Visual Arts

A new chapter in the history of the University of Texas at Dallas opens tonight far from the university's Richardson's campus.

REX C. CURRY/Special Contributor

A furnished loft at Centraltrak, the UTD artists' residency at 800 Exposition Ave. in Dallas

In a former post office building a block from Fair Park, UTD is inaugurating Centraltrak, a program and facility to bring graduate students in aesthetic studies together with international artists-in-residence. The recycled building provides four furnished live-work loft spaces for artists, plus four studios for UTD students, exhibition space and a director's office.

The facility opens to the public with a reception and an exhibition titled "False Space and Time of the Apartment," a line from J.G. Ballard's 1969 novel Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A.

REX C. CURRY/Special Contributor

Centraltrak occupies a former post office building a block from Fair Park.

Blurring lines between art and architecture, the inaugural show includes works by the San Francisco architecture firm Anderson and Anderson, Dallas sculptors and installation artists Lily Hanson and Tim Stokes, Houston installation artists Dean Ruck and Dan Havel, French architect Nathalie Wolberg and German sculptor and installation artist Stefan Eberstadt.

Ms. Wolberg will be one of Centraltrak's first four artists-in-residence, along with Dallas sculptor Ted Setina, Dutch designer-sculptor Daniel Rozenberg and Argentine video artist Florencia Levy.

REX C. CURRY/Special Contributor

Charissa Terranova, the director of Centraltrak, curates the gallery space and acts as a liaison between the project and other galleries.

The artist residencies will run from two weeks to a year. UTD students chosen for the program will be given free live-work space for one year or two, while they complete MFA degrees in arts and technology.

The director of Centraltrak, whose name was inspired by the nearby Houston and Texas Railroad tracks, is Charissa Terranova, assistant professor of aesthetic studies at UTD. Formerly on the faculty of Southern Methodist University's Meadows School of the Arts, Dr. Terranova is also a freelance art critic for The Dallas Morning News.

"I'm curating the gallery space and inviting lecturers and working as a liaison between Centraltrak and the Dallas Museum of Art and other gallery spaces in the city, and also the arts magnet high school," she says.

"I feel a little bit like a den mother. This feels like a family, and also like a collective, in the most interesting sense of the word."

Centraltrak's opening show, divided between the indoor gallery and a covered, grilled-in loading dock outside, reflects Dr. Terranova's academic interests. She has two degrees in art history and two, including a Ph.D. from Harvard, in architectural history and theory.

Centraltrak is UTD's second artist residency program. The first, active between 2002 and 2005, was located at South Side on Lamar, the huge former Sears warehouse south of downtown that was recycled as loft apartments and studios.

"As that went along, we felt it was too big," says Richard Brettell, professor of aesthetic studies at UTD. "Having 10 artists at a time, as we did then, and relating to the university, was just too much. And we didn't have control of the gallery there. So we decided to get out of South Side."

After considerable thought, and studying other residencies, the university decided to revive its program in a smaller and more focused version.

"A first, we thought we would just rent a bunch of vacant studios, and have artists scattered around the community," Dr. Brettell says. "Then we realized we wanted synergy, and for the place to have its own character."

The university worked with David Gibson, a developer who has renovated a number of buildings in the Fair Park-Deep Ellum area, to identify and adapt a building for the project.

"With our graduate students and people who helped us in the past, we designed a not-too-fancy, not-too-grand but very professional facility, which David would build for us," Dr. Brettell says. "I don't know of this happening anywhere else, where a developer spends his money on a building and rents it to a university at lower-than-market rates."

Both the guest artists and the UTD graduate students can take advantage of a university known for technological sophistication.

"We have a large and sophisticated arts-and-technology program," Dr. Brettell says. "One of the points of our residency, which makes it different from most residencies throughout the world, is that it's connected to a major university, rather than to an art school. Which means the artists have access to a motion-capture lab studio and state-of-the-art computer systems and the kind of technical expertise that doesn't exist in any art school."Plan your life

The Centraltrak opening reception is from 6 to 9 p.m. today at 800 Exposition Ave. The exhibition "False Space and Time of the Apartment," runs through June 16. Hours: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays. 214-912-9834 or 214-824-9302. www.centraltrak.org.

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