NOW/THEN/AGAIN: Contemporary Art in Dallas 1949-1989 Page: 11
85 p. : ill. ; 28 cm.View a full description of this book.
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Dallas artist David McManaway
created this "Jomo Board" for the
opening of the new Gateway Gallery
in 1984.and the theory of installation design discussed. The result of this process of assess-
ment and argument is an installation that "reads" the collection of contemporary art
in the Dallas Museum in a systematic way for the first time in the history of this
institution. The word systematic, however, is not meant to be understood in an utterly
rigid sense, because works of art cannot be easily categorized. Indeed, many of the
most hallowed ideas about contemporary American and European Modernism were
not very helpful in our attempts to deal with the Dallas collection, and the installation
presents our collection in a way that will raise many questions while answering others.
Perhaps our greatest source of inspiration for this installation - aside from the
works of art themselves - were the hundreds of slides and photographs of earlier
installations of contemporary art in Dallas. These dominated the table in the center of
"The War Room" and made all of us realize how much about the present we can
learn from the past. One exhibition in particular seemed linked to our own endeavors
and that was the 1975 DMFA installation of the work of Dallas artist, David
McManaway. Called simply PROJECTS I, the installation itself was an assemblage of
hundreds of separate objects found, positioned, and, hence, interpreted by the artist.
McManaway's fascination with process and arrangement as well as with the physical
integrity of individual objects taught us certain lessons. Following McManaway's
suggestive lead, we came to realize that as designers of an exhibition of works of art,
we are, in a certain sense, artists ourselves, and that while we must always respect
what we know to have been the intentions of the individual artist, we affect in
profound ways the meaning of works of art simply by positioning them.
The first major installation of modern art in Dallas was held the same year in
which the Calder was acquired. The paintings were sent from Chicago and were part
of the famous Winterbotham Collection, which was from its beginnings in 1921 the
first museum-acquired collection of modern art formed in America. When the
Winterbotham pictures came to Dallas, every effort was made on the part of the
museum to insure that the public understood just what these strange artists like
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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/m1/16/: accessed May 1, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Dallas Museum of Art.