DMA membership to be free!

Five good reasons to visit the soon-to-be-free Dallas Museum of Art

Michael Granberry / Reporter
November 28, 2012 | Permalink

Dallas Morning News--Arts GUIDE

For those who now have a license to visit the Dallas Museum of Art for free — well, at least you will when the “free” policy begins Jan. 21 — here’s a snapshot of what we recommend about the DMA, which will also free membership via its new Friends and Partners program:

1) Every Thursday from 5 to 9 p.m., you can take in the DMA’s “Thursday Night Live”program. Tomorrow night, you can listen listen to the Carolyn Lee Jones Sextet as part of the DMA’s Thursday night jazz series.

2) Through March 13, you can see the work of Glasgow-based artist Karla Black, who recently created two sculptures for the DMA, her first such project in the United States. As the DMA says in its own description, “Transforming light, fragile, often impermanent materials into powerful sculptures of commanding scale and presence, Black creates abstract works that resolutely eschew metaphor while simultaneously beckoning a complex series of associations.”

3) Texas art. The DMA offers Texas Artist Databases, a list of titles and dates for exhibitions presented by the DMA since 1909, and the Otis Dozier Sketchbooks, a digital collection that includes “nearly 1,500 sketches. When complete, it will make available over 6,200 images that comprise a complete representation of 130 sketchbooks by Texas regionalist artist Otis Dozier (1905-1987).”

4) The DMA’s current hot show, “Posters of Paris: Toulouse-Lautrec and His Contemporaries,”wraps up the day before free admission and free memberships begin. Even so, it’s a can’t-miss. Beginning with the early designs of “Jules Chéret – the ‘father of the poster’ — the exhibition explores the earliest days of the affiche artistique [artistic poster] and its flowering in Paris, first under Chéret in the 1870s and 1880s, and then with a new generation of artists including Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec,Pierre Bonnard, and Edouard Vuillard, artists who brought the poster to new heights in the 1890s.” The DMA says the exhibition “examines the story of the French artistic poster in all its complexity.”

5) The DMA is a community resource, which is why director Maxwell Anderson’s push to go “free” is so brilliant, because it puts the museum within reach of the entire community. On a regular basis, it hosts Arts & Letters Live (which brings name authors to town), lectures, gallery talks, concerts, film, teen workshops and other family events. The DMA is home to 22,000 works of art, spanning 5,000 years, though not all are on view at any one time. Artists whose work is currently on view include Jackson Pollock and Claude Monet. Plus, the DMA is home to a highly acclaimed African art collection.