Texas Art Scene

Contemporary Austin museum lands game-changing grant from Dallas foundation

Austin Photo Set: News_shelley seale_laguna gloria_march 2012_amoa

Laguna Gloria in Austin was awarded a $9 million grant by the Dallas-based Marcus Foundation to enhance its art collection.

Courtesy photo

The Edward and Betty Marcus Foundation has awarded a $9 million grant to Laguna Gloria, the 12-acre estate that serves as the outdoor venue for The Contemporary Austin. The money will help transform Laguna Gloria into an "unparalleled outdoor-indoor art destination."

Approximately $5 million will fund the commissioning and acquisition of sculpture and site-specific permanent installations by leading artists. To honor the foundation's generosity, this Laguna Gloria feature will be named the Betty and Edward Marcus Sculpture Park.

The remainder of the grant will be dedicated to an endowment for maintenance and conservation of the works, and it will also fund a series of commissions, exhibitions and public engagements for The Contemporary's program at the new sculpture park.

"Betty and Edward Marcus will always be remembered as the trailblazers for contemporary art in Dallas," said The Contemporary Austin executive director Louis Grachos in a statement. "We are tremendously grateful to the Edward and Betty Marcus Foundation for recognizing the extraordinary potential of our new mission at The Contemporary Austin and for moving us ahead by a giant step."

Visitors eager to get a glimpse of Laguna Gloria's future can tour the grounds beginning September 21, when The Contemporary Austin presents new works by Liam Gillick and Marianne Vitale, whose recent exhibit at the Zach Feuer Gallery in New York was heralded by the New York Times "as something approaching a near-perfect 10."

In Austin, Vitale will take over the expansive outdoor spaces of Laguna Gloria with a series of "common crossings" composed of the switches that allow trains to change directions. The exhibit runs through January 5, 2014.

Founded by Betty Marcus, the Marcus Foundation has provided more than 125 grants to support the visual arts throughout Texas. In early 2013, the trustees initiated a selective competition for its $9 million corpus to be granted to "the Texas institution that proposes the most innovative, visionary visual arts initiative for the future."

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Mural News

Netflix House will debut in Dallas with murals from acclaimed artist

Netflix House

Jeremy Biggers at Netflix House

A long-awaited immersive venue is opening in Dallas, and it will debut with local art on its walls: Netflix House, a year-round exhibit revolving around Netflix shows and movies, will open at Galleria Dallas on December 11, with two murals from award-winning Dallas multi-medium artist Jeremy Biggers.

Netflix House is an immersive dive complete with merchandise store, film house, arcade, and restaurant-bar. When it opens, Dallas will be the second location in the U.S., following Philadelphia, where it debuted in November 2025, also with murals from a local artist.

A graduate of Booker T. Washington High School for Performing and Visual Arts, Biggers is a renowned artist whose murals can be found spashed on walls across Dallas. Many, such as the Selena portrait on the wall outside Top Ten Records at 306 S. Bishop Ave., have become local landmarks.

He's a logical choice, having worked with a number of corporations including Nike, Adidas, the Dallas Mavericks, and IBM, for whom he created the "THINK" mural in their Dallas corporate office. His works have also been exhibited nationally, including a 2024 solo exhibition "be safe out there bro" at Band of Vices, a gallery in Los Angeles.

"Being chosen to be the artist to paint this mural, it would have been a disservice to myself, as well as the art scene in the city, not to try to infuse myself into it," he says.

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Biggers did two murals featuring his interpretation of Netflix figures including the Squid Game Young-hee doll, characters from KPop Demon Hunters and megahit series Stranger Things, plus Pandy and DJ Catnip, the best friends in the interactive series Gabby’s Dollhouse.

Both murals are intensely colored works that incorporate Biggers' signature motif: a grid of polka dots spread across the image.

One is on the exterior of Netflix House, at the parking entrance, a colorful collage of characters, measuring 38 feet x 50 feet — the tallest mural Biggers has tackled. He painted it with aerosol; it took him two months to complete.
The other is on the interior, on the mall side entrance of Netflix House, measuring 57 feet x 12 feet — a study in moody blacks and blues, with accents of neon-red that give it a 3D effect.

“I'm trying to tell the story of Netflix, and the story of where Netflix has been historically, where Netflix is headed in the future, and then also infusing my own narrative and my own language visually into that story,” he says.

“They could have opened this anywhere, so for Dallas to be one of the very first locations — that’s a testament to us as a market, as consumers of arts and consumers in general," he says.

Jeremy Biggers at Netflix HouseNetflix House

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