Articles & Publications

Season Finale of Soundings: New Music at the Nasher to feature Alexi Kenney

Dallas native Nic Nicosia became internationally known in the 1980s for his staged photographs, which played against the documentary nature of traditional photography by creating believable but fabricated narratives. Over the course of his career, Nicosia’s oeuvre has expanded to include films, drawings, and ultimately sculpture. We spoke to Nicosia in his studio about working across media and coming to sculpture through photography.

This May, Nasher Prize Dialogues will present a discussion in Glasgow, Scotland. Hosted in partnership with the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art and The Common Guild, one of Glasgow’s foremost visual art spaces, the talk will be centered on the role of appropriation and issues of copyright within contemporary sculptural practice. Katrina Brown, director of the Common Guild and one of the U.K.’s brightest curatorial lights, will moderate the conversation. Here for The Nasher, Brown gives a brief primer on the famously influential Glasgow art scene.

Excerpted from his essay in the exhibition catalogue First Sculpture: Handaxe to Figure Stone

Pop culture and the history of conceptual art tangle in this recent Nasher acquisition.

Curator Catherine Craft and Paper into Sculpture artist Marco Maggi talk about time, space, and our urgent need to slow down.

Curator Catherine Craft talks to Paper into Sculpture artist Norkio Ambe about the artist's journey into sculpture.

Working in the US and Israel for more than four decades, Joshua Neustein makes art that traverses conventional boundaries between artistic media, often with the effect of questioning and challenging the divisions, borders, and distinctions that shape our social, political, and personal lives. Curator Catherine Craft, spoke with Joshua Neustein in New York at his SoHo studio in 2012.

Nasher Sculpture Center Curator Jed Morse visited artist Nancy Rubins at the home and studio complex she shares with her husband, artist Chris Burden, in the hills outside of Los Angeles.

Nasher Sculpture Center Associate Curator Leigh Arnold writes about Roni Horn on the occasion of the Nasher Sculpture Center exhibition on view May 20 through August 20, 2017.

In the March 2013 budget resolution for FY 2014, the House Budget Committee threatened to cut the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) budget by 49%, arguing that NEA-funded activities constitute “a wealth transfer from poorer to wealthier citizens.” To understand the relationship between NEA funding and community wealth, the SMU National Center for Arts Research (NCAR) turned to data to answer the following question: Does NEA grant-making show bias toward arts organizations in wealthier communities, constituting an intercommunity transfer of wealth? We compared the community wealth characteristics of all arts organizations receiving NEA grants to those of all arts organizations that did not receive NEA grants. We found that NEA grants do not favor arts organizations in wealthier communities. We found no bias in NEA grant-making either toward or against organizations on the basis of the median household income of the surrounding community.

This year is offering a particularly rare confluence of impressive international art events in Europe: documenta will make its quinquennial appearance, this year in both Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany; the Münster Sculpture Projects is returning for its decennial public art event; and the Venice Biennale prepares for its more frequent exhibition of contemporary art. Amid all the activity, find out what themes and strategies some of the top global art events are dreaming up this year.

Artist, curator and educator Avi Varma reflects on the work of Nancy Grossman, whose leather head sculptures were at the forefront of a powerful shift in twentieth century art, from modernist to post-modernist concerns.

In keeping with the literary theme of this summer’s Foundations exhibition, below is an annotated list of six recommended books that reveal the wide-ranging connections between artists and writers throughout the 20th century. Whether it be poetry, folklore, memoir, or historical fiction, readers are sure to find something of interest.

Nasher Sculpture Center summer exhibition artist Roni Horn is an avid reader and frequently includes excerpts from books in the subtitles of her work. Take a moment this summer to get into the artist’s mindset by checking out a book or two that the artist quotes in the subtitles of her glass sculptures on view in Roni Horn.

Curator Catherine Craft, Ph. D. shares insights on the daily life of Jean Arp from her travels to the archives of artist in Berlin. 

Constructivism, an artistic movement born during the onset of the Bolshevik Revolution, embraced abstraction as a means to represent intangible attributes of the universe at large. Amid social and political upheaval, Russian artists like Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner interpreted abstraction as the highest form of creative expression, a bridge to a more genuine reality based on scientific aspiration and spiritual transcendence. Pevsner, in particular, sought to employ a formal language that examined the visual relationship between positive and negative space, as well as movement and time.

The 2017 Nasher Prize Laureate Pierre Huyghe has profoundly expanded the parameters of sculpture through artworks encompassing a variety of materials and disciplines, bringing cinema, music, and dance into contact with science and philosophy and incorporating time-based elements as diverse as microclimates, ice, rituals, parades, robotics, computer programs, games, dogs, bees, or microorganisms.

British artist and recent UTD CentralTrak resident, Kate Yoland, interviewed Mai-Thu Perret for the website Art This Week when Sightings: Mai-Thu Perret opened in March. The two artists had a fascinating conversation that ranged from Perret’s notions of utopia and the conflicts in the Middle East that inspired the work in the show, to the ideas behind the two performances she will stage here at the Nasher in June. 

The Nasher’s Communication Director Lucia Simek caught up with Diana recently and chatted about this most recent work, as well as what’s up next for the artist.

Nasher Assistant Curator, Leigh Arnold, spoke with Chan and Golia about Chalet Dallas and how they will adapt it to its new, vastly different environs in Renzo Piano’s Nasher gallery. What follows is a condensed version of their conversation, which has been edited for flow.

On October 17, 2015, the Nasher hosted 40 high school and college students from schools around North Texas to be part of an interactive learning experience in Chalet Dallas. Students were invited to read about the project, then meet in the space to discuss with other students and create art with artists. We asked four participants to share their take on the day.

Between 2003 and 2007, the sculptor Giuseppe Penone created Il Giardino delle Sculture Fluide (The Garden of Fluid Sculptures) for La Venaria Reale near Turin, Italy. Born in nearby Garessio in 1947, Penone is widely regarded as one of Italy’s leading contemporary artists. 

Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection On the Road

This fall, one of the most extraordinary works in the Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection, Pablo Picasso’s Flowers in a Vase, will travel to New York to be featured in a landmark exhibition of the artist’s sculptures at The Museum of Modern Art.

Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection Highlight

The Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection is fortunate to number among its holdings seven sculptures by Pablo Picasso, several of which will be on view at the Nasher Sculpture Center this fall.

As a Collections Registrar, I am seldom able to form relationships with the pieces I care for in the same manner as a curator, artist, or patron. The stories that I learn about an individual artwork are typically not revealed to the public, and a relationship forms through a particular level of intimacy.