Nasher Public and Katy Trail Art: Nic Nicosia

at Katy Trail, Thomsen Overlook

February 20 - November 21, 2023

Best known for his work in photography and film, Nicosia initially came to international prominence as part of the Pictures Generation, artists who came of age in the 1970s and whose work was suffused with images from popular culture that also included figures such as Richard Prince, Laurie Simmons, and Cindy Sherman. Although he often built sets and props for his elaborately staged photographs, Nicosia only began to make sculptures around 2009–10. Early experiments in paper clay and hydrocal included a group of eccentric personages reminiscent of works by Max Ernst, whimsical wire portraits harkening back to the early work of Alexander Calder, and anonymous figures taking on various poses and personas. Many of these were made independently of his photography, but they soon began to populate the models for his staged photographs and, more recently, real domestic interiors, resulting in images that confound reality and artifice.

Urban Historical Reclamation and Recognition

December 10, 2022 - December 31, 2023

Conceived and steered by Dallas artist, curator, and veteran activist Vicki Meek, Nasher Public: Urban Historical Reclamation and Recognition will be a socially engaged public art project that enlists a collective of local artists and historians to create a contemporary ‘monument’ in collaboration with a Dallas community that is underrepresented in public history efforts.

Nasher Public: Jeff Gibbons and Gregory Ruppe

at Katy Trail, 2620 Katy Trail @ N. Houston St – Katy Trail @ Harvard Ave

November 9, 2022 - April 23, 2023

Artists Jeff Gibbons and Gregory Ruppe have created an installation that runs the length of the Katy Trail, from the Thomsen Overlook to just south of where the trail intersects Knox Street. Entitled Borest Forest, Grunting Grasses, the installation comprises a series of vignettes featuring sculptures of squirrels that appear at intervals along the trail. The works may blend naturally into the environment of the trail, distinguished from the real animals only by their fixity, as well as their uncanny human faces, which resemble those of the artists themselves. The various placements of the sculptures along the trail suggest a narrative, a slightly surrealist story, like a fairy tale, that reflects the vaguely otherworldly experience of the trail itself—a thin thread of nature strung along an industrial rail line that runs through the urban environs of Uptown.

Nasher Public: Celia Eberle

at the Nasher

July 23 - October 2, 2022

Celia Eberle’s Nasher Public installation titled Waiting for Robot portends a future that may never arrive—one where the power dynamics between automation and human engineering have reversed, allowing for the rise of artificial intelligence and technology’s control over humankind.

Nasher Public: Liss LaFleur

at the Nasher

May 7 - July 17, 2022

For her Nasher Public installation, Liss LaFleur presents the inaugural exhibition of The Queer Birth Project, a collaborative arts and research-based project that promotes a radically inclusive view of pregnancy, birth, and family building.

Nasher Public: Christian Cruz

December 4, 2021 - January 30, 2022

For her Nasher Public installation, Christian Cruz returns to two works from her 2020 solo exhibition at the Dallas-based gallery, ex ovo, and expands them in scale and concept. Comprising a suspended cloth sculpture and a column of stacked plastic laundry baskets, Cruz’s Nasher Public installation, titled Pink Collar // Children’s Linen, focuses on the unseen and undervalued labor performed by domestic workers.

Nasher Public: Alicia Eggert

at 2000 Ross Avenue

November 13, 2021 - September 3, 2023

For her Nasher Public commission at 2001 Ross Avenue, Alicia Eggert has made The Time for Becoming.  A steel structure with red neon lettering, the work of art shifts between messages.  “NOW IS ONLY FOR THE TIME BEING” changes to “NOW IS ALWAYS THE TIME FOR BECOMING.”  The work continues Eggert’s philosophical exploration of language and time.  Using the language of commercial signage such as neon, steel, plastic, inflatables, and flowers, Eggert poses existential conundrums.  Messages imparted in her works have included “This present moment used to be the unimaginable future” which transforms into “This moment used to be the future,” as well as “All the light you see is from the past,” which changes to “All you see is past.”  Taking inspiration from astrophysics, existential philosophy, and semiotics, these “signs” highlight and question one’s experience of reality from a cosmic perspective.

