NOW/THEN/AGAIN: Contemporary Art in Dallas 1949-1989 Page: 9
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fragile, too heavy, or so light-sensitive that they are difficult to move for study
purposes. Those of us who care for the DMA's collections and their presentation to
the public made several decisions. First, we asked our registrar to produce a list of all
relevant objects from our superb computer data bank. Secondly, we gathered photo-
graphs of as many of those objects as we could. Thirdly, we set aside a room in the
museum so that we could work with those photographs in long collaborative sessions.
And finally, we created a curatorial and publications team to make the project work.
The curatorial team consisted of both Sue Graze, Curator of Contemporary Art,
and Charles Venable, Associate Curator of Decorative Arts. Charles was included
because of the museum's firm commitment to the establishment of a vital and im-
portant collection of contemporary design and decorative arts as part of our already
well-established collections of painting, sculpture, graphic arts, and photography,
presided over by Sue Graze. These curatorial experts were assisted in the conception
and design of the installation by Barney Delabano, the museum's Curator of Exhibi-
tions since 1958, and Gary Cunningham, the principal partner in the Dallas architec-
tural firm of Cunningham Architects and one of a number of creative young
architects in Dallas. The rationale for this decision to work with a young architect as
well as the museum's own superb designer was two-fold. First, they are of different
generations, one having been an adult throughout the course of the period covered by
the exhibition and the other having "grown up" in it, thus bringing different tastes
and experiences to the curatorial process. Secondly, since Barney Delabano is in-
tensely involved with works of art and Gary Cunningham with architectural form,
they have collaborated with the curators to produce an installation for NOW/THEN/
AGAIN which combines the most sophisticated of current architectural ideas with a
reverence for works of art themselves.
All four of these "principals" in the installation met regularly with Elizabeth
Simon, the Curatorial Assistant in charge of research, for long sessions in a wonderful
room which we quickly designated as "The War Room." In it, the relative merits of
individual works of art were hotly disputed, the "movements" in post-War art argued,
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Brettell, Richard R. NOW/THEN/AGAIN: Contemporary Art in Dallas 1949-1989, book, 1989; Dallas, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth307668/m1/14/: accessed May 1, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Dallas Museum of Art.