SPRING ART SEASON IS HERE

Hope springs eternal in these 8 Dallas-Fort Worth art openings in March

Hulktaur is one of the pieces on exhibit at Joshua Goode's solo show, "The Ruins of Burg Worth," at Fort Works Art.

Joshua Goode, Hulktaur, 2018

Spring may not officially be here yet, but we can tell it's on the way as art springs up all over.

In Fort Worth, the Fort Worth Art Dealer's Association (FWADA) welcomes the season with their annual Spring Gallery Night on March 25. FWADA's website features a list of member organizations you can check out for their planned events for the evening.

In Dallas, March could be called a warm-up month for Dallas Arts Month in April. Till then, here are eight must-see exhibitions to visit in March, in order of opening date.

"Artists of Texas Spring Fling"
Keller Town Hall, March 6-April 20
The work of 11 Texas artists will be on display in the Town Hall in Keller this month. Works span from watercolor to modern abstract, covering subject matter from animals to the outdoors and more. An artist reception will be held at 7 pm on March 16 at 1100 Bear Creek Parkway.

Rapheal Crump "B.O.R.N." Solo Exhibition
Atelier Gallery, March 11
It's only right that luxury apartments in the Dallas Arts District have their own galleries, right? At Atelier on Pearl Street, this month's exhibition is from Raphael Crump, who moved to Dallas in 2014. He classifies his work as urban contemporary art, and indeed, scenes from Dallas play a role in his "Beautiful Outside Right Now" show. Join the artist for a gallery walkthrough and talk at 11 am on Saturday, March 11 at Atelier.

"Modern Analog: Historical Processes in the Digital World"
Dallas Center for Photography, March 11-25
The photographs in this juried exhibition use "a wide array of analog and alternative processes, including pure analog from start to finish, film-captured to digital-print, Polaroids, alt processes, cyanotypes, digital negatives and photograms, and many more techniques that incorporate the unique traits and discipline of analog photography." Juror Lisa Elmaleh and several exhibiting photographers will be present at the opening reception on Saturday, March 11 at 6 pm.

"Parables of Mayhem"
Kirk Hopper Fine Art, March 11-April 15
Artist Shaun Roberts, an associate professor of art at Stephen F. Austin State University, creates self portraits and narrative works influenced by allegory, and the universal human condition. This exhibit features twenty of his paintings from the last six years and illustrate pandemonium, desperation, and the enduring human spirit's unvanquished capacity for redemption. The artist's reception will be held from 5 to 7 pm on Saturday, March 11.

"Emancipation: The Unfinished Project of Liberation"
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, March 12-July 9
This exhibition, which includes the work of seven contemporary Black artists, explores the legacy of the Civil War. With installations including sculpture, photography, and paper and textile fabrications, each work is an artist's response to a sculpture in the Carter's collection, The Freedman, by John Quincy Adams Ward.

"Talk of the Town: A Dallas Museum of Art Pop-Up Exhibition"
NorthPark Center, March 19-April 29
Featuring artworks from the Dallas Art Fair, and opening during Women's History Month, this group exhibit celebrates women using non-traditional portraiture. All of the works on display were acquired by the DMA in the last six years through the Dallas Art Fair Foundation Acquisition Program. Visit the free exhibit at NorthPark Center’s Level Two, between Nordstrom and Macy’s.

Joshua Goode: "The Ruins of Burg Worth"
Fort Works Art, March 25-April 29
In his first solo show at Fort Works Art, North Texas artist and curator Joshua Goode brings together created artifacts and remnants of the "ancient" past with performance art in an interactive installation. In the exhibit, Fort Worth history is reimagined and set in a fortress at Eagle Mountain.

Goode intertwines his research of local culture and background in archaeology into his creations of sarcophagi and other items reminiscent of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. With works featuring extinct animals, objects and artifacts, he aims to expose “the malleability of our past, present, and future” and the ease at which history can be distorted. An opening reception will be held on Gallery Night, March 25, from 12-9 pm.

"We are all Homeless"
Art on Main, March 26-April 9
For more than 30 years, SMU Meadows School for the Arts professor Willie Baronet has been purchasing signs from people experiencing homelessness. The installations Baronet creates from them help viewers "explore the humanity of the signs, and questions regarding the nature of home, compassion, and what it means to truly see each other." Art on Main will host an artist reception from 3-5 pm Sunday, March 26 with an accompany event from 2-4 pm. to help put together Blessing Bags to be distributed to people in Dallas experiencing homelessness.