Nasher Public: Sara Cardona

at Katy Trail, 4000 Cambrick Street

October 23, 2021 - March 20, 2022

For her Nasher Public commission on the Katy Trail, Sara Cardona considered the essence and history of the Trail as a site of transit, transport, and transition.  Entitled Seeding the Path, the five sculptures suspended from the trees over the Katy Trail between Cambrick Street and Fitzhugh Avenue feature vibrant colors and dynamic geometric patterns, the latter recalling seed pots from the ancient Mimbres and contemporary Acoma cultures native to the Southwest, ceramic vessels which were used to secure and transport seeds and represent the potential for renewal.  The forms also resemble enlarged versions of these indigenous ceramics, as well as Akari lanterns, a traditional Japanese form enlivened in the mid-20^th century by modernist sculptor Isamu Noguchi (an American artist of Japanese ancestry who lived 1904–1988).  Cardona connected the spirit of the seed pots and Akari lanterns, which means “light” as well as “lightness of being,” with the sense of renewal contemporary users of the Katy Trail seek through exercise or connection with nature.

Nasher Public: Oshay Green

at The Power Station, 3816 Commerce Street

October 23, 2021 - February 20, 2022

For Nasher Public, Oshay Green has made his largest sculpture to date.  The work continues his use of a three-dimensional lozenge or rounded octahedron form and takes its title, Mundane Egg, from a chapter in The Secret Doctrine, a 19^th-century theosophical text by Helena Blavatsky.  In Blavatsky’s book, the mundane egg serves as a metaphor for the origin of creation, equally applicable to the cosmos or a work of art, the new entity breaking through its protective shell to emerge into existence. 

Nasher Public: Linda Ridgway

Herself

August 19 - September 12, 2021

Linda Ridgway’s attentiveness to the rhythms of nature and its echoes in poetry has sustained more than three decades of involvement in sculpture, drawing, and printmaking. For her Nasher Public installation, she has brought together five works to form a meditation on time, memory, and touch, drawn from her experiences over the months of the pandemic and its aftermath.

Nasher Public: Brian Molanphy

July 22 - August 15, 2021

Artist Brian Molanphy has been working primarily in ceramics throughout his two-decade career, but the issues that he explores through this material are the conceptual and physical concerns of sculpture.  For his Nasher Public installation, titled Silent Partner, Molanphy brings together a variety of series of ceramics made over the past eight years in an innovative installation that occupies the floor and the wall—territory not typically associated with presentations of ceramics—examining the varied ways one defines space, both within the ceramics themselves as well as the space of the gallery.  Molanphy will make drawings on the glass façade of the gallery on July 24 and August 7, further mediating and changing the visitor’s experience of the space.

Nasher Public: Cameron Schoepp

at the Nasher

June 24 - July 18, 2021

For the past two decades, Cameron Schoepp has made work that compels viewers to reconsider the familiar.  Whether sculptural forms drawn from everyday life, likes hats, benches, or rugs, Schoepp’s treatment raises them from their utilitarian reference points to objects of esthetic and philosophical consideration.  He often combines and arranges these so that they create spaces of their own, a new kind of space that obliges one to consider it, and one’s own presence, on different terms.

Nasher Public: Paul Winker

at 3708 Lexington Avenue

June 25 - December 31, 2021

For Nasher Public, painter Paul Winker has made his first sculpture, Untitled (Shroud), using much the same process he follows for his paintings.  Winker’s paintings start with drawings he makes with his finger on a computer touch pad.  These unpremeditated gestures take on an awkward precision in the computer.  They are slightly wonky, akin to the simplicity of finger painting, but with a more precise edge as the computer translates the touch of his fingermarks.  These computer-mediated finger drawings then become sources for his paintings, which he paints the traditional way with brush on canvas.  The Nasher Public commission gave Winker the opportunity to manifest one of his painted shapes in three dimensions.  Rather than painting the form on a squared canvas, he produced the wavy rectangle as a free-standing sculptural form, using much the same materials and techniques as his paintings, but adapting them to outdoor display with the technical advice of renowned Dallas architect, Gary Cunningham.

