Arts and Culture Texas magazine • October 10 2024

Cheers to 15 Years: Bruce Wood Dance Dallas isn’t afraid to mix things up for 2025

For its 15th year, Bruce Wood Dance is gifting itself a new name. The contemporary dance company, which is a new iteration of the original founded in Fort Worth by Wood in 1996, has officially rebranded as Bruce Wood Dance Dallas. This is not meant to drive a wedge between the two North Texas cities, but instead broadcast a sense of place as the troupe continues to tour and bring in big-name guest talent from around the globe.
The new name is already enticing admirers, as is evidenced by its sta...

Arts and Culture Texas magazine • September 24 2024

Through An Inclusive Lens: Diversity and divas populate Uptown Players’ 2024-25 season

Regional premieres abound for Uptown Players’ 23rd season, offering Dallas audiences several new ways to view love, self-discovery, and diversity onstage. These are the cornerstones of Uptown Players, after all, which is known as Dallas-Fort Worth’s preeminent LGBTQ+ theater company. Its mission since 2001 has been to create greater positive public awareness and acceptance by bringing inclusive and engaging theater to the Dallas community.
It all kicks off Dec. 6-15, 2024, with the regional prem...

Arts and Culture Texas magazine • September 23 2024

A Culture of Women: Now in its sixth year, Vignette Art Fair continues to promote women artists

There is no shortage of artistic talent in Texas, but each year is another chance for the Vignette Art Fair in Dallas to remind us once again of how skilled and creative the women of the Lone Star State truly are.
Last year’s fair received a record number of applications, and this year’s submissions were equally plentiful, with the official tally topping 200. A total of 36 artists—from Aubrey to Amarillo, Richardson to Round Rock, Houston to Highland Village—will be featured Oct. 17-19 at Dallas...

Arts and Culture Texas magazine • August 27 2024

Theater with a Capital T: Big titles connect Stage West to the community in 2024-25

After an unprecedented 2023, where it grew and thrived in the face of post-pandemic uncertainty, Stage West is continuing to flourish. But the Fort Worth theater is always careful to remember its purpose.
Artistic director Dana Schultes is so committed to building her audience that she even opened up Stage West’s building, which houses two performance spaces, to long-running improv comedy troupe Four Day Weekend, which just ended its 27-year relationship with Sundance Square.
“When we learned Fo...

Arts and Culture Texas magazine • August 17 2024

Sharing Our Stories: Cara Mía Theatre’s 2024-25 season strengthens connection across borders

It’s the largest Latinx theater company in Texas, but Dallas’s Cara Mía Theatre is making waves that ripple far outside the Lone Star State. During its 2023-24 season alone, the 1996-founded Dallas company toured three of its original plays: Crystal City 1969 in San Antonio, Orígenes in Mexico City, and Ursula or let yourself go with the wind in Bogota and Chía, Colombia.
And so they’re bringing back the Latinidades Festival & Symposium for a fifth year, as the first offering in their 2024-25 se...

Arts and Culture Texas magazine • July 30 2024

Connecting Art to Hearts: Dallas’ contemporary Conduit Gallery celebrates 40 years

They say to do what you love, and Nancy Whitenack loves art. “But I’m really lousy at it,” she laughs. “I intend in my golden years to take clay classes, but what I’ve always liked to do more than anything in the world is go to galleries and museums.”
The space was twice as big and much more expensive than any she had rented before, but Whitenack knew that if the prospect seemed frightening, then that meant she had to go for it. Now at 1626 Hi Line Dr. for the past 22 years, Conduit Gallery is c...

Arts and Culture Texas magazine • July 23 2024

Material Girl: Jean Shin clothes the Amon Carter’s ‘Museum Body’

In our current era of fast fashion and 15-second TikTok videos, Jean Shin is looking for permanence, or at least a way to honor the people whose work and energy is directed at one common goal, at one specific place, during one particular point in time.
In both commissions, Shin snips the seams of these discarded garments and uses the textiles to create a large-scale wall mural that’s topped with a soft skeletal structure of shoelaces, suspenders, lanyards, undergarments, and more hanging above....

benton buckley books • July 1 2024

Bespoke: A Philosophy of Beauty

/be-spok/: a philosophy of beauty – A curated collection of 35 of the world’s most innovative, visionary interior designers, /be-spok/ shares custom, curated, bold design that is both timeless and provocative. Each comprehensive interior design project is exhibited in a 12-page gallery with an editorial speaking to each designer’s ethos. Beyond the aesthetic allure, this book honors the collaborative spirit of design. It recognizes that great design is often the result of many hands and minds co...

