Dallas Museum of Art

The Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) is a major encyclopedic art museum located in the Dallas Arts District of downtown Dallas, Texas. Founded in 1903, the DMA is among the ten largest art museums in the country and is distinguished by its innovative exhibitions, educational programs, and global collection. The museum has grown from a small group of art aficionados at the Dallas Public Library into a 370,000-square-foot building that houses more than 25,000 pieces of art. At the heart of the museum and its programs are its encyclopedic collections, which encompass more than 24,000 works and span 5,000 years of history, representing a full range of world cultures. Established in 1903, the museum welcomes more than 600,000 visitors annually. The DMA sits alongside the Nasher Sculpture Center, the AT&T Performing Arts Center, and other cultural institutions that define one of the largest urban arts districts in the country.

History

Founding and Early Years

The Dallas Museum of Art traces its beginnings to the Dallas Art Association, which was founded by a group of eighty citizens in 1903. Since its inception, the museum's facilities and most of its collections have been owned by the city of Dallas and operated and overseen by the board of trustees of the museum. The first museum facility opened in 1909 under the name Free Public Art Gallery of Dallas. It occupied a building in Fair Park that was later damaged by a storm. The association originally displayed paintings within the Dallas Public Library, an arrangement championed by civic leaders who believed art and education belonged together in the life of a growing city.

Activity at the gallery accelerated with the appointment of artist and art historian John S. Ankeny as the museum's first professional director in 1929. Ankeny secured exhibitions of national importance, offered weekly lectures and art classes, and published a monthly newsletter. In 1932 the museum was renamed Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, and the next year it moved into the Dallas Power and Light Company building. In early 1934 Ankeny was succeeded by Lloyd LePage Rollins, under whom a $500,000 city bond issue was passed to build a new museum in Fair Park.

The new facility, completed in 1936, opened with an exhibition of European and American art presented in conjunction with the Texas Centennial Exposition that attracted more than 154,000 visitors. The museum, renamed the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts in 1932, relocated to a new art deco facility within Fair Park in 1936, on the occasion of the Texas Centennial Exposition. This new facility was designed by a consortium of Dallas architects in consultation with Paul Cret of Philadelphia.

The Bywaters Era and the "Red Art" Controversy

Richard Foster Howard (1936–41) and Louise Britton McCraw (1942) succeeded Rollins as directors of the museum; McCraw was followed by Jerry Bywaters, a regionalist artist and critic who led the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts for twenty-one years. Bywaters specialized in southwestern and Mexican art, and under his stewardship the museum focused primarily, though not exclusively, on regional art.

The museum's commitment to education was manifested in the Museum School of Art, begun in 1941, which offered children and adult classes in sculpture and ceramics, lithography, painting, life drawing, and other subjects. Such prominent artists as Merritt T. Mauzey, Otis M. Dozier, Coreen M. Spellman, Evaline C. Sellors, Octavio Medellín, Roger Winter, and David McManaway taught at the museum school until the mid-1960s, when the school was closed after a study committee determined that other institutions in Dallas were serving similar needs.

Acquisitions under Bywaters's leadership focused on works by leading contemporary artists such as Rufino Tamayo, Alexandre Hogue, William Zorach, George Grosz, Thomas Hart Benton, Edward Hopper, Alexander Calder, and Jackson Pollock.

The Bywaters era was not without conflict. In March 1955 the Public Affairs Luncheon Club, a local women's group, charged the museum with exhibiting the work of artists with Communist affiliations and neglecting the work of Dallas artists. The museum temporarily removed works by Pablo Picasso, Diego Rivera, and other ideologically suspect artists from display. On December 7, 1955, the board of trustees issued a statement that they would "exhibit and acquire works of art only on the basis of their merit as works of art."

Merger and Expansion

In 1963 the museum supplemented its permanent collection and increased its board of trustees to eighty-two members through a merger with the Dallas Museum of Contemporary Art. The permanent collections of the two museums were then housed within the DMFA facility, suddenly holding significant works by Paul Gauguin, Odilon Redon, Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, Gerald Murphy, and Francis Bacon.

By the late 1970s, the greatly enlarged permanent collection and the ambitious exhibition program fostered a need for a new museum facility. Under Harry Parker's direction, the museum was able to move once again, to its current venue, at the northern edge of the city's business district, in what is now designated the Dallas Arts District. The $54 million facility, designed by New York architect Edward Larrabee Barnes, was financed by a 1979 City bond election, together with private donations. The project was galvanized by the slogan "A Great City Deserves a Great Museum," and the new building opened in January 1984.

