Editor’s note: Art and the City is a special project by The Dallas Morning News arts and entertainment staff. We asked more than 100 members of North Texas’ creative community to tell us in their own words how they are living life and making art during the great shutdown of 2020. We also asked artists to share a piece of work that is especially meaningful to them right now. You can contribute to this project by emailing us at artslife@dallasnews.com or share your work online with the hashtag #DFWArtMatters. We are sharing work weekly in our free Arts & Entertainment newsletter; sign up at join.dallasnews.com/newsletter.
Want to see more from Art and the City 2020? Check out the links below:
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- Gallery art
- Curated art
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A room of one’s own
Server [above] is a mixed-media installation that incorporates collage, photographs, audio, moving image, objects and relics. When brought together, the installation becomes a life-sized view of this bibliography in the real — and not hosted in virtual. Specific decisions were made about what I wanted to allow to happen in that space. Server needed to just exist, and it needed to be a whole damn room.
— Ciara Elle Bryant is a master of fine arts candidate at Southern Methodist University.
Too much of nothing
I grew up in the age of excess of the ’80s, and I see similar parallels with our current moment.
Needledrop represents a new direction in my work — sculptural, digital and painterly all at once. It is based on collage, then printed on aluminum and is an homage to the glitz and horror of the ’80s art scene.
— Sara Cardona is a visual artist and the executive director of Teatro Dallas. saracardona.com.
Statement piece
I created this mural last fall, in the barrio of La Merced in Mexico City, focused on the theme of working women. La Merced is a tough neighborhood with a tradition of hard-working people. Living there showed me respect for the effort that the women make: in working long hours, in looking beautiful, in caring for their children, all while being chingonas, strong and powerful in their lives. Yesterday, I went by the café and it was closed. The entire area around Plaza Aguilita, one of the busiest parts of the city, was quiet. So, I think about these women now and wonder how they are doing with the disruption that coronavirus has brought to us all. Right now, I am in Mexico City, exploring these ideas by creating a video podcast series on YouTube about living life in a time of pandemic.
— Randall Garrett is a Dallas- and Mexico-based artist and founder of Plush gallery.
Graphic content
I’ve been developing Heaven Chamber, an original comic book, for the last three years. Throughout this time, my project has informed the majority of my personal work. The plot follows an unnamed character represented in this digital illustration.
The symbolism that’s represented depicts the main character lying idly on a hilltop, patiently waiting for me to finish his epic tale. The initial process has evolved into an ambitious and thoroughly challenging development. Through this, I’ve learned the importance of balancing patience and creativity, especially while living in these accelerated times.
— Cristopher Brown, a.k.a. Ghostdrank, is a Dallas-based artist.
American beauty
Black is Blue, is a part of my new body of work titled “Beautiful Blackness.” A visual pilgrimage following the path of Exodusters, African Americans who migrated from states along the Mississippi River to Kansas and Oklahoma in the late 19th century, and an exploration of the remains of Freedmen’s towns across the South. It is an elegy for a lost promised land.
This image was taken in Kansas after one of the prescribed prairie burnings in the Flint Hills. It is a method of preservation used to rejuvenate growth and ensure long-term survival to the natural flora and fauna. For me, this piece is a reminder that during dark times and difficulties, we can still find beauty. Nature is what is getting me through our current times of social distancing: taking long walks on the Trinity River, spreading wildflower seeds at home and tending a new vegetable garden.
— Letitia Huckaby is a Fort Worth-based visual artist.
Highly ‘Vulnerable’
I think these two pieces from my installation titled “Vulnerable” best represent how I’m feeling right now during this pandemic. These two of the four-piece work Sleight of Hand explore how when things go terribly wrong, at some point you just have to surrender to God and hope for the best. The photos are what I call intentional selfies and are printed on shower curtains, because how more vulnerable can you be than when totally naked in the shower? I am feeling quite vulnerable in every way these days, but lucky for me, I have two little bright lights in my life who keep me hopeful. These bright lights are my grandbabies whom I am sheltered in place with!
— Vicki Meek is a Dallas-based artist.
Art, in isolation
My artwork creates immediate, tangible encounters that connect viewers to things we usually perceive as being remote. The artwork I want to share with you is a performance I did at Nahmad Projects, which feels resonant with my current experience of being simultaneously removed from the world and hyper-aware of my physical body.
A sign at the gallery entrance told viewers to take a deep breath, enter one at a time, and stay inside only for as long as they could hold their breath. Upon entering, they saw me reading an essay I had written about experiencing one’s physical limits. Next to me was a pitcher of water, which I would occasionally use to alternately pour myself a glass of water and water a plant nearby. The performance’s title, 1372549, corresponds to an estimate of how many breaths it would take to fill the exact dimensions of the gallery space.
— Allyson Packer is an artist and teaches at the University of North Texas College of Visual Art and Design, where she now lectures remotely. allysonpacker.com.
The shape of things
My work deals with my personal narrative of the visceral experience of living with body dysmorphic disorder. I’m a master of fine arts sculpture candidate at the University of North Texas. I was supposed to have my thesis show April 13-18, but it was canceled due to COVID-19.
This was the last sculpture I was able to complete before our campus closed. The moment that I was able to put it together and photograph it was cathartic. This work is going to be part of an immersive performative installation, so for now it’s titled Untitled (Visceral: Belly #2). Ideally, I would be performing with this work by crocheting the guts that are spilling out of the over-sized belly. The Visceral is a series that embodies the struggles with the gut, the subconscious and conscious mind, and it is a representation of living with a body-image disorder that is invisible to others.
— Heather Leigh Hoskins is a Denton-based artist who teaches Beginning Sculpture Digital Methods at UNT.
Time stands still
Last year on the first of April I wrote a reminder to myself that said, “Don’t over-schedule.” As an artist, teacher at Dallas Community Colleges, and mother to three kids, I struggle to balance the onslaught of activities that mark the arrival of spring and the growth of my kids against my desire to just sit and watch these things unfold from my backyard. But now, everything is canceled, and yet, nature abhors a vacuum. Rushing to fill the space are Zoom calls and online course restructuring, home school lessons and snack patrol. I steal away to make work for my gallery, Galleri Urbane, who is working tirelessly to support their artists. A new series of paintings is about time turning in upon itself, reversing, and standing still. I am looking up information on koala bears, triangles, and best practices for grocery shopping. I am trying to connect with friends and support those whose lives are upended by the coronavirus, and then hiding in the bathroom to read the news. At the end of the day, I read Camille Bordas’ How to Behave in a Crowd, till my eyes are on fire, as if I have nowhere to be tomorrow.
— Danielle Huey Kimzey is an artist and art professor based in Dallas.
Being resourceful
This painting is part of a series for my first solo show that I titled Crossing the Slow Burning Line last spring. When I started these paintings back then, I had little money for paint or canvas and forced myself to innovate with what I could find – old rags, hospital bed sheets, and denim scraps sewn together and painted with thin layers of paint. To see them now that the show has been indefinitely suspended, I can’t help but think about how vastly our understanding of time, care, and survival have shifted. These paintings were born from circumstantial adaptation in much the same way people have sprung into action to help each other through these trying times. At this very moment, people are responding to scarcity by sewing masks from scraps of fabric.
— Leslie Martinez is an artist based in Dallas.
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