Editor’s note: For Dallas Arts Month in April, this is one of a series of stories from The Dallas Morning News examining how North Texas artists and arts groups are coping and moving forward one year after the start of the pandemic.
— To see more from our Art and the City 2021 collection, click/tap here.
Back in 2012, Hollywood graced us with an Oscar-winning movie titled Silver Linings Playbook. It’s a phrase heard often in the arts world these days, with companies large and small seeking the best ways possible to recover from the gloomy effects of a pandemic.
There are silver linings, they say, which continue to provide a collective playbook for emerging from a labyrinth of despair.
Amy Lewis Hofland, senior director of the Crow Museum of Asian Art, suffered as much as anyone during the pandemic. Her museum, like every other Dallas company, weathered a fiscal downturn triggered by the coronavirus. She laid off two employees. Her budget dipped by $200,000 a year.
A months-long lockdown kept the Crow shuttered from the start of the national emergency on March 13, 2020, but in late May, the situation morphed from bad to worse.
Nationwide demonstrations over the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police extended to the streets of downtown Dallas, where the Crow Museum underwent an assault of 250 river rocks hurled through the window by protesters. It got worse from there.
“We had three or four of those,” Hofland said — meaning bullet holes. The combination of thrown rocks and bullets fired through the windows resulted in losses totaling almost $500,000, from which the Crow has yet to recover.
As with most museums, the Crow has reopened, albeit at only 25% capacity. Portions of the building remain off-limits to visitors. The Lotus Shop — which suffered extensive damage — remains closed, with no reopening anytime soon.
And yet, something nice happened in the aftermath of a siege of bullet holes and broken glass.
“The next morning, I will never forget all the people who came to the Crow to sweep up broken glass,” she said. They included such notables as Jeremy Strick, director of the Nasher Sculpture Center; Agustín Arteaga, director of the Dallas Museum of Art; and Kevin Moriarty, artistic director of Dallas Theater Center.
Hofland says the spirit of cooperation among arts institutions has endured.
Jill Magnuson, external affairs director of the Nasher Sculpture Center, says the ongoing cooperation among Dallas arts groups has thrived as the unexpected silver lining throughout the pandemic.
Arteaga echoed Magnuson’s sentiments, saying: “We worked closer than ever with our partners in the Arts District and throughout the city. From weekly meetings since the beginning of the shutdown, to joining together to advocate for arts funding with city leaders, to aligning on when and how to safely reopen.”
Jennifer Scripps, director of the city’s Office of Arts and Culture, called the collaboration “huge. The cooperation extends across genres and from big to small organizations. It has been awesome.”
But does she see it lasting after life returns to normal? “I do, and there are huge opportunities going forward.”
The most-often-heard cliché surrounding the crisis has been how to make lemonade out of lemons. And there’s one more cliché at work — necessity is the mother of invention.
“The pandemic completely upended our way of life and wreaked unimaginable grief and pain,” said Arteaga, whose galleries sat empty for five months.
Even so, he marveled at how “we became a virtual museum in the blink of an eye. We produced virtual tours of exhibitions and galleries and hosted over 170 virtual public programs.”
Debbie Storey, the president and CEO of the AT&T Performing Arts Center, talked about her staff pivoting “to produce virtual arts education programs that were shared district-wide in both Dallas and Richardson ISD and helped them complete the semester.”
ATTPAC was also at the forefront of one of the cleverest measures, which figures to stay once normalcy returns.
The Great Outdoors
More than any other company, ATTPAC made ingenious use of its outdoor Annette Strauss Square to create a safer, more socially distanced venue.
“The first time we safely reopened Strauss Square in September to local arts groups was an emotional night. It was the first time since March for many of our staff to see one another in person again — masked up and at a distance,” Storey said. “But also to welcome our audiences who were incredibly excited about sitting safely outside and on the lawn to see a live show again. It was a powerful night.”
The Nasher offered its outdoor space to Dallas Black Dance Theatre “to tape important works for its audience,” Magnuson said. The Nasher also made it possible for “Dallas-based musicians to release new works on video while in the safety and beauty of the Nasher setting.”
Even with shuttered galleries, the Nasher still launched Nasher Windows, a series of street-facing exhibitions behind its front windows. The success of Nasher Windows led to Nasher Public, a series of monthly exhibitions, each presenting work by “emerging and established Texas-based artists in a newly constituted gallery space formerly occupied by the Nasher Store.”
Last June, Prism Movement Theater, a Dallas troupe that uses dance and music, but not words, to tell stories, staged an outdoor production in the parking lot of the Latino Cultural Center and at other locations.
Scripps praised the Dallas Symphony Orchestra for being one of the few anywhere in the country that kept going, emphasizing social distancing on stage and in the audience at the Meyerson Symphony Center. The DSO also introduced The Concert Truck. Its mobile vehicle allowed orchestra members to strut their stuff inside a 16-foot box truck, staging performances at Klyde Warren Park and schools, churches and museums.
Streaming
Stage West in Fort Worth made frequent use of streaming, as did Dallas Black Dance Theatre and the Dallas Theater Center. The question about streaming is, will it last? Live theater remains an enticing option for streaming, and on a national level, the Disney Plus airing of Hamilton showed that television can be as effective for theater as it is for professional sports.
Stage West became a regional pioneer in streaming, having produced four shows in-house as a collaboration with Moonrise Initiative and four in a co-production with In the Box Productions. Executive producer Dana Schultes says the shows were done “live — and with audience participation, where desired.”
“COVID may have changed how we could meet our mission,” Schultes says, “but it didn’t stop us from doing it.”
Money
The best silver lining of all, Scripps said, is how the City Council “voted at the last minute in the budget discussions last year to add back $500,000 for arts support — which fully restored arts funding.”
And that, she said, got a whole lot of attention well beyond Dallas.
“I have been on national calls,” Scripps said, “and people don’t believe me when I say that.”
As bad it was in Dallas, it could have been worse, and one of the reasons it wasn’t was the Silver Linings Playbook that Scripps and others say made the best of a bad situation — and continues to do so.
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