Approximately 500 exhibitions were organized by the DMA from 1903 to 1983, reflecting the development of both the museum and the city of Dallas, documenting a progression of cultural, social, and political environments throughout eight decades.

Architecture

The Dallas Museum of Art is located in the Arts District of downtown Dallas, Texas, along Woodall Rodgers Freeway between St. Paul and Harwood. The building is one of the defining structures of the Dallas Arts District and has established the aesthetic character of that neighborhood since its opening.

Designed by American architect Edward Larrabee Barnes, the Dallas Museum of Art spans across more than 150,000 square feet of exhibition areas. The new building was designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes and John MY Lee Associates, the 2007 winner of the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal. The construction of the building spanned in stages over a decade. The pivotal component of the Dallas Arts District is Edward Larrabee Barnes' sprawling Dallas Museum of Art. The building's trademark barrel vault aligns with Flora Street at this location.

When the current building opened in the mid-1980s, several prominent artists were commissioned to contribute site-specific works. Artists commissioned to create site-specific works especially for the Dallas Museum of Art included Ellsworth Kelly, Sol LeWitt, Richard Fleischner, and Claes Oldenburg with Coosje van Bruggen.

The museum's outdoor spaces are equally notable. One of the most distinctive exterior spaces in downtown Dallas is Barnes' walled sculpture garden at the DMA. Four parallel water walls subtly divide the expansive space into a series of smaller-scaled "rooms," which are further enriched by landscape architect Dan Kiley's sensitive landscaping and the placement of modern sculpture. The pervasive presence of falling water provides a refreshing respite to Dallas' arid climate, and also masks the sounds of city life beyond the garden walls.

The museum also maintains a significant research library on its premises. The Mildred R. and Frederick M. Mayer Library, the museum's non-circulating research library, contains over 50,000 volumes available to curators and the general public.

Collection

The museum's vast collection represents a full range of world cultures spanning every time period from the third millennium BC to the present day. The permanent galleries are organized thematically and geographically, making it one of the most encyclopedic collections in the American South.

The permanent exhibits on display can be found grouped in galleries devoted to Arts of the Americas, Contemporary Art, Arts of Africa, Arts of Asia, American Art, Decorative Arts and Design, Classical Art, and Latin American Art.

The American art collection includes paintings, sculptures, and works on paper from the United States from the colonial period to World War II, and art from Mexico and Canada. Among the highlights of the collection are Duck Island (1906) by Childe Hassam, Lighthouse Hill (1927) by Edward Hopper, That Gentleman (1960) by Andrew Wyeth, Bare Tree Trunks with Snow (1946) by Georgia O'Keeffe, and Razor and Watch by Gerald Murphy. One of the most important pieces in the collection is The Icebergs (1861) by Frederic Edwin Church, a painting long referred to as a lost masterpiece. The painting was given to the museum in 1979 by Norma and Lamar Hunt.

Contemporary artists within the collection whose reputations are well established include Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Bruce Nauman, and Robert Smithson. In recent years, the museum has shown a strong interest in collecting the work of contemporary German artists such as Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, and Anselm Kiefer.

The Dallas Museum of Art also has one of the most thorough collections of Texas art. This is in great part thanks to Jerry Bywaters, director of the DMA from 1943 to 1964, who was also one of the Dallas Nine, an influential group of Texas artists.

The Keir Collection of Islamic Art Gallery houses a private collection of Islamic art currently on long-term loan to the Dallas Museum of Art. Selected works from the 18th and 19th centuries offer a view into artistic practices and production in Iran, India, and the Ottoman Turkish lands during the beginning of the modern era.

The Art of the Americas collection includes more than 4,000 pieces of art spanning 3,000 years, representing the artists' achievements and cultural heritage of 16 countries in the Western Hemisphere.

Programs and Public Access

General admission to the museum is free and includes viewing the museum's collection galleries and most exhibitions; selected special exhibitions and programs require an admission ticket. This free-admission model for the permanent collection, restored in 2013, has made the DMA one of the most accessible major art museums in the country. Since resuming free public admission in 2013, the DMA has welcomed more than 3.2 million people.

The museum offers a range of public programs including a monthly Late Night when the museum is open until midnight, Second Thursday with a Twist which highlights the museum's collection through activities and performances with a pop culture theme, and Arts & Letters Live, a literary and performing arts series for all ages that features award-winning authors and performers of regional, national, and international acclaim.

To get to the museum, visitors can take any DART train to the St. Paul station and walk north to the museum's Ross Avenue entrance.

See Also

• Dallas Arts District
• Nasher Sculpture Center
• Fair Park
• Perot Museum of Nature and Science