Honoring Texans

Dallas designer Lela Rose, actor Luke Wilson to receive Texas Medal of Arts Awards

Lunch with Lela PetSet Lela Rose and Bobbin

Lela Rose (with dog Bobbin) at a Dallas event in 2018.

Photo by Priscilla Dickson

Two Dallas-born stars of fashion and entertainment will receive the state's highest honor for achievement in the arts, a Texas Medal of Arts Award, in 2023. Fashion designer Lela Rose and actor Luke Wilson are two of 11 medal recipients announced at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth on Wednesday, September 14.

Two other North Texans also are being honored: Yellowstone and 1883 creator Taylor Sheridan (a Weatherford resident and honorary Fort Worthian) and country superstar Miranda Lambert (a Lindale native who was crowned an honorary Fort Worthian when she was inducted in the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame last year).

The complete list of 2023 Texas Medal of Arts Award recipients is:

Film/Actor: Luke Wilson, Dallas
Design: Lela Rose, Dallas
Film/Producer: Taylor Sheridan, Weatherford
Music/Songwriter: Miranda Lambert, Lindale
Arts/Health: Center for Performing Arts Medicine, Houston
Lifetime Achievement/Musical Theatre: Carole Cook, Abilene
Music: Christopher Cross, San Antonio
Architecture: Miró Rivera Architects, Austin
Visual Arts: Deborah Roberts, Austin
Literary Arts: Benjamin Alire Saenz, El Paso
Dance: Septime Webre, Brownsville

The medals will be awarded at the 11th biennial Texas Medal of Arts Awards on February 21-22, 2023, in Austin. One of the Lone Star State's premier arts events, the glittering awards ceremony, presented by the nonprofit Texas Cultural Trust, is making its post-pandemic return in 2023.

Celebrating the creative contributions of Texans across multiple disciplines, the 2023 event will reflect and look ahead to the role the arts play in our lives and communities, according to a release. Texas Culture Trust 2019 TMAA honoree Brandon Maxwell will chair the event.

A statewide group of experts selected the 2023 TMAA honorees across a wide variety of creative disciplines.

“The state of Texas is fortunate to have been the birthplace of a vast number of incredibly creative and talented artists in every medium,” says TXCT board of directors executive committee member Judy Robison in the release.

Since 2001, the TMAA has celebrated 118 Texas leaders and luminaries for their creative talents, excellence, and generosity.

Dallas native Luke Wilson has established himself as a versatile actor, with performances in such broad comedies, thoughtful dramas, and provocative independent features as The Royal Tenenbaums, Old School, Legally Blonde, and Fort Worth-set 12 Mighty Orphans. In television, he can be seen starring in Stargirl on The CW.

Dallas' Lela Rose is known for her eponymous brand of sophisticated, elegant designs worn by the world's most fashionable. In 2018, Rose launched Pearl by Lela Rose, a woman-led, fashion-forward ready-to-wear line specializing in fabulous clothes that are fun to shop for.

For more information on the Texas Medal of Arts Awards, visit the website.

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Hannah J. Frias contributed to this story.

Lela Rose (with dog Bobbin) at a Dallas event in 2018.

Photo by Priscilla Dickson

Lela Rose (with dog Bobbin) at a Dallas event in 2018.

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GIFTED AND TALENTED

SMU historian Ariel Ron wins prestigious $800k MacArthur genius grant

Photo courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

SMU historian Ariel Ron will receive $800,000 — no strings attached.

Three Texans have been named 2026 MacArthur Fellows, one of the most prestigious honors in the U.S. for artists, scientists, and scholars. Among them is Dallas historian and author Ariel Ron, who directs the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University.

San Antonio's Vincent Valdez and San Marcos-based anthropologist Kate Spradley were also on the 2026 list of 20 recipients of the “genius grants” given by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Each fellow will receive $800,000 over five years, with no strings attached.

Individuals do not apply for the honor. The grants are awarded via a confidential, multi-step process managed by the foundation, and many recipients express surprise that they were considered for the fellowship.

“While individuals will have a track record of significant achievement, the fellowship is not a lifetime achievement award — it is an investment in a person's originality, insight, and potential,” wrote MacArthur on its website. “The Fellows Program is proactively working to foster and enable innovative, imaginative, and ground-breaking ideas, thinking, and strategies.”

Ron's research focuses on how Northern agriculture shaped economic growth and federal power in 19th-century America. Grassroots Leviathan: Agricultural Reform and the Rural North in the Slaveholding Republic, his 2020 book, challenges the notion of an industrial North versus an agrarian South.

"My approach is to identify and look carefully at things that everyone knows to be important but are somehow too obvious-seeming to look at closely," Ron says in a video on the MacArthur Foundation's website. "If you scratch the surface a little bit, you discover that there are a lot of interesting things that might change the way we think about bigger questions."

Valdez, who splits his time between San Antonio and Houston, is known for large, hyperrealistic drawings and paintings of Mexican American life. More recently, he has turned his focus to broader sociopolitical issues in works like The Strangest Fruit, a series of paintings confronting the lynching of Latinos.

At Texas State University in San Marcos, forensic anthropologist Spradley founded Operation Identification in 2013 — a program that identifies and repatriates the remains of migrants who died along the Texas-Mexico border. She is also a cofounder of the Forensic Border Coalition, which pushes for policy changes at the local and national levels. Spradley is the school’s first MacArthur Fellow.

A full list of the 2026 MacArthur Fellows can be found online.

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