Arts and Culture Texas magazine • August 13 2025

Forging Admiration: Art Worth encourages Fort Worth fans to see artists in their element

If you’ve ever wanted to watch molten glass stretch and curl into a goblet while an opera aria drifts through the autumn air, Fort Worth has just the weekend for you. The free Art Worth Festival, returning for its fourth year Oct. 24–26, transforms the lawn at The Shops at Clearfork into a vibrant crossroads where artistry in all its forms—paint, clay, wood, glass, metal, and music—comes to life.
Wander the festival and you might stumble upon a woodturner coaxing a silky curve from a chunk of ma...

Arts and Culture Texas magazine • August 13 2025

Stage Left of Center: Four Texas Theaters Redefining Regional Performance

Texas is no stranger to theatrical prestige. Both Dallas Theater Center and Houston’s Alley Theatre have won the distinguished Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre, but to understand the full scope of the state’s creative force, you have to look beyond the conventional.
Each one is shaping the cultural identity of its community by trusting their own artistic instincts, investing in homegrown talent, and inviting audiences to take a different kind of journey. For the adventurous theatergoe...

Arts and Culture Texas magazine • July 22 2025

Dance with Abandon: Avant Chamber Ballet Grows a New Audience with Biggest Season Yet

Katie Puder isn’t one to do things halfway. For Avant Chamber Ballet’s 13th season, the founding artistic director is nearly doubling the company’s repertoire, launching a new subscription series for families, premiering two original ballets, and restaging a landmark production by mentor and longtime collaborator Paul Mejia. And all of it will be performed with live music, featuring full orchestras for five out of the eight productions.
The company’s largest season to date features two distinct...

Arts and Culture Texas magazine • July 22 2025

Big Moves Ahead: Bruce Wood Dance Dallas Leans Into Legacy for 2025–26

Bruce Wood Dance Dallas is approaching its sweet sixteen with a season that blurs boundaries between genres, generations, and creative disciplines. Artistic director Joy Bollinger, who has led the company since 2018, calls it a season built on “connection and risk,” the kind of programming that welcomes both longtime supporters and new audiences into the fold.
The season opens Aug. 9-10 at the Kalita Humphreys Theater with Imagine, a first-time collaboration with Uptown Players that Bollinger ca...

Arts and Culture Texas magazine • July 8 2025

The Ballad of Stage West: Fort Worth theater company’s 47th season is a matter of life and death

Stage West’s 47th season is full of wild turns: ghost machines, war-time ceasefires, financial despair, and a cottage crawling with infidelity. The six-play season is stacked with regional premieres and collaborations, all with the through-line of empathy.
The season begins with Ride the Cyclone (Oct. 16-Nov. 2, 2025), a musical about six teenagers who die in a freak roller coaster accident and find themselves in spiritual limbo, where a mechanical fortune teller gives them one last shot at life...

Arts and Culture Texas magazine • July 8 2025

Glitter and Be Gay: Uptown Players celebrates chosen family, queer joy, resilience, and rebellion in 2025-26 season

The theater produced by Uptown Players has always pulsed with a particular kind of energy that’s equal parts heart, wit, and daring. That pulse beats loud and clear in the Dallas theater company’s 2025-26 season, which promises a rich mix of irreverent comedy, powerful drama, and musical mayhem, all housed in the historic Kalita Humphreys Theater (with a stop at Theatre Three for good measure). Never content to play it safe, Uptown Players—Dallas’ premier LGBTQ+ theater—leans even deeper into bo...

Arts and Culture Texas magazine • June 2 2025

Unbind Your Imagination: TITAS/Dance Unbound invites global dance into Dallas for 2025-26 season

For TITAS/Dance Unbound’s 2025-26 season, the math is undeniably impressive: 10 companies from five different countries, among them two debuts (one U.S. and one Texas) and two world premieres.
Of equal importance is the idea of “be in the room.” TITAS developed this mantra following the pandemic to entice audiences back into the theater for shared experiences, and still asserts that nothing replaces the magic and connection of in-person performance. Santos’s tagline also generated ACTX’s March/A...

Arts and Culture Texas magazine • April 18 2025

Cartoon King: The Brilliant Accessibility of KAWS at Crystal Bridges (COVER STORY)

It’s Mickey Mouse, but not. It’s The Simpsons, but twisted. It’s a shaggy Muppet, but there’s something off about the eyes…
Since the late 1990s, KAWS (legal name: Brian Donnelly) has been putting his own original twist on well-known pop-culture figures and inventing his own cast of iconic characters that are complex, familiar, and deeply relatable.
“Part of the brilliance of KAWS’ work is that he pulls from the world we know,” says Alejo Benedetti, curator of contemporary art at Crystal Bridges...

Arts and Culture Texas magazine • April 12 2025

Fade To Black: Week-Long Arts Festival Amplifies Black Voices in Houston

At a time when many institutions are pulling away from telling diverse stories, Houston is proudly showing its support for the Black artistic community with the Fade To Black Festival. This week-long summer celebration highlights and elevates Black voices, transforming downtown Houston into a hub of Black artistry from June 8-14.
In 2013, her organization premiered the first iteration of Fade To Black as a play festival in the 80-seat Obsidian Theater (at the time called Obsidian Art Space). The...

Arts and Culture Texas magazine • March 31 2025

Dance Here: Agora Artists is Planting the Seeds to Make Dallas a Dance Town

A common lament among Dallas performing arts leaders is how the city’s talent doesn’t stay in Texas. Dancers, singers, and actors are born here, train here, and then leave for New York, Chicago, or even abroad. Someone should fix that, everyone thinks, and Avery-Jai Andrews is ready to be that someone.
“I would call Dallas a traditional dance company town,” says Andrews, who graduated from Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts and later NYU, before performing in Isr...

Arts and Culture Texas magazine • January 30 2025

Finding His Niche: Actor/Playwright Parker Davis Gray Carves out his place

Parker Davis Gray is not afraid to be weird. The SMU theater grad has played silly, sinister, sympathetic, and sometimes just plain psychotic on basically every professional stage in Dallas-Fort Worth since 2016; if he’s not taking a risk, he’s not satisfied.
“When it seems like my calendar’s full, I’ll just go and give myself something else to do,” Gray laughs. “I’m all about stretching different muscles.”
Coming from the small Texas town of Combine, about 30 minutes southeast of Dallas, Gray a...

Arts and Culture Texas magazine • January 23 2025

An Enigmatic Woman: Marisol’s Big Works Get an Even Bigger Retrospective at Dallas Museum of Art

Her name was synonymous with Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and other iconic Pop artists of the 1960s. But few today remember Marisol Escobar or her ahead-of-its-time art, which provocatively explored femininity and women’s role in society.
“She was so extremely successful in her day but departed from the art-world limelight by her own choice,” says Dr. Anna Katherine Brodbeck, DMA’s senior curator of contemporary art, who assisted originating institution Buffalo AKG Art Museum with building the...

Arts and Culture Texas magazine • December 31 2024

The Hills are Alive with a Pair of Mickle Mahers, Noises Off, Die Hard, Tharp, Cinderella’s Rats and so much more: The 2024 Season Wrap up

It’s that time of year again, when we gather on the page to consider all the shows that we have seen, what stood out, who wowed us, and more. As usual, we are never brief. Grab a snack or two or three, some tasty nog, plan on a nap midway through, and enjoy musings from a gaggle of our trusted performing arts writers.
Lindsey Wilson: I’ve been a bit of a Scrooge this year when it comes to holiday-themed shows, but if you’re seeking glamour, glitter, and lots of soapy family drama, then you can’t...

Arts and Culture Texas magazine • December 15 2024

Born to Lead: Circle Theatre’s New Artistic Director Ashley H. White Isn’t Afraid to Shake Things Up

When Imprint Theatreworks closed at the end of 2022, Ashley H. White found herself at a crossroads. The founding artistic director had spent the previous five years producing some of the most ambitious and original theater that Dallas audiences had experienced in a good long while, but ultimately the nonprofit just couldn’t survive the pandemic’s decimation of regional theater.
“I have a sign on my desk that says, ‘if it doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t change you,’” White laughs, adding, “and...

Arts and Culture Texas magazine • December 15 2024

Beauty and Repulsion, Decay and Renewal: Jessica Kruetter at Galveston Arts Center

We may be made of star stuff, according to Carl Sagan, but the way Jessica Kreutter sees it we are all made of dirt.
Kreutter’s sculptures—though she prefers to call them ceramic assemblages—literally take pieces of the earth (clay) and sometimes found objects to echo the natural cycle of decay and renewal. But for “Collapse,” her latest exhibition now running at the Galveston Arts Center through Feb. 16, 2025, Kreutter is revisiting, reviving, and reforming some of her earlier works into entire...

CultureMap Dallas • December 3 2024

The Neighborhood Guide by Briggs Freeman

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...