Nasher Public: Lauren Cross

at For Oak Cliff, 907 E. Ledbetter Drive

June 19, 2021 - June 30, 2022

For her Nasher Public installation at For Oak Cliff, A Moment of Silence / Let Freedom Ring, Lauren Cross takes as inspiration the announcement of the abolition of slavery in Galveston, Texas, June 19, 1865, two and half years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.  The spot at which slaves in Texas were formally informed of their freedom is now a parking lot, its significance indicated by a simple historical marker near a bench and a few trees.  The simple and understated marking of the site belittles its historical importance yet is consistent with the way the lives of African Americans in the United States have been overlooked and underappreciated.  For Cross, it also signifies the starting point of a journey that continues to this day.

Nasher Public: Jer'Lisa Devezin

at the Nasher

May 27 - June 20, 2021

Jer’Lisa Devezin’s soft sculpture titled Beaucoup Shive / Madam C.J. Walker ain’t got nothin’ on me comprises millions of strands of discarded, found, and discounted synthetic and human hair in a towering monument to Black people and the residue they leave behind.

Nasher Public: Artstillery

at Lone Star Missionary Baptist Church, 323 West Main Street

June 18, 2021 - December 31, 2022

Artstillery, an experimental performance group based in the Dallas neighborhood of Oak Cliff, has been working for five years with the residents of West Main Street, a tiny neighborhood with a long history in West Dallas, documenting their stories and working to save important structures that are quickly disappearing due to rapid gentrification in the area.  The project, called Family Dollar (2016–2021), is an extensive archiving effort that includes documentary film, architectural preservation, and live, immersive, though socially-distanced performances that are also recorded for on-demand digital and VR experiences.  As part of Nasher Public, the Nasher Sculpture Center partnered with Artstillery to support and amplify each layer of Family Dollar, helping bring awareness to the group’s important work and to the stories of the West Dallas community. 

Nasher Public: Dan Lam

at the Nasher

April 29 - May 23, 2021

For the past seven years, Dan Lam has created a menagerie of amorphous sculptures that play with the line between beauty and ugliness, attraction and repulsion, the sensuous and the disturbing.  The artist broadly categorizes the organic forms under the monikers Blobs (wall-mounted mounds), Drips (piles that drip over an edge, such as shelf or table), and Squishes (mounds that seem to rise up on sprouted appendages).  Made of polyurethane foam, acrylic paint, and epoxy resin, the forms take on a kaleidoscope of colors—from day-glo pinks and yellows to neon greens, and from shimmering silvers to dark shiny eggplant purples—and are often studded with spikes of equally vibrant hues.  The works are inviting in their coloration and tactility, but suggest an element of danger or discomfort, like beautiful yet poisonous jellyfish or microorganisms grown to a disturbing size.

Nasher Public: Melanie Clemmons

at the Nasher

April 1 - 25, 2021

The Nasher Sculpture Center presents its first exhibition of New Media art with Melanie Clemmons’s Likes Charge, Light Tear, a hybrid in-person/virtual installation for Nasher Public. Noting that “[we] routinely discover that our experiences with the internet and digitality mask horrifying structures that exploit and divide us” even as we increasingly rely on digital connections and online platforms in our daily lives, Clemmons seeks to use this very technology toward more positive and constructive ends by making it a conduit for healing and care.
 

Nasher Public: Shelby David Meier

A Part of the Whole

February 25 - March 21, 2021

Shelby David Meier’s Nasher Public installation, A Part of the Whole, invites viewers to consider the role everyday objects play in our lives and to reflect on our relationship with the things we leave behind.

