Art blitz - various artists and exhibits; Dallas, Texas

Art in America, April, 1994 by Mitchell Charles Dee

This season, Dallas has witnessed an unaccustomed flurry of art activity, including multiple museum openings and an artist-organized Biennial.

On Sept. 24, 1993, the Dallas Museum of Art opened to the public its new "Museum of the Americas," a chronological survey spanning 3,000 years of art produced in the Western hemisphere. As conceived by Richard Brettell, past director of the DMA, who saw the project through to completion in the capacity of consulting director, the Museum of the Americas is part of the total reinstallation of the DMA's collection into separate "museums within the museum." These include a "Museum of Europe" (opened last summer) for European art from ancient times to the early part of this century and a "Museum of Contemporary Art" (opened in October) which takes an international view of developments since World War II. The museum's holdings in African and Asian art

have yet to be reinstalled.

This reorganization of the DMA was made possible by the addition of the Nancy and Jake L. Hamon Building, architect Edward Larrabee Barnes's 140,000-square-foot addition to his original 1984 museum building on the northern edge of downtown Dallas. The Hamon Building more than doubles the available exhibition space at the DMA, as well as providing increased space for museum offices, classrooms, meeting rooms, a library and a computer center.

The DMA dominated cultural news in Dallas this past fall, but its multiple openings in the new space were only part of a series of art events that closed 1993. The Museum of African American Life and Culture, which has sponsored exhibitions in the Dallas area since the 1970s, opened its first permanent facility in a new building constructed on the Texas state fair grounds. And an organization called Dallas Artists Research and Exhibitions (DARE) converted a 1930s-era state fair exhibition hall into avenue for its first Texas Biennial Exhibition, a juried show bringing together works by 80 Texas artists.

Overall it was a three-month stretch that frustrated the Dallas art community's predilection for complaining that so little goes on in Dallas. It was also a period during which the city's art organizations, whether relatively new or firmly established, presented themselves in ways that demonstrated both their strengths and weaknesses while simultaneously laying out their plans for the future.

The Dallas Museum of Art Expands

Rufino Tamayo's 1953 mural El Hombre and a spare but clearly monumental staircase dominate the atrium of the Hamon Building. The staircase climbs three stories to the entrance of the Museum of the Americas, and, although an elevator is available, the climb best sets the mood for the ambitious installation that one encounters at the top. Some critics have slighted the Museum of the Americas for attempting and failing to make a persuasive case for a tradition of art-making in the Americas that can encompass elements as disparate as the monumental Head of the Rain God Tlaloc that opens the installation and the early 20th-century abstractions one finds near its end. But was this really the curatorial team's goal? The team's statements frame the project in terms of a "narrative," not a "tradition," and their narrative has clearly demarcated disruptions, established not only by the nature of the works presented but also by the manner of their presentation.

The museum's pre-Columbian collection is now housed in a series of darkened galleries where dramatically lit cases display small groupings of objects or single works. As theater it verges on melodrama, but as an installational gambit it pays off most of the time. The DMA's pre-Columbian holdings form an important part of the collection, and the cases encourage viewers to focus on the true masterpieces--a small ceramic Jalisco figure, a Peruvian ceramic trumpet, a decorated 8-foot fragment of a Mayan wall. Only in the Mesoamerican gallery do the small display cases proliferate to such an extent that one is reminded more of a shop than a museum.

Works by native North Americans fill a spacious hallway that leads one into the open, interlocking galleries housing works of the European tradition. Standing in the first gallery, which is devoted to the Spanish colonies, one can see the English colonial gallery which follows and can catch a glimpse of the 19th-century galleries. The circular layout of these successive halls encourages consideration of the traditions developed by European settlers in the New World. The disruption of the pre-Columbian cosmos depicted in the earlier rooms could not be more clearly presented.

Whereas the pro-Columbian installation goes to great lengths to highlight individual pieces and establish their status as art, the European portion of the American wing freely mixes the decorative and fine arts in ways that range from illuminating to overbearing. In the colonial galleries, where the portraits on display were clearly meant as prestigious decoration for domestic settings, the mix makes a great deal of sense. As one enters the 19th century, however, paintings by Sargent, Henri, Harnett and others are overwhelmed by the furniture.