DALLAS, Texas (May 14, 2020)—The Nasher Sculpture Center announces the launch of Nasher Windows, a new series of exhibitions sited within the Nasher’s entrance vestibule on Flora Street. The installations will be viewed through the windows from the outside of the Renzo Piano-designed museum, providing exhibition space for North Texas-based artists and offering the public an accessible way to view art while the building is closed. The first Nasher Windows exhibition will be viewable beginning Friday, May 22 and run until Wednesday, May 27.
Presented weekly until the museum resumes operating hours, Nasher Windows installations will run Friday-Wednesday and host a roster of early- and mid-career North Texas artists selected by the Nasher’s curatorial team of Jed Morse, Catherine Craft, and Leigh Arnold. Artists have been invited to submit proposals for the space, with especial interest in site-specific work or work made for exhibitions previously scheduled in other art spaces but cancelled due to the pandemic lockdown.
“During this time of crisis, before we can reopen the Nasher doors to the public, we are compelled to imagine new ways to show art to our local audiences, and to give our region’s artists a space to show their work,” says Director Jeremy Strick. “We are grateful that the beautiful building Renzo Piano designed affords us the opportunity to offer our front windows for this series of exhibitions. We hope that the effort contributes to our community’s healing, well-being, and enrichment.”
The first Nasher Windows exhibition will be presented by Dallas-based artist Tamara Johnson and run Friday, May 22 through Wednesday, May 27. Johnson’s work Deviled Egg and Okra Column, 2020, was slated for exhibition at the Dallas art space ex ovo before the show was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A fitting homage to the Nasher Collection, the piece is a nod to Brancusi’s Endless Column (1918) and features a mirroring tower of stacked deviled eggs and pickled okra, cast in resin and spanning the height of the vestibule space. Of the work, Johnson says: “Since moving back to Texas in 2018, my work has shifted to explicitly focus on a more personal iconography - my relationship to the South and the ways in which my (temporary) body moves and works within this familiar, yet unfamiliar landscape. Each of these works explore a personal terrain, embedding meaning in foods I associate with my upbringing, like deviled eggs, picked okra and Rotel. These items become condensed bouillon cubes of material meaning, holding vulnerability, sexuality, and humor in a delicate balance.”
For the second installment of Nasher Windows opening on May 29, artist Xxavier Edward Carter will present an installation called Start Livin’ in the New World, a title pulled from the hip hop band The Roots. The work on view will be a collaged ‘tapestry’ of paper receipts and the flotsam and jetsam of consumer culture, all bound together and suspended from a magnolia branch. Carter comments on the installation: “The scene created is a kind of terrarium or bonsai world of plastic, dead limbs, fake flowers, and a banner showing not only a journey in its material presence but a record of consumption, in other words the suburban dream. This space surveils the viewer being set inside of the institutional glass façade of the Nasher Sculpture Center during a global pandemic, echoing the words of the song, ‘It ain’t nowhere to run, it ain’t hardly nowhere to hide,’ at a time where communities of color are being disproportionately affected by a crisis that is being exacerbated by the consumption of capitalist living and a government that continues to adhere to corporate safety and racial divisions rather than investing in the people.”
About Tamara Johnson
Tamara Johnson (b. 1984, Waco, TX) currently lives in Dallas, TX and works primarily in sculpture, installation, performance and public art. Johnson obtained her BFA from the University of Texas at Austin in 2007 and her MFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 2012. Her recent projects have been exhibited at The Blanton Museum of Art (Austin, TX), Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (Salt Lake City, UT), Carillon Gallery at Tarrant County College (Ft Worth, TX), ex ovo gallery (Dallas, TX) and the Modern Museum (Ft Worth, TX) as well as various spaces in New York such as Socrates Sculpture Park, The CUE Art Foundation, Wave Hill, Maria Hernandez Park, SPRING BREAK Art Show, Air Mattress Gallery, Microscope Gallery, NURTUREart, Black Ball Projects, Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art and CR10 Arts. In 2018, Johnson was awarded a grant from the Brooklyn Arts Council to complete the first public art piece in Maria Hernandez Park in Brooklyn, NY. She has been awarded a grant from The Foundation for Contemporary, an Individual Artist Award from the Santo Foundation and most recently a Faculty Development Grant from Southern Methodist University (SMU) where she currently works as a Visiting Lecturer in Sculpture. In October 2018, Johnson and her partner, Trey Burns, opened Sweet Pass Sculpture Park - an art space in west Dallas featuring contemporary outdoor projects on a rotating basis. Sweet Pass Sculpture Park has received grants from the Nasher Sculpture Center, City of Dallas Office of Arts & Culture and the National Endowment for the Arts.
About Xxavier Edward Carter
Xxavier Edward Carter (1986) is a transdisciplinary artist born in Dallas, Texas with a BFA from Stanford University and an MFA from Southern Methodist University. His work is often presented as videos, publications, installations, and performances to encompass multi-sensorial, and layered circumstances encountered by the artist. Personal interactions, media bombardment, observed and lived experiences, and material excess/waste influence his work towards a complex revolutionary promise. These ecologically centered works are often heavily linked to the material history of currency in how it relates to the histories of marginalized people. Xxavier is of Black and Native American heritage and views his work as a continuation of the survival and storytelling practices of the cultures he was born into. Broader, he is interested in how these practices have their analogies across cultures worldwide. Stories of origins, the after life, superhuman beings, and of love and tragedy are the most compelling for him. Xxavier Edward Carter creates work dealing with what these stories mean in an often violent and oppressive context. His work bravely forges new ground by creating from the links of a chain that is often marked by the destructive history of humanity
Subsequent artists for Nasher Windows will be announced via media alert and on the Nasher Sculpture Center’s social media channels in the coming weeks.
Nasher Windows is made possible by generous support from John W. Dayton, given in memory of Donald Fowler.