Nasher Public: Vicki Meek

at the Nasher

January 7 - February 14, 2021

Taking its title from a lyric of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” the Black national anthem, Vicki Meek’s Nasher Public installation Stony the Road We Trod offers a contemporary shrine dedicated to the Black community. Drawing upon the culture of Yoruba belief, Adinkra symbols of Ghana, and other metaphorical elements, Meek has transformed the Nasher Store Gallery into an uplifting space of healing and encouragement.

Nasher Public: Nyugen E. Smith

at the Nasher

December 10, 2020 - January 3, 2021

The work of artist Nyugen E. Smith examines the universal human experiences of memory, trauma, and spirituality through the multifarious impacts of colonialism on the African diaspora.  A first-generation Caribbean-American born in Jersey City, New Jersey, to Haitian and Trinidadian parents, and a Lecturer on Interdisciplinary Art at SMU in Dallas, Smith uses performance, found object sculpture, mixed media drawing, painting, video, photography, and writing to connect past upheavals with present political struggles.  For Nasher Public, Smith presents fourteen Spirit Carriers, a series of found object constructions that the artist began in 2016.  Suspended from the ceiling, the sculptures seem to float in the space, like eccentric, improvised air balloons.  Their characteristic shape derives from the crowns of Yoruba chiefs, whose beaded headdresses featured veils to shield the monarch’s visage from the public, thus also protecting viewers from the chief’s power.  Smith made the Spirit Carriers as vessels to carry and protect the spirits of unarmed people of color killed by the police, until, as the artist says, “the spirits can go where they need to go.”  This body of work can be seen as a conceptual and formal outgrowth of a larger series the artist began in 2005 called Bundlehouses—multimedia drawings as well as small- and large-scale found object sculptures—that recall the temporary shelters built by migrants with whatever resources they have at hand (usually what they manage to bring with them or find where they camp).  Both the Bundlehouses and Spirit Carriers speak powerfully and beautifully to the capricious circumstances and tenuousness and fragility of life in the contemporary world.

Nasher Public: Giovanni Valderas

at the Nasher

November 12 - December 6, 2020

In the second exhibition for Nasher Public at the Nasher Store gallery, Dallas-born artist Giovanni Valderas’s Grit/Grind takes its point of departure from the American dream of freedom, mobility, and success that owning a car has traditionally represented. Valderas has placed a single object in the gallery—a large, brightly colored piñata he created as a full-scale replica of the 1986 Nissan Sentra that was the first car his Guatemalan mother bought and in which she learned to drive. Valderas’s project draws upon his memories of the independence having a car of their own granted to his family but offers reflections as well upon the more sobering consequences of life among working poor families. For these communities, a car may be emblematic of a transitory life of frequent moves when the rent becomes too high or may even serve as a possible dwelling itself when other options are exhausted. These layers of meaning are apparent in the work’s title, Grit/Grind, as Valderas explains: “The grit that we all have coming from working class families, we get it done no matter what. Our bills need to be paid, so we are going to figure out a way to do that. But it is also the grind that takes a toll on us through constantly driving or constantly working low paying jobs, and we see that reflected in our health and our socio-economic status. We have brown and black families that have shorter life expectancies than say a white family in North Dallas.”

Nasher Public: Bernardo Vallarino

at the Nasher

October 15 - November 8, 2020

For the first installation of Nasher Public in the Nasher Store gallery, Fort Worth artist Bernardo Vallarino will present an iteration of an ongoing project called Pedacitos de Paz (Little bits of peace), which combines installation with video and addresses the persistence of violence in our society. The central element—hundreds of white ribbons looped in the style of advocacy movements and installed as a pile on a table—speaks to the sentiments of  “thoughts and prayers” that often follow such atrocities as mass shootings yet remain empty refrains without concrete actions for change. Several times throughout the duration of the exhibition, the artist will sit at the table within the installation to make these ribbons, a performance the public may witness through the exterior windows of the Nasher building. Inspired by Vallarino’s childhood experiences in Colombia  and in the US, where his family emigrated in the 1990s, Pedacitos de Paz will continue to grow as a body of work as long as the violent issues that spurred it into being persist.