Arts and Culture Texas magazine • June 17 2024

From Page to Stage: Dallas Theater Center’s resident playwright Jonathan Norton is ready to lead

If you see Jonathan Norton at the theater, he wants you to stop and say, “Hi.” The longtime playwright is relishing the more public-facing opportunities that come with his new appointment as interim artistic director of Dallas Theater Center, and greeting audience members is definitely one of them.
The Dallas-raised Norton has a long association with DTC, having seen his first play there (Adrian Hall’s production of A Christmas Carol) in sixth grade. “At the time, sixth-grade me could not have i...

Arts and Culture Texas magazine • June 11 2024

Top Arts: In 2024, the Dallas Arts District is finally crowned the best in America

I moved to Dallas in October 2009, the same month and year that the AT&T Performing Arts Center opened. The city was buzzing, I remember, so incredibly proud and excited to finally welcome people to the ruby-red Winspear Opera House, along with the outdoor Annette Strauss Square, strikingly silver Wyly Theatre, and Sammons Park, home of many open-air performances and the famous reflecting pond. ATTPAC completed (at the time) the Dallas Arts District, which at 118 acres is the largest contiguous...

Arts and Culture Texas magazine • June 11 2024

Don’t Blink: Dallas Museum of Art stares down race, gender, and identity with ‘When You See Me’

The Dallas Museum of Art recently acquired several new works from TWO x TWO for AIDS and Art Fund, and it was this expansion of its permanent collection that inspired When You See Me: Visibility in Contemporary Art/History, on view now through April 13, 2025.
It’s co-curated by the museum’s entire contemporary art department: senior curator Dr. Anna Katherine Brodbeck, curator Dr. Vivian Li, assistant curator Ade Omotosho, and curatorial assistant Veronica Myers.
“With this recurring theme about...

Arts and Culture Texas magazine • May 26 2024

Art in Dark Places: Artists Sans Frontières comforts a world in crisis with the healing power of performing arts

In 2017, Dallas-based dancer and choreographer Katie Burks felt compelled to offer aid and assistance in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey. Upon arrival in Houston, however, she quickly realized that she was well-meaning but ill-prepared, and not trained as a first responder or member of the military. But she became hooked on helping people and continued her humanitarian efforts until leaving the next year for grad school in London. Multiple performance and teaching opportunities across Europe,...

Arts and Culture Texas magazine • May 26 2024

All Together Now: Unexpected premieres and cherished favorites blend in TITAS/Dance Unbound’s new season

For more than 40 years, TITAS/Dance Unbound has been bringing in dance companies that entertain, educate, and inspire Dallas audiences, and its 2024-25 season is no exception. With two Texas premieres, one world premiere, and a lineup that hails from Spain, New Zealand, and America, the nine-company season, titled “Unexpected,” is a sumptuous buffet of innovative dance.
The season opener will even make a personal appearance, adding yet another layer of live excitement. Twyla Tharp’s longstanding...

Arts and Culture Texas magazine • April 14 2024

A Lifelong Exploration: Director Sasha Maya Ada navigates a new path for DFW theater

Listen to how she says “pecans,” and you’ll know immediately that Sasha Maya Ada is not a native Texan. But the Bronx-born and South Carolina-raised director, actor, educator, and SMU graduate is nonetheless deeply committed to making the Dallas-Fort Worth theater industry better than it was when she moved here in 2012.
It feels like Ada has touched practically every professional production in North Texas these past few years, from forward-thinking plays to classic musicals to new works, spannin...

Arts and Culture Texas magazine • April 14 2024

Soy de Tejas: Traveling exhibition unites the Lone Star State in Fort Worth with Latinx art

In a state as vast as Texas, how do you go about building a survey that encompasses the Latinx population’s art? Because this is Texas, you go big. Rigoberto Luna curated nearly 100 contemporary works of all mediums by native Texas and Texas-based Latinx artists into Soy de Tejas, which was originally exhibited in San Antonio in 2023. Now the massive collection is on display at Arts Fort Worth through June 23, 2024, exploring themes of identity, migration, mythmaking, displacement, and indigenei...

Arts and Culture Texas magazine • April 8 2024

Texas Studio: Evita Tezeno on collaging Black joy

“I came out of the womb and knew I wanted to be an artist. It’s all I know.” Growing up in Port Arthur, Texas, Evita Tezeno was surrounded by female relatives who were quilters and seamstresses. Little bits of fabric could always be found around the house, and it’s this patchwork, folk-art style that has inspired Tezeno’s immensely popular collage paintings since the beginning of the 21st century.
Tezeno’s paintings overflow with Black joy: colorful, harmonious scenes of Black Americans dancing,...

