Follow-up to recently released Creative Time report brings recognized innovators in art and architecture to Dallas

On February 1, New York-based public arts organization and Meadows Prize recipient Creative Time and SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts released a series of recommendations for fostering the arts in Dallas. The group identified 13 key elements necessary for the Dallas art community to thrive, and developed several recommendations for each element to further strengthen programs and structures and to create new opportunities.

In a follow-up to the report, the Meadows School will host a public symposium on Saturday, April 9, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. titled “The Freedom of the City: Models of Urban Engagement and Creativity in the 21st Century.” Through individual presentations and panel discussions, the conference will explore the relationship between artists, architects, activists and social justice struggles, and examine new models of public art practice and architecture in the urban environment. The aim of the event is threefold: to disseminate information on exemplary public art/architecture projects that have taken place or are in progress in cities throughout the United States; to discuss the relevance of such approaches to the city of Dallas; and to generate public feedback on these and related issues deemed crucial to the well-being of the community.

Participants will include socially engaged artists, SMU and UT arts and architecture faculty, and prominent Dallas community builders. The symposium will be moderated by Nato Thompson, chief curator of Creative Time. Guest speakers include the following:

• Dean Almy, Associate Professor of Architecture and Director of the Graduate Programs in Urban Design and Landscape Architecture, University of Texas-Austin
• Brent Brown, Architect; Director of CityDesign Studio and buildingcommunity WORKSHOP, Dallas
• Mel Chin, Artist; projects include Revival Field (use of plants to remove toxic metals from soil) and KNOWMAD (video game based on rug patterns of disappearing nomadic people); investigates how art can provoke greater social awareness and responsibility
• Wanda Dye, Assistant Professor of Architecture, University of Texas-Arlington
• Tom Finkelpearl, Executive Director, Queens Museum of Art, and author of Dialogues in Public Art
• Rick Lowe, Artist; Founder of Project Row Houses, Houston, the Watts House Project, Los Angeles, and other community building projects nationwide
• Cheryl Mayo, Executive Director, West Dallas Community Centers
• Laurie Jo Reynolds, Artist; Soros Justice Fellow; projects include Tamms Year Ten, which led to prison reform in Illinois; fuses art with political activism
• Jason Roberts, Founder and President, Oak Cliff Transit Authority; co-founded Art Conspiracy and Bike Friendly Oak Cliff; “Better Blocks” project organizer
• Zoka Zola, Architect; winner of Architecture magazine’s Home of the Year Award

The symposium will take place in the Bob Hope Theatre of the Owen Arts Center, 6101 Bishop Blvd. on the SMU campus. The schedule is below. Lunch and refreshments will be served. Admission is free, but registration is required. To register for the event, visit smu.edu/freedomofthecity or contact Leila Grothe at leilagrothe@gmail.com.

The symposium is an example of new initiatives at the Meadows School designed to help students discover myriad ways to use their artistic training after graduation, said Meadows School Dean José Bowen. “The Meadows School is pioneering a new model of art that connects social engagement and community relevance with employment,” he said. “As of fall 2010, all freshmen at Meadows are introduced to alternative models of artistic practice – which includes everything from our own programs in music therapy and our interdisciplinary ensemble, Point, to our community artist partnerships with Big Thought – AND to the basics of how the various arts businesses, both nonprofit and for-profit, work. We’ve also introduced the country’s first official minors in arts entrepreneurship and creative computing, as well as a new minor in arts management, and we will soon launch a new minor in cities and culture. All of this is designed to expose students to a broader array of art-making, which will prepare them both for community impact and jobs.”

About Creative Time and the Meadows Prize

In October 2009 Creative Time received one of the inaugural two Meadows Prize artist residency awards from the Meadows School. Creative Time’s residency took the form of a yearlong study of the Dallas art community to identify strengths and potential areas for growth. During the course of three weeklong visits to Dallas in 2010, Creative Time’s team met with a wide range of members of the art community, including artists, curators, collectors, gallery owners, visual and performing arts organization leaders, school administrators, philanthropists, writers, community organizers and city officials. The resulting report, released on February 1, presented some 60 recommendations for both individual and collective action to help the Dallas art community thrive. The full report and ongoing community comments are posted on D Magazine’s FrontRow site: frontrow.dmagazine.com/creativetime. The report is also available at smu.edu/creativetimereport.

Since 1974, Creative Time has presented the most innovative art in the public realm. The New York-based nonprofit has worked with over 2,000 artists to produce more than 335 groundbreaking public art projects that have ignited the public’s imagination, explored ideas that shape society and engaged millions of people around the globe. Creative Time seeks to convert the power of artists’ ideas into works that inspire social change and stimulate public dialogue on timely issues, while initiating a dynamic conversation among artists, sites and audiences. For more information on Creative Time and its projects, visit www.creativetime.org.

SYMPOSIUM SCHEDULE

10:00 a.m. – Opening remarks Jose Bowen, Dean, Meadows School of the Arts

10:05 a.m. – Introduction Michael Corris, Chair, Division of Art, Meadows School of the Arts

10:10 a.m. – Keynote Speaker Rick Lowe – “Art and Social Justice”

Theme A: Art

10:40 a.m. -Speaker 1 Laurie Jo Reynolds – “The Worst of the Worst: Where DoThey Come From? Who Are They? Where Are TheyGoing?”

11:05 a.m. -Speaker 2 Mel Chin – “April Update: Operation Paydirt/FundredDollar Bill Project”

11:30 a.m. -Panel discussion Nato Thompson, Chief Curator, Creative Time; Noah Simblist, Associate Professor of Art, Meadows School ofthe Arts; and speakers

12:00 p.m. – Lunch Break

Theme B: Community

12:35 p.m. – Speaker 3 Cheryl Mayo – “West Dallas and the Arts”

1:00 p.m. – Speaker 4 Tom Finkelpearl – “Can Artists Actually Make a Difference in a City?”

1:25 p.m. – Panel discussion Nato Thompson, Jason Roberts and speakers

1:45 p.m. – Refreshment break

Theme C: Architecture

2:00 p.m. – Speaker 5 Dean Almy – “Colonization”

2:25 p.m. – Speaker 6 Zoka Zola – “Recent Works”

2:50 p.m. – Speaker 7 Wanda Dye – “Engaging the Everyday City: Observations and Interventions”

3:15 p.m. – Panel discussion Nato Thompson, Brent Brown and speakers

3:45 p.m. – Closing remarks Jose Bowen

The Crow Collection of Asian Art and Crescent Real Estate Holdings, LLC announce the beginning of work on the future Crow Asian Sculpture Garden, a new outdoor gallery surrounding the Trammell Crow Center. The interior and exterior of the office building, which sits within the Dallas Arts District, will be used to expand the footprint of the Crow Collection of Asian Art, featuring traditional Japanese landscaping, new Asian art acquisitions and additional works from the museum’s collection.

“I have always considered the Crow Collection a museum without walls. In Asia, art and the environment coexist naturally. This garden will be a place Dallas Arts District visitors to find art and Asia in unexpected places,” said Trammell Crow, president of the Crow Family Foundation. “I am grateful to our partners at Crescent for giving us the perfect canvas for expansion.”

The vision and plans for the Asian Sculpture Garden will be unveiled in early spring when landscaping is expected to begin. To make way for the new art acquisitions and upcoming landscaping, the Crow Collection’s European sculpture pieces, such as Bourdelle’s Horse for Alvear Monument and Rodin’s Meditation that are currently on display at the Trammell Crow Center, will be re-installed at the Old Parkland campus Saturday (March 5).

“Crescent Real Estate takes great pride in offering its customers unique and well-appointed office space in the heart of thriving metropolitan areas, such as the Dallas Arts District,” said John Zogg, managing director of leasing for Crescent. “We look forward to working with the Crow Collection on providing this beautiful, tranquil space for business people, visitors and art patrons to enjoy.”

About The Crow Collection

The Trammell & Margaret Crow Collection of Asian Art is located in the Arts District of downtown Dallas. The Crow Collection is a permanent set of galleries dedicated to the arts and cultures of China, Japan, India and Southeast Asia. The museum offers a serene setting for both quiet reflection and learning, which spans from the ancient to the contemporary.

Admission is free. The Crow Collection of Asian Art is open Tuesdays – Thursdays (10 a.m. – 9 p.m.), Fridays – Sundays (10 a.m. – 6 p.m.), and closed on Mondays. For more information, please go to www.crowcollection.org or call 214-979-6430.

About Crescent Real Estate Holdings

Crescent Real Estate Holdings LLC, headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas, is a fully-integrated real estate company owned by Barclays Capital and Goff Capital. Through its subsidiaries and joint ventures, Crescent owns and manages a portfolio of 35 premier office buildings totaling over 17 million square feet located in select markets across the United States with major concentrations in Dallas, Houston, Denver and Las Vegas. Crescent also holds investments in resort residential developments in locations such as Scottsdale, Vail Valley, and Lake Tahoe; luxury hotels; and the wellness lifestyle leader, Canyon Ranch^®. For more information, visit Crescent’s website at www.crescent.com.

Today the Kimbell Art Museum unveils the final design by Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW) for a major new museum building located to the west of its existing building, a landmark of modern architecture designed by Louis I. Kahn.

Slated to open in 2013, the new building provides much-needed space for the Kimbell, whose exhibition and education programs have grown far beyond those envisaged when the Kahn building opened in 1