The Big Center Hires the Big Voice for a Walk-On

And the answer to Stephen’s question (see below) about who the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts would get to make their opening-day announcement is really quite simple.

Just get the Greatest Voice for Announcing Anything in the World.

James Earl Jones

– who promptly gave the dignitaries and million-dollar arts patrons assembled at the Belo Mansion a little sampler (Jacques’ Seven Ages of Man speech from As You Like It, some reminiscences of playing Of Mice and Men at SMU, Fences on Broadway and The Great White Hope on stage and film — funny, there was nothing about this guy, though). And then Jones didn’t even announce the one (the only) new fact. The official opening date of the DCPA. That was left for John Eagle, head of the opening ceremony committee.

October 12, 2009.

Serenity

I’ve often thought that few people could improve on Dallas Morning News photographer David Woo’s classic shots of the Museum of Modern Art Fort Worth. He quickly latched on to the reflecting pool, letting Tadao Ando’s design shimmer like hammered gold at night or emphasizing its perfect geographic order in the day. But now MAMFW has posted a shot of its own from a different angle. And it’s lovely, too.

How is it that Fort Worth has two of the most serene spots in North Texas — the Japanese Garden and the Modern Art Museum?

A Million Here, A Million There, And It Starts to Add Up

Yesterday, it was a $3 million gift to the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts — an additional $3 million gift from Diane and Hal Brierley — but today, it’s a still-mysterious $6 million gift. The DCPA folks aren’t saying who, yet. But that makes 129 gifts of $1 million or more into the center’s $333 million kitty.

With their latest gift, the Brierleys have boosted their total donation to the DCPA to $8 million. The money is going to the  Diane and Hal Brierley Esplanade, which will run from the Wyly Theater through the Elaine D. and Charles A. Sammons Park. And then there’s the Brierley Encore Suite in the Winspear Opera House, kind of a fancy green room for receptions and the like.

Wall Street Fallout, Pts 3 and 4

• The current financial troubles have already affected the Seattle Art Museum in a highly unusual way: It shares ownership of its downtown Seattle building with Washington Mutual — the teetering-on-the-brink savings bank. What  happens when it’s the non-profit arts institution that is the solvent landlord, and the bank is the penniless tenant?
• Lehman Brothers Holding company owns about 3,500 contemporary art works — that now may be auctioned off in the wake of Lehman’s bankruptcy.  These include works by Louise Nevelson, Jasper Johns and Frank Stella.
  

  Auctioneers are experienced at liquidating corporate art collections. Sotheby’s has sold art for International Business Machines Corp. and Christie’s International has disposed of photography for bankrupt futures trader Refco Inc….

  The luster has faded for corporate art collections in general.

  “The golden age of corporate art buying was in the 1960s and 1970s, when fabled collections like IBM’s were made,” said Christie’s Americas President Marc Porter.

  Stacey Gershon, an art adviser and former senior curator of the JPMorganChase collection, said corporate art has a perception problem.

  “It just doesn’t jibe with the new lean-and-mean attitude on the street,” she said.

The Texas Sculpture Association Celebrates 25 Years

Karen Garrett cardboard sculpture currently on display in Bryan Tower

Guest blogger GAIL SACHSON is a member of the TSA 25th Anniversary Planning Committee and the Moderator of the Symposium Panel discussion.

The Mayor of Dallas and the Governor of Texas have proclaimed September to be Sculpture Month. So don’t be surprised when you notice that most galleries around town are exhibiting and encouraging sculpture. Architecturally large outdoor pieces, indoor table-size pieces, works of glass, iron, steel, bronze, brass, acrylic, paper and more. Texas Sculpture Assoiation membership shows are all over town, and sculpture enthusiasts are coming from all over Texas. Everyone is gathering at . . . where else? The Nasher Sculpture Center, Saturday, Sept. 20, for the celebratory TSA Sculpture Symposium.

Beginning with a breakfast of sculpturally perfect Dunkin’ Donuts, the day will be filled with a provocative panel discussion aboutcollecting sculpture, public art and sculpture trends. Ashley Tatum Casson, Director of the Gerald Peters Gallery, Kevin Vogel of Valley House and Thom Andriola from Houston’s New Gallery will represent the gallery views, while former Dallas Public Art Manager, Margaret Robinette, will rally support for Public Art.

Ted Pillsbury, former director of the Kimbell Museum, now with Heritage Galleries and Auction House, will be the Featured Speaker, while acclaimed sculptor James Surls will be the Keynote speaker.

We’ll be posing questions such as:

Is sculpture more difficult to sell than two-dimensional work?

Who is the typical sculptor collector?

How does an artist get involved in public art? Why should he/she want to?

What roles do corporations play in collecting and exhibiting sculpture?

Are sculptors different from other artists?

Can a woman make a strong statement in sculpture?

If you have the answers or want the answers or have questions or comments, e-mail me or join us on Saturday. E-mail Linda Hickman to register: lshickman@sbcglobal.net

George Steel, Agent of Change

Anthony Tommasini, the classical music critic of the New York Times, has written a bittersweet profile of George Steel, the new general director of the Dallas Opera. Sweet, because Tommasini clearly values Steel highly as an innovative New York musical theater presenter and producer (he has turned Columbia University’s Miller Theater into “a hotbed of adventurous programming”). Bitter, of course, because next month, Steel starts with the Dallas Opera. It’s an outfit that Tommasini, with a fair degree of accuracy, considers downright stodgy:

The Dallas Opera? Talk about conventional programming. This season the company is offering mostly comfy favorites: La Bohème, Die Fledermaus, The Marriage of Figaro, The Italian Girl in Algiers. In this context the inclusion of Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux seems downright risky.

But then, Steel argues, that’s precisely why the Dallas Opera hired him. In contrast to his earlier, more cautious statements about learning the ropes, Steel now sounds as though he’s been given something of a mandate to shake things up. Here’s hoping.

This, by the way, is one of the ancillary benefits (and increased pressures) of ambitious new buildings like the Winspear Opera House and the Wyly Theater. Citizens, in effect, are saying to these arts groups: We’ve given you the facility you ‘ve always wanted.

Now give us that world-changing art we’ve heard about.

Image from classicaldomain.org.

Where to Put the Piano

Expansion plans for The Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth are, well, expanding. Architect Renzo Piano (Nasher Sculpture Center) will now create two proposals for a new wing: one on what is now the museum’s west lawn, in addition to a previously identified spot across the street at Darnell and Arch Adams. Commenters on the Star-Telegram’s story are concerned about losing green space in the museum district (Zoom in for a quick look at green space to concrete/asphalt in the area) and obstructing the view of the Kimbell. Of course, building across the street makes it challenging - though not impossible - to integrate the museum and its addition. The museum hopes to make a choice by the end of the year. What do you think?

Tickets, Please

Unfair Park, the Dallas Observer’s blog, reports that the Dallas Theater Center is selling seats in the new Wyly Theater via a complicated “points” system akin to the one that the Dallas Opera used. These are systems that reward monetary contributions to the company over, say, long-term subscriber loyalty.

In short, ante up.

But Observer theater critic Elaine Liner opines that pushing for a “better” seat will be wasted. Given the vaunted flexibility of the new space, one seat’s sightlines could wind up as good as any other. Maybe. This might hold true for the first season or so, when directors and designers like to play with the new toys, find out what they’re capable of and, of course, show off.

But my experience with even the most experimental spaces — if they have regular resident companies and season offerings — is that eventually, they settle on certain, proven arrangements. It’s human nature and it’s smart: The backstage people learn what works. Also, the front-of-house people learn that, while some theatergoers like to find a new experience every time they attend, many other theatergoers don’t like the completely unexpected: Sorry, ma’am, but with this stage design, your favorite seat location will be pointed in the wrong direction.

The only theater companies that manage to re-invent the wheel each time are ones that don’t have expensive stagings. Or large audiences. That’s why off-off-Broadway (or Deep Ellum) spaces and their crowds tend to be smaller: These are the theatergoers who like the completely unexpected, and these are the theater spaces where seating is either always intimate or more or less dicey.

So … back to the DTC seating. If you want to play by this system, if you’re going to lay down the money, I’d say that front of house/front of balcony are likely to be safe bets. They usually are. The theater would be foolish to antagonize bigger donors by perching them somewhere inconvenient, whatever the arrangement.

Old Home for Shakespeare’s Plays

Archaeologists believe they have found the brick foundations of the Theatre – the performance space in London (in an area known as Shoreditch) where William Shakespeare first performed as an actor and where his first plays were staged. Built in 1576, it was home to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the company that the young Shakespeare first joined. Because of a dispute with the landowner, Giles Allen, the Theatre was dismantled by company master James Burbage, who’d built the wooden structure, and with the help of carpenter Peter Street and the rest of the Chamberlain’s Men, it was ferried at night across the Thames in pieces and rebuilt “in a new form” as the Globe, at the time, the largest amphitheater in London.

The excavated site will eventually be the home of the Tower Theater Company, which regularly performs Shakespeare’s plays.

Designing for Despots

The Los Angeles Times asks:

Certainly there has been precious little coverage in the Beijing media of a subject that has captured the attention of architects and critics throughout the West in recent months — whether firms should refuse on principle to work in China, particularly on high-profile government buildings. With an increasing share of the world’s most innovative architecture being sponsored by autocratic regimes, an age-old question has gained new traction on the eve of the Beijing Olympics: To what degree are architects responsible for the political records or ethical shortcomings of their clients?

It’s not just the question of China’s repressive politics. Western architects working on large projects may be accelerating “the widespread destruction of the city’s ancient fabric. Since winning the right to host the 2008 Olympics seven years ago, the government has forcibly displaced, according to one study, more than 1 million Beijing residents to make way for new construction.”

Rem Koolhaas, one of the architects behind the Wyly Theater, has designed the already famous CCTV building (above), the new headquarters of Chinese television.

Koolhaas has said all along he hopes the CCTV building will change the culture of the Chinese media and that the broadcaster might ultimately become a key force driving progress and openness. He also told the critic Deyan Sudjic that when it comes to building in China “a position of resistance seems somehow ornamental” — that it is egotistical to think that the government cares what you, as an architect, think about its human-rights or environmental record and might change its policies accordingly.