Artist Mary Miss’s commissioned installation, Stream Trace: Dallas Branch Crossing (2023), is a site-specific sculpture that follows the path of a buried stream passing beneath Nasher Sculpture Center. The artwork, a series of reflective X’s on stakes, originates within the garden walls of the museum and extends into area neighborhoods through participatory walks.
Dallas-based artists, writers, historians, and scientists will lead walking tours that loosely follow the original path of the Dallas Branch--a small stream that was encased in concrete and built over sometime in the early 20th century. The Dallas Branch originates in the present-day neighborhood of Uptown Dallas and outfalls at the Trinity River in the Design District. Participants in each walk will have the option to walk from the Nasher Sculpture Center toward the Dallas Branch's origin point or from the Nasher toward the outfall near the Trinity River.
Each tour will last approximately 1.5 hours. Participants are encouraged to bring a bicycle, use public transportation, or arrange a ride if they need to return to a vehicle at the walk’s point of origin. This is a rain or shine event, but may be cancelled in the case of extreme or threatening weather.
Register for Group A: Nasher to Uptown - Cynthia Mulcahy
Originating at Nasher Sculpture Center, ending in Uptown near Greenwood Cemetery
Walking distance approximately 1.5 miles
Register for Group B: Nasher to Design District - Tamara Johnson and Trey Burns
Originating at Nasher Sculpture Center, ending in Design District near Riverfront and Payne
Walking distance approximately 3 miles
If the event you wish to attend is sold out, you may add your name to the waiting list here.
About Cynthia Mulcahy
Cynthia Mulcahy is a Dallas-based conceptual artist and independent curator. Her intermedia works range from large-scale public interventions to small quiet gestures and often defy categorization. Be it a community square dance, farming as street theater, historical markers for public parks created during Jim Crow, or an evening of musical performances to recognize a city park’s forgotten history, Mulcahy’s research-driven practice reflects her training as an historian and often begins in the archive or in her community with a desire to re-investigate the historical record for the present moment. Questioning the divisions between various forms of art-related practice, the artist's work also promotes the concept and practice of art as activism. Mulcahy’s commitment to platforming the work of others through organizing exhibitions has focused on pressing contemporary subjects such as modern warfare and American militarism. Cynthia Mulcahy’s work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, NPR, The Dallas Morning News, D Magazine, and Glasstire. The artist is represented by Talley Dunn Gallery in Dallas, Texas.
About Trey Burns
Trey Burns is a lens-based artist, writer, and co-director of Sweet Pass Sculpture Park* based in Dallas, TX. His writing and photography has recently been published in the Nasher Magazine, Southwest Contemporary, and Burnaway. In general, the work looks in a self conscious documentary-style towards complex landscapes that are gnarled or interlaced. Recent installations favor site-response, and often create multimedia architecture for collaboration and collectivity. Burns is currently serving as a Lecturer in New Media at the University of North Texas.
*Sweet Pass is a 501(c)(3) artist-run organization which provides space and support for experimental and large-scale outdoor works by a diverse set of contemporary voices. In 2020 and 2021 SP received grants from the City of Dallas Office of Arts & Culture to launch Sculpture School a cohort based program to generate site-responsive works through active exploration and collective inquiry. In 2023 SPSS received a Grants for Arts Projects award from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).
About Tamara Johnson
Tamara Johnson received her BFA from University of Texas, Austin, TX and her MFA in Sculpture in 2012 from RISD. She headed to New York and became the studio assistant to Robert Gober for 6 years, when she returned to Dallas to teach and co-founded Sweet Pass Sculpture Park (an outdoor sculpture park with rotating exhibitions). Johnson has exhibited her work regularly throughout the US, including Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas; NYC Parks, NY; CUE Art Foundation, NY; Wave Hill Art Center, NY; Socrates Sculpture Park, NY; Ft Worth Modern Museum, TX; the Blanton Museum of Art, TX; Microscope Gallery, NY; LatchKey Gallery, NY; Ex Ovo, TX; and Keijsers Koning, TX. Some of her awards and recognitions include Moss/Chumley Award, Meadows Museum of Art, TX; National Endowment for the Arts Grant, US; the Brooklyn Arts Council Grant; NARS Foundation; The Santo Foundation, MO. In 2022 Johnson was awarded the Public Art Commission price in the city of West Sacramento in California, which will see her build a life size house on top of a former water tower structure. It will be one of the largest public sculptures in California.
Groundswell: Women of Land Art is made possible by leading support from the Texas Commission on the Arts, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Henry Luce Foundation, The Kaleta A. Doolin Foundation, and the Jean Baptiste "Tad" Adoue, III Fund of The Dallas Foundation. Generous support is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Wyeth Foundation for American Art. Additional support is provided by Joanne Bober, Humanities Texas, Ann and Chris Mahowald, Leigh Rinearson, the Dallas Tourism Public Improvement District (DTPID), and Susan Inglett.