at the Meadows School of the Arts, about the Student Sunday initiative and scheduled panel discussion.
Kelly Cornell: Over the past few years, we have developed the Student Sunday program, with this year being the second iteration. Noah, why do you this this day of free admission will be important for your students?
NOAH SIMBLIST: This is a great opportunity for art students to see a wide range of contemporary art. Many students are on financial aid and the cost of admission is prohibitive so this allows them to have access to something that they otherwise might not have access too. The DAF has such a tremendous range of work from around the world and this helps students to understand what the current state of international art practice looks like.
Student Sunday has specific programming which you have helped form. Why is the panel topic, From Artist to Gallerist to Artist-Gallerist: The Use and Misuse of the MFA in Artist Organized Spaces, important for your students and their peers to discuss?
This panel is meant to coincide with an exhibition with work by students in a number of MFA programs in the DFW area during the fair. This conversation has been conceived of as a supplement to that exhibition, linking the notion of the MFA with the professional platform of the fair. These programs include SMU, TCU, UTD, UTA, UNT, and Texas A&M. I personally am very interested in artist run spaces as an alternative to the usual artist/gallerist relationship. Some questions that we will address include: How is an artist run gallery different than other kinds of commercial galleries? What are the advantages or disadvantages for artists to self organize around for-profit vs non-profit models? How does the MFA prepare (or not prepare) artists to work with galleries or to run galleries? How should the MFA best prepare artists to participate in the art world? What are the relative merits of different platforms for programming such as gallery exhibitions, publications, art fairs, and other venues? The panelists, John Riepenhoff, Ryan Wallace, and Alison Starr, are all working artists who have also been engaged in exhibition making beyond their own practice. I hope that this discussion can open up the options that artists have after they graduate.
How do you see Student Sunday contributing to the larger Dallas/international art + culture scene? And more specifically, how does it help mold students’ participation in this arena?
The more that students understand the ecology of the art world and the relative place of art fairs and galleries within it, the more that they are empowered to map out their own professional path, either in Dallas or elsewhere.
