ART INFLUENCERS

As the entire art community is thrust into finding new channels for creativity, we celebrate several passionate leaders committed to the future.

BY LEE CULLUM AND NANCY COHEN ISRAEL

“O n or about December 1910, human character changed.” So wrote Virginia Woolf. Similarly, on or about March 11, 2020, the world changed. Echoing the Black Death, which killed one third of Europeans in the mid-1300s, Covid-19, a coronavirus originating in China, stormed the US by way of Europe, shutting down the most extraverted nation on earth—equal only to Italy in its love of life out in the open, shunning solitude, as close to the madding crowd as humanly possible. The first plague was caused by rats, some say, and the second by bats. The first, in the 14th century, profoundly affected art and literature, turning them to a dark embrace of the “dance of death.” The second, here in our own time, surely will have a heavy impact as well. Not yet revealed, it no doubt will be mediated by “influencers”—too trivial a term perhaps, for the arbiters of art on whom we must rely to mend the sudden discontinuity of culture in Dallas. Here are some of them. There are many more.

RICK BRETTELL

Rick Brettell is everywhere. A creator of community and communal institutions, his latest innovation is to renovate the Art Deco building that housed the original Dallas Museum of Fine Arts and make of it a new Museum of Texas Art, called MoTA. With typical dispatch he has formed a board, engaged an excellent consulting architect—Gary Cunningham— submitted a proposal to Fair Park First and Spectra, from which he hopes to lease the property, and even launched a seminar of graduate students at the University of Texas at Dallas to help inform and shape the project. Ranging from Hispanic to African-American to Chinese to Iranian, the students are the “New Dallas,” he says; the city can no longer think of itself as an ethnic triad.

If the New Dallas is multifaceted, the new museum will aim to surprise as much as enchant. “Some thought it would be all bluebonnets,” Rick observed. But that is belied by 250 years of Texas art that is stunning in its scope and sophistication. Nonetheless, he promises, “We’ll do a bluebonnet show that will blow your mind. Every blue is different. It will be like a room of Monets. It’s about color and atmosphere.”

Rick Brettell is about creative energy, at the Dallas Museum of Art which he once ran, at the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History at UT Dallas, which he founded, and at the Dallas Morning News where he is a contributing arts writer, having been the art critic there. And that’s only a fraction of his oeuvre. An influencer? More than that, Rick Brettell is an indispensable advocate for civilized living in this and many parts of the world.

Craig Hall not only adorns his buildings with art—he buys “at least one piece every week.” That’s because his curators, Patricia Meadows in Dallas and Virginia Shore in Washington DC, keep sending him work that he and his wife, Kathryn, cannot resist. Sometimes they have a place in mind at HALL Arts Center, with soon-to-be-opened residences, a hotel, and an office tower to choose among. Or maybe they can find a spot at HALL Park in Frisco. One work was so oversized they had to build a special wall for it at their winery in St. Helena, California. A sculpture in yellow metal by John Henry had no home, so Craig put it in a parking lot behind the Dallas Arts District, which then was still a hole in the ground.

The point is that Craig Hall is a true believer in art for the Dallas Arts District. He is not solely a real estate player. He plays for keeps, helping update the long out-of-date Sasaki Plan for an area that he hopes will expand its boundaries and take in new territory, making sure that everything, including the hotel restaurant Ellie’s, is designed to create community. An added bonus for him would be if people relaxing along Flora Street would take time to read his latest book, Boom: Bridging the Opportunity Gap to Reignite Startups. The artful life, for him, must always be linked to real people doing real things.

CRAIG HALL

ROBERTO ZAMBRANO

Getting Roberto Zambrano was a big coup for the Dallas Symphony Orchestra in its continuing campaign to open lives to new avenues of inspiration. A veteran of El Sistema in Venezuela and the US, he has signed on to start Young Musicians, an after-school program for students in southern Dallas, ages seven to ten. Working always as a group, they study music theory and learn to play instruments provided for free by the DSO. On Saturdays, the children from all five schools practice together as an orchestra.

