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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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Texas Lens: Lily Cabatu Weiss Looks Ahead for the Dallas Arts District

Nearly one year to the day that the Dallas Arts District—and most of the world—shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic, ACTX’s Lindsey Wilson interviewed its executive director, Lily Cabatu Weiss.
I cannot help but reflect that it’s been one year since we closed all the cultural venues in the Arts District—March 13, to be exact. That weekend was scheduled to be one of the busiest in the neighborhood: American Mariachi was premiering at the Dallas Theater Center; TITAS Dance/Unbound in partnership...

Finding Where to Fit In

Coworking spaces are a rapidly expanding trend in Dallas-Fort Worth— they occupy about 1.5 million square feet of DFW office space, according to the latest estimate by commercial property firm Cushman & Wakefield. But all that space must be decorated for its wide variety of clients. Serendipity Labs in Frisco found its unique artistic aesthetic in one of its very own tenants.
CJ Cowden runs c2c Contemporary Art, a by-appointment gallery where the artist helps clients choose from her artwork, whi...

Bringing Fabric to Fort Worth

The next time you visit The Fabric Shoppe in Fort Worth, keep an eye out for a small scrap of red fabric. It’s sitting, suspended, in a jar of bleach and has been ever since the Sunbrella-brand-only store opened in September 2017. And, that red is still just as bright and vibrant as day one.
“My father-in-law has the same thing in his store, only his has been there over a year,” says The Fabric Shoppe owner Sallie Duncan. “It hasn’t decomposed a bit.”
Duncan’s husband, Tim, is a fourth-generat...

Finding the Way

It’s easy to disappear for hours inside the aptly named Lost … Again Antiques & Décor. The original Lost—and its sister store, Found—held court on Riverfront Boulevard for a little over a decade before moving to a new Dallas Design District spot at 148 Riveredge Drive. This next generation of the popular antiques mall is still a showplace for handmade pieces and funky retro finds from Texasbased dealers, but its larger footprint has allowed owner Beth Callahan to expand Lost … Again’s unique off...
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