Amon Carter Museum Art on Main Dallas Museum of Art Fort Works Art Spring Gallery Night galleries openings

A good listen

Dallas Symphony and Fabio Luisi release landmark Wagner 'Ring Cycle' set

Fabio Luisi conducting the Dallas Symphony Orchestra

Photo courtesy of Dallas Symphony Orchestra

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Fabio Luisi wanted his Ring Cycle to be heard and not seen.

Wagner’s four-opera epic Der Ring des Nibelungen, approaching the 150th anniversary of its premiere in 1876, has been reinterpreted and deconstructed by directors finding various meanings in the conflicts among gods, humans, giants and dwarfs.

While most new recordings are on video, Luisi led his Dallas Symphony Orchestra in concert performances that were released on 13 compact discs by Delos on May 22 and are available on streaming services.

“Wagner conceived this as a total immersion in visual and acoustic, but I could focus really only on the music, and this was the point actually — not to be distracted by staging and not to have to cope with maybe strange ideas of staging,” Luisi said. “I think the music tells everything.”

Luisi became DSO music director in 2020 and broached the idea while dining two years later with (the now late) Morton H. Meyerson, a longtime board member.

“Fabio came back from lunch sort of giddy but sort of sheepishly saying: `Do you think that this would ever be possible?” recalled Kim Noltemy, the Dallas CEO at the time. “So, I said, well, let’s give it a try. So, we called around to see if there were people who wanted to support it and did a budget.”

After securing a waiver from the orchestra allowing for the needed rehearsals and performance length, recordings were made during four concerts from May 1-5 and six more from Oct. 5-20. Each opera was performed two or three times.

Americans in cast fill big roles
American singers featured prominently, with Mark Delavan as Wotan, Lise Lindstrom as Brünnhilde and Sara Jakubiak as Sieglinde, part of a cast that included Christopher Ventris (Siegmund), Daniel Johansson (Siegfried), Deniz Uzun (Fricka), Tómas Tómasson (Alberich), Michael Laurenz (Mime) and Stephen Milling (Hagen).

Delavan sang Wotan at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 2013 after Luisi took over from an ailing James Levine in Robert Lepage’s much-maligned production staged on a 45-ton set of 24 rotating planks.

“We’re accessible and they know that we’re hungry and we have a chip on our shoulders,” Delavan said. “What conductors like about American singers is their technique is sound. Even a European conductor would say: Well, I’m going to give up some of the communication skills, only one degree of separation with the language, but I’m going to get a solid technique, and I’m going to get pretty good acting chops.”

Lindstrom has been in Atlanta to sing in its production of “Götterdämmerung,” the concluding night of the tetralogy, leading to what is being billed as the first complete Ring Cycles in the America South in 2029.

“The wonderful thing about it is the intimacy between the orchestra and us, because we’re not separated by a chunk of stage or a chunk a scenery or a chunk of concept,” she said of the Dallas performances. “And for people like me, who have had the opportunity to perform the role before, I have all those iterations to rely on for my portrayal that I can sort of filter myself through.”

A younger Luisi listened to famous renditions
Luisi, 67, first heard a Ring recording in Georg Solti’s famous studio set with the Vienna Philharmonic from 1958-65. He also admires Karl Böhm’s live recording from the 1967 Bayreuth Festival and Marek Janowski’s 1980-83 studio version with the Staatskapelle Dresden.

He first conducted Ring when he was music director of Dresden’s Semperoper from 2007-10. Luisi’s Dallas performances include more legato and softer sound than his rendition a decade earlier at the Met. He tries to keep an arc from the first notes of “Das Rheingold” to the final strains of “Götterdämmerung.”

“I have a deeper understanding about the meaning of this piece,” he said. “I consider the ring to be a big Bruckner symphony. So we have the introduction, then we have the first movement, this is “Walküre,” which happens to be a slow movement, and then we have the scherzo, which is “Siegfried,” of course, and then the long, long, last movement. There is a unity.”

dso luisi ring wagner recording concerts music symphony

SPRING ART SEASON IS HERE

Hope springs eternal in these 8 Dallas-Fort Worth art openings in March

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A good listen

Dallas Symphony and Fabio Luisi release landmark Wagner 'Ring Cycle' set