Arts and Culture Texas magazine • March 21 2024

Invited to Learn: Bishop Arts Theatre Center ends its 30th season with groundbreaking plays about history-making women

The Bishop Arts neighborhood of Dallas has enjoyed a surge in popularity these past few years, but many of its diners, drinkers, and shoppers probably aren’t aware that just a mile away sits the area’s namesake theater company. And that’s a shame, because for the past two-plus decades Bishop Arts Theatre Center has been showcasing emerging artists, producing thought-provoking plays and festivals, and engaging its community through diverse and multigenerational programming.
Albert Wash II, BATC’s...

Arts and Culture Texas magazine • March 21 2024

Taking Flight: Zeke Williams and his feathered friends nest at Galveston Arts Center

Dallas-based artist Zeke Williams is addicted to making work. He began his career painting “serious” landscapes that were often inspired by trips to Yellowstone and the Great Smoky Mountains with his grandparents, who worked with the U.S. National Park Service. After their passing, he inherited their photo collection and felt the urge to capture all that natural beauty with a brush. But there was one eventual problem: “I am the ultimate ‘indoor kid,’” Williams says. “I do appreciate the outdoors...

benton buckley books • March 1 2024

New View Texas

New View: A Curated Visual Gallery: Twenty Magnificent Homes by Texas Architects Part anthropological and part declarative, New View: A Curated Visual Gallery — 20 Magnificent Homes by Architects of Texas is the fourth installment of a series that is at once trending and historic. Mesmerizing photography capturing the elegance of urban or rustic life is balanced with the architects’ design philosophies, perspectives, and transformational experiences. Featuring a foreword by the esteemed John Gra...

benton buckley books • March 1 2024

New View California

New View: A Curated Visual Gallery: Twenty Magnificent Homes by California Architects The great Frank Lloyd Wright taught us that form and function are forever bound in spiritual union; that design is eternally emotive; and that architecture structures society. Inspired by this depth of being, 20 modern architectural greats and their most extraordinary feats are celebrated in the illustrious pages of New View: A Curated Visual Gallery — 20 Magnificent Homes by Architects of California.Designed t...

Arts and Culture Texas magazine • February 7 2024

Amazing, Fabulous, Spectacular: New Works Light Up Fort Worth’s Amphibian Stage in 2024

It’s likely you’ve never heard of any of the titles in Amphibian Stage’s 2024 season, and that’s exactly how Kathleen Culebro wants it.
Each of the four plays in the Fort Worth company’s 25th anniversary season fits this bill, in addition to the return of the popular SparkFest new play festival, which this year will spotlight the AAPI community.
Harry Houdini shows up—in a way—for the first production, Instructions for a Séance by Katie Bender, running Feb. 2-11, 2024. This “DIY séance party” at...

Arts and Culture Texas magazine • February 2 2024

Old Friends, New Stories: Familiar faces meet provocative premieres in Uptown Players’ 2024 season

Since its founding in 2001, Uptown Players has put a heavy emphasis on relationships—not only with its patrons, the majority of whom identify as LGBTQ+, but also with its performers, musicians, crew, artistic and administrative staff, and playwrights and composers.
One such performer is Lee Walter, whose alter ego is the drag diva Jada Pinkett Fox. The statuesque Walter starred in their very own tinsel-tinged revue, Jada Bells–A Holiday Extravaganza, in December. Written and directed by B.J. Cle...

Arts and Culture Texas magazine • January 5 2024

Changing My Major: SMU’s newly endowed musical theater program is being built by a Dallas legend

Since 1969, Southern Methodist University has been offering performing arts degrees in theater, music, and dance through undergraduate tracks in the Meadows School of the Arts. But beginning in 2026, incoming students will have the option to enroll in a BFA program dedicated to musical theater. It’s all thanks to a $15 million gift from philanthropist and Broadway producer G. Marlyne Sexton, and the tireless research, foundation-building, and passion of the program’s inaugural director, Joel Fer...

Inspired Intermedia • January 1 2024

Inspired Kitchens & Baths

Inspired Kitchens & Baths is a collection of the finest kitchens and bathrooms fashioned by the country’s leading interior designers, architects and builders. These are the main rooms in a house that reflect its personality and the areas that most affect the value. It will take you on a journey of different design styles and of sizes–from modest to large scale. Plentiful in inspiration for all design tastes, from traditional, transitional, farmhouse to modern, Inspired Kitchens & Baths will inspire you for your dream abode ambitions.