The point, insists Roberto, “is social change.” He and his cadre of teaching artists— one of them, Ashley Alarcon from Mexico City, helps translate our conversation—have an important effect, he notes, on parents, neighbors, the schools themselves. He has seen it happen in Venezuela, where El Sistema is one of the few stabilizing elements left in a land of chaos. He also knows what it can do in Boston, where he worked as an adviser. The key is the teacher, says Ashley. “The barrier,” she observes, “is in the teacher, not the child. Limitations are put on educators,” so, for example, they don’t press students to practice their scales playing two octaves instead of one. That will not happen with Roberto Zambrano’s Young Musicians.

My last lunch before the deluge was at the Nasher, with Clyde Valentín. Who wouldn’t love a guy with a name like that? He arrived early and had already eaten half his sandwich by the time I got there, the better to devote himself entirely to our conversation. And definitely he had a lot to say—mainly about Ignite Arts Dallas, the program at the Meadows he decamped from New York to launch. First, like Roberto Zambrano, Clyde had to create this catalyst, designed to “occupy an important middle” for artists, institutions, funders, interested bystanders— anybody who might be drawn into making things that never were to happen for the first time.

That means extravaganzas like Public Works, which draws 200 people or so to the Wyly to mount a Shakespearean production such as Twelfth Night, scheduled, let us hope, for this summer. It also put Ignite Arts Dallas into the funding business for Playwrights in the Newsroom, written by two Meadows alums, Brigham Mosley and Janielle Kastner, and staged in the Wyly’s Studio Theater until an early end imposed by corona. Once the publisher of Stress Magazine, for the hip hop contingent, Clyde considers himself “a creative entrepreneur, a curator, an executive…an urbanist on the edge of culture.” That makes him perfect for the present danger: that the arts will vanish from our lives, except for the web and remembered glories. All these influential zealots—nothing less is equal to the hour—will fight that possibility and, surely, for the sake of all of us, prevail.

CLYDE VALENTÍN

TAMARA JOHNSON /

TREY BURNS

Nestled in a wooded acre between Trinity Groves and North Oak Cliff, Sweet Pass Sculpture Park is the brainchild of artists Tamara Johnson and Trey Burns. The New York transplants co-founded this nonprofit in 2018 as an outdoor artist-run space that hosts a robust rotating exhibition calendar. In Sweet Pass’ short existence, Johnson and Burns have worked with over 100 local, national, and international emerging and mid-career artists to present thought-provoking interactive art in a free, public environment. As part of their determination to engage with the community, they have worked cooperatively with a diverse range of stakeholders, from the Dallas Boys & Girls Club and the West Dallas Chamber of Commerce to the Nasher Sculpture Center, the Dallas Museum of Art, 500X Gallery, and NorthPark Center. Johnson and Burns are also associate curators for this fall’s AURORA 2020.

In the past year, Sweet Pass received a micro-grant from the Nasher. This funding, along with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, awarded in conjunction with the New York-based Wassaic Projects, will help ensure that Sweet Pass continues to thrive. During the recent quarantine, Burns devoted considerable time to tending his garden. Agricultural metaphors also guide his thinking about his practice. “I have been working with a group of artists on a video exchange project—we’re passing around footage and editing/augmenting it; creating meaning collectively. It came about very organically as a way to make something together, and it has been a real joy to watch it grow,” he says. Johnson also remains optimistic, saying, “We are excited to create a sustainable model for this outdoor art space in West Dallas to support how we experience art and culture [in a way] that continues to be available and inclusive to anyone who wants to visit.”

SARA CARDONA / DAVID LOZANO

Latinos account for 42 percent of the local population, and Sara Cardona and David Lozano, of Teatro Dallas and Cara Mía Theatre, respectively, tell the stories of this diverse community. Sara’s parents, Cora Cardona and Jeff Hurst, founded Teatro Dallas in 1985, presenting groundbreaking plays featuring ethnically diverse casts at a time when that was a novelty.

As executive director, Sara is an able guardian. In February, she received a grant from Ignite/Arts and CultureBank given to artists who are changing the cultural landscape. Cardona sees the seismic societal shifts as a result of the coronavirus pandemic as an opportunity for new beginnings. She says, “I think this virus has revealed the fractures in our social armature, but it is also an opportunity to repair them. I am hopeful that we can embrace a revolutionary spirit and overturn the systems that fail us as a human collective.” As executive artistic director of Cara Mía, founded in 1996, Lozano continues the mission of presenting transformative Latinx theatre while also providing youth arts experiences, including bringing bilingual plays to roughly 17,000 children per year. The theatre’s recent growth has been exponential. “When the pandemic hit,” Lozano shares, “I was exhausted. Little by little, I began adding yoga, meditation, and more reading to my schedule. I still dream a lot about making theatre again but I’m exploring how it can evolve in the next 12 to 18 months.”

When the city’s Office of Arts and Culture updated its Cultural Plan in 2018, it called for equity and diversity in the cultural community. As part of this initiative, these two organizations were invited to become resident companies at the Latino Cultural Center. In addition to the main performance hall, a new, black box theater is currently under construction and slated to open in 2021. The move into their new home allows Cardona and Lozano to continue to push boundaries as they make Dallas a national destination for Latino theater. They also see the possibility that lies before them. “This is a time for us to cultivate unifying visions for our communities to move forward. I believe that we have to tap into our innate human strength and access our unbreakable spirits to sustain our visions,” Lozano states. As audiences currently have to remain physically distanced, Cardona sees theatre as a vehicle for reconnection. “We need those communal rituals that bring us physically together and allow us to be in a sacred, creative, narrative space from time to time,” Cardona concludes.

Above: A selfie of Sara Cardona, the executive director of Teatro Dallas and the daughter of the Latino theater’s founders. Courtesy of Sara Cardona. Right: David Lozano is the executive artistic director of Cara Mía. Photograph by Fabián Aguirre.

JIN-YA HUANG

When Jin-Ya Huang and her family arrived in the United States from Taiwan, they quickly grasped the cultural disruption of leaving one’s homeland. Huang’s mother, Margaret, eventually became a successful chef, restauranteur, and community activist, offering work and mentorship to other new arrivals. Huang founded Break Bread, Break Borders as a way to honor her mother’s legacy after she passed away. In this innovative social practice, Huang hires refugee women, predominantly from Syria and Iraq, to cook their traditional foods for catered events, where they also tell their stories. This simple idea of sharing food as a vehicle to share culture is successful on multiple levels. Attendees to these dinners benefit from a delicious meal while also being able to put faces to the refugee crisis. For the women in the program, it provides a livelihood in the form of a paycheck and, for those who complete the training program, a food manager certification. Many of these women have ultimately established their own catering companies, echoing Margaret’s example. In February, Huang received a grant from Ignite/Arts Dallas, in partnership with San Francisco–based CultureBank and Dallas’ own TACA, to continue the important work of her women-led, refugee-run organization, whose apt tagline is “Catering for a Cause.” Huang sees the current situation as a time to forge new paths. She says, “There’s a saying, ‘Don’t waste a crisis.’ For Break Bread, Break Borders, these trying times are exactly the kind of moments we look at to see how we can pivot and build on our resilience. These women’s stories must be told—and we will find new ways to share the storytelling to help build a more compassionate future.”

Artist, educator, curator, activist, and arts administrator—for over 40 years, Vicki Meek has made an outsized contribution to the dialogue of the African American diaspora through these varied roles. Through text-driven installations, her work tackles racism, explores Black history, and champions the women of the Civil Rights movement. As a contributor to a long list of commissioned major public art projects, she has made a lasting imprint on the city. Among these are the Dallas Convention Center Public Art Project, Nasher XChange, and Dallas Area Rapid Transit, for which she was awarded multiple commissions. To help realize several of these projects, Meek often works collaboratively, reaching back into the community to incorporate their stories into her work. When conceiving DART’s Hatcher Street Station, for example, Meek worked with young area art students to create a visual history of their neighborhood. Of the coronavirus pandemic, she says, “I think the most inspiring thing for me is to see how artists in myriad disciplines are finding new ways to make work and to get that work out to the public. It pushes me to also look for avenues of expression that may be different from my usual ones, and also to seek new audiences for the work.”

To that end, she has recently turned to video as a medium to explore some of her recurring themes. Earlier this year, Meek’s work was honored with a retrospective at the Houston Museum of African American Culture. In addition to her own practice, Meek serves as a Commissioner of the Arts and Culture Advisory Commission for the City of Dallas. She currently divides her time between Dallas and Costa Rica, where she is on the administrative board of USEKRA: Center for Creative Investigation.

VICKI MEEK