Let's Fest

Art, music, and family fun await at 2 treasured Richardson festivals

Add two festivals to the list of things blooming in Richardson each spring: Cottonwood Art Festival and Wildflower! Arts & Music Festival.

It’s the 55th year for Cottonwood Art Festival (May 4-5) and the 32nd for Wildflower! Arts & Music Festival (May 17-19). Here’s what you need to know about both:

Cottonwood Art Festival

What to expect: No matter your art personality type, you’ll find something to love amid more than 200 global artists’ juried work, spanning paintings and sculpture to ceramics, jewelry, fiber art, fine glass, woodwork, mixed media, and photography.

Make sure to look for this year's featured artist, ceramicist Gregory Story. The South Texas native now works out of his Chicago studio, Modern Clay, but studied at both Texas Christian University and the University of Texas at Arlington. He's known for his signature smiley sculptures, which were created as a welcome back post-COVID, and has added onto them with baseball caps in orange, blue, black, and red.

There’s also live music across two stages along with an arts-and-crafts area for the kiddos and plenty of food and drink for all on tap.

Where: Cottonwood Park, 1321 W. Belt Line Rd.

When: Saturday, May 4, 10 am-7 pm; Sunday, May 5, 10 am-5 pm.

Tickets: Admission and parking are both free, with shuttles running continuously between the park and the Richardson High School football stadium lot.

History lesson: Celebrating 55 years, the award-winning Cottonwood Art Festival is a twice-yearly juried show that has become a signature art event in the community and beyond. The festival also provides innovative outreach programs for students, with the goal of broadening interest in visual arts and bringing the art world into classrooms.

More details: CottonwoodArtFestival.com

Wildflower! Arts & Music Festival

What to expect: With six stages and 100-plus performers, including Nile Rodgers & CHIC, Randy Rogers Band, KC & The Sunshine Band, The Struts, Sister Sledge, Monica Saldivar, and more, your listening schedule will be packed at this fest.

Beyond the stages, the Prosperity Bank Marketplace is a one-stop-shop for local and regional accessories, art, home decor, apparel, and more.

There’s also The Zoo art guitar auction, songwriter competition, and Patterson & Associates Performance Row that features street performers, acrobats, and magicians. Plus, look for Wildflower! Kids, a family-fun zone with art, games, informative activities, and kid-friendly tunes.

Wildflower! in Richardson is always a can't-miss event.

Photo courtesy of Wildflower! Festival

Wildflower! in Richardson is always a can't-miss event.

Where: Galatyn Park Urban Center, located at Galatyn Parkway and U.S. 75.

When: Friday, May 17, 6 pm-midnight; Saturday, May 18, 11 am-midnight; Sunday, May 19, 11 am-6 pm.

Tickets: Friday and Saturday are $30 online ($45 at the gate), Sunday is $15 online ($25 at the gate), and kids 12 and under are free. Richardson residents can score tickets for only $15.

A three-day pass is $65, and the popular Friends of the Festival VIP package is $400. It includes 2 VIP wristbands for the weekend, access to preferred VIP seating at Methodist Richardson Medical Center Stage, complimentary food and beverages (including beer and wine), shade and relaxed seating in the VIP Hospitality Lounge, and 1 VIP parking pass valid for the entire weekend.

Parking: Complimentary parking will be available within the nearby surrounding area. Festival-goers are encouraged to take advantage of the DART Red Line light rail, which stops at the Galatyn Park Station, located immediately adjacent to the west side of the festival grounds.

History lesson: Wildflower! began as a small community gathering in 1993 and has since become one of the most popular cultural events in North Texas, with tens of thousands of fans showing up for their favorite artists.

More details: WildflowerFestival.com

festivals galleries music concerts families promoted

Movie Review

Jennifer Lawrence plays one crazy mom in thriller Die My Love

Photo by Kimberley French/courtesy of MUBI

Jennifer Lawrence in Die My Love.

Writer/director Lynne Ramsay does not make feel-good movies. Her previous two films —You Were Never Really Here and We Need to Talk About Kevin — were about a traumatized veteran who tracks down missing girls for a living and parents reckoning with a child who might be a sociopath, respectively. Her latest, Die My Love, has a story as dark as its title.

Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson) are a married couple who move into a run-down house that used to belong to Jackson’s uncle, who shot and killed himself on the property. That doesn’t exactly scream “great vibes,” but the somewhat manic duo quickly introduce a child into the equation, an event that forms a schism between two people who previously seemed to be on the same off-kilter wavelength.

While Jackson works to provide for the family, Grace is left to take care of the baby and herself at the somewhat remote house. She doesn’t appear to be a big fan of the arrangement, engaging in all manner of odd behavior, like crawling around the floor, talking to herself, and taking the baby on miles-long walks to visit her mother-in-law, Pam (Sissy Spacek), who’s not doing well herself after recently losing her husband, Harry (Nick Nolte).

Ramsay, who co-wrote the film with Enda Walsh and Alice Birch, foregrounds Grace’s experience above all others, but the film is far from straightforward. The idea of post-partum depression is raised as a reason for Grace’s weird behavior, but as both she and Jackson are introduced as two people who skew to the “ab” side of normal, it’s difficult to say that everything she does is due to feelings that arise after giving birth.

Plus, Grace has plenty to be upset about in general, including living in a death house, being left alone with their child the majority of the time, and Jackson bringing home a yapping dog without even so much as a conversation. But the manifestation of her anger/depression is hard to parse, as Ramsay includes scenes of her carrying around a butcher knife, meeting up with a mysterious figure on a motorcycle, and other strange things that may or may not actually be happening.

There is clearly a lot of metaphorical work being done by seemingly random things like the reappearance of a black horse on multiple occasions, blaring rock music that accompanies several scenes, and the use of the 1x1 aspect ratio by Ramsay. It’s easy to feel the intensity of the film’s central relationship and their conflicts even if you can’t make heads or tails of the allusions that the filmmaker seems to love.

Lawrence is put through the wringer almost as much as she was in Darren Aronofsky’s Mother!, and her performance is one that can be felt strongly. Still, because the narrative is unclear, she often appears to be overwrought in certain scenes. Pattinson never fits well with his uncaring and/or oblivious character. Spacek makes a nice impression in a limited amount of screen time, but why Ramsay chose to use the ultra-talented LaKeith Stanfield in the nothing part of the motorcycle rider is baffling.

Those who love to dig into symbolism and non-linear storytelling will have a field day with the arty Die My Love. But for everyone else, anything Ramsay might have been trying to say about the difficulties of being a mother gets buried under many scenes that don’t make any logical sense and over-the-top acting that’s only fit to match the bizarreness of the film itself.

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Die My Love is now playing in theaters.

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Art, music, and family fun await at 2 treasured Richardson festivals

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Movie Review

Jennifer Lawrence plays one crazy mom in thriller Die My Love