Year in Review

The year in the Dallas art world might best be summarized by the John Denver song, "Leaving on a Jet Plane." So, after 2007, who's still around?

Steven Nash left as director of the Nasher Sculpture Center to move closer to family in Southern California. The Nasher lost not only its director but also its founder and patriarch, Raymond Nasher, who died soon after flying home from a trip to Paris. Timothy Potts resigned as director of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, citing, among other reasons, the increasingly high cost of acquiring paintings. But that wasn't the end. John R. "Jack" Lane announced his retirement as director of the Dallas Museum of Art, which also lost its curator, Dorothy Kosinski, who's moving to Washington, D.C.

When folks weren't leaving town altogether, they were moving to other parts of Dallas. The Gerald Peters Gallery was among many noteworthy galleries that moved to the hot new Dragon Street area.

File 2003

Raymond Nasher

1 Death of Ray Nasher – Raymond D. Nasher left an indelible stamp on Dallas by developing NorthPark Center and giving the city a sculpture collection worth more than $400 million. He died in March at age 85. The $70 million Nasher Sculpture Center, designed by Renzo Piano, on a 2.4-acre site across from the Dallas Museum of Art, has become a linchpin of the Arts District.

Michael Granberry

2 "Fast Forward: Contemporary Collections for the Dallas Museum of Art" — A genuine blockbuster of modern art that someday will belong to the DMA. Nearly 300 works sampled a coordinated bequest to the museum from three of the city's savviest collecting couples, ranging from 1940s abstract expressionism to mixed-media and video installations with the plastics barely dry. And that was only the tip of the iceberg to come from Marguerite and the late Robert Hoffman, Cindy and Howard Rachofsky, and Deedie and Rusty Rose.

Scott Cantrell

3 "The Mirror & the Mask: Portraiture in the Age of Picasso" at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth – This exhibition told the narrative of modernism through painted faces: portraiture by Cézanne, Gaugin, van Gogh, Munch, Ensor, Beckmann, Kokoschka, Schiele, Klimt and more. Exquisitely curated by Paloma Alarcó and Malcolm Warner. Intense, careful and ruminative looking paid great dividends with this show.

Kimbell Art Museum

From "The Mirror & the Mask" exhibit: Harlequin with a Mirror by Pablo Picasso

Charissa N. Terranova

4 "The Société Anonyme: Modernism in America" at the Dallas Museum of Art – The remarkable collection of early 20th-century art re-created the sense of excitement felt by those who were discovering new ways of seeing and interpreting the world.

Charles Dee Mitchell

5 "Picturing the Bible: The Earliest Christian Art" at the Kimbell — Nearly 100 works, from the third century to the fiffth, most never before seen outside a scattering of European museums. The first such U.S. show in a quarter-century, it explores how the first Christian artists imagined scenes from both Old and New Testaments, in media ranging from terra cotta to ivory to gold and silver.

S.C.

Kimbell Art Museum

From "The Société Anonyme: Modernism in America" exhibit: Signboard, artist unknown

6 "Accommodating Nature: The Photographs of Frank Gohlke" and "Frank Gohlke" – These two exhibitions, the first at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, the other at Photographs Do Not Bend Gallery, presented an overview of the subtle, elegant and sophisticated work of a North Texas native who is among the masters of American landscape photographers.

C.D.M.

7 "Faults May Shake" by Rhys Davies-Gaetano at Marty Walker Gallery – The Brooklyn-based artist provided a tour de force of the absurd. In Family , flick a switch and a clatter of movement rolled across the wall, from the whirring of a can opener, blowing hot air of a hair dryer, kicking legs of children's overalls, to-and-fro of a zipper in a pair of pants, to the warming of a beer can on an electric eye. Hair Gel With Sock and Easy Cheese and Light fused eroticism to the household object, yielding a surrealism of the commonplace.

C.N.T.

Dallas Museum of Art

A still from Phil Collins: The World Won't Listen

8 "Phil Collins: The World Won't Listen" at the DMA – The Briton created a video triptych that fingers the fault line between the universal and the particular. In universal terms, karaoke singers from three mega-cities croon Morrissey songs from the 1980s. In particular, viewers tune into the star-struckness of the singers. The results are fraught with ideas and emotion while also compositionally balanced.

C.N.T.

9 "Reality Bytes: Digitized Narratives" at the Dallas Contemporary – The often awkward exhibition space has never looked so good as when it imaginatively contained these works by nine video artists who used both monitors and projectors to tell their stories.

And/Or Gallery

From Blood Fantasy video installation

C.D.M.

10 Anything at And/Or Gallery – This is the new venue with the most buzz in Dallas. The tiny space has hosted paintings, sculpture, videos and computer art from local and internationally recognized artists.

C.D.M.

10 More resignations – Director Steven Nash left the Nasher Center for Southern California; Timothy Potts quit the head job at the Kimbell to become director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in England; and top curator Dorothy Kosinski left the DMA for the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.

M.G.

"You need only two to three of them at an auction, and the price goes through the roof." Former Kimbell director Timothy Potts on how wealthy individuals from around the world are outbidding museums. He cited the sale of a 1950 painting by U.S. abstract expressionist Mark Rothko for $72.8 million, a record price for post-World War II art.

"He lived a rich life and he gave back a lot. There's a lesson in there for a lot of young people who are wealthy but don't think they need to give back. That was his sense of obligation to the community." Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Halberstam, remembering arts patron Raymond Nasher. A month after Mr. Nasher's death, Mr. Halberstam was killed in a car wreck in Menlo Park, Calif.

"This is an important day. It puts Dallas in an important light. It puts us on the international stage." Mayor Tom Leppert, in announcing Dallas will host the King Tut exhibition in 2008