Back in September, a video and architectural renderings of the new Perot Museum of Nature & Science were released. Groundbreaking on the $185 million building happens later this year with construction scheduled to be completed in 2013.
But a recent visit to the website of the design firm Morphosis – prompted by lead architect Thom Mayne [...]

This Friday, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra will hold a major press conference, but so far, it has not revealed even the topic of discussion. At the same time, the DSO has been enticing (or taunting) us — we, the officially jaded skeptics in the media — with tidbits such as: The announcement will be “the [...]

Richard Rodzinski, the head of the Van  Cliburn Piano Competition who retired in July after 23 years, has essentially gone over to the competition. The Star-Telegram reports that Russian conductor Valery Gergiev, who was appointed to revive the long-faded Tchaikovsky International Music Competition, asked Rodzinski for advice in June. What was a one-shot consultation has [...]

Dallas author/literary agent James Donovan has won the 2009 nonfiction award from the Writers’ League of Texas for his book, A Terrible Glory:  Custer and the Little Big Horn.
The award, which comes with a cash prize of $1,000, will be presented during the Texas Book Festival on Oct. 31 at the State Capitol in Austin. [...]

– it’s now online as one of Gary Cogill’s WFAA videos, all 20 breathless minutes of it (” “magnificent!” is pretty much how the prose starts). Mighty cool visuals, though. A first look at that rooftop logo, for instance, with a big aerial reverse zoom that makes Cogill look like a tiny bridegroom figure topping [...]

Beginning Thursday, the Barry Whistler Gallery will host Eight Track Tapes: The Bucks Burnett Collection. This exhibit will feature an extensive collection of rare eight track tapes assembled over a 20-year period by Dallas record store owner and music producer Bucks Burnett. Burnett is launching the exhibit to begin funding and awareness for [...]

Live theater is such an ephemeral thing, it’s hard to assess the real merit of performances and productions from even a few years ago — if you never saw them, if they were never recorded. Although I met him twice, I never saw a show directed by Paul Baker, the founder of the Dallas Theater [...]

Paul Baker, who founded the Dallas Theater Center in 1959 and was the first principal of Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, died Sunday morning due to complications from pneumonia. He was 98.
The Baker Idea Institute’s Web site has a short biography that highlight’s Baker’s numerous achievements in the fields [...]

TOP OF THE LINE OR END OF THE LINE? NYTimes architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff writes that Dallas’ Arts District may mark a new beginning around these parts but it’s actually the last such major downtown renovation project currently in the American pipeline. (Well, there’s Miami’s, but Ouroussoff counts that one as “finished” because the money’s [...]

Unfair Park has a very interesting, hot-off-the-presses-kind of story about Robert Edsel — the author of Rescuing Da Vinci and The Monuments Men, both books about the Allied efforts to retrieve artworks that the Nazis looted. Edsel declares he’s found a pair of stolen paintings — at SMU’s Meadows Museum. They’re by Murillo, the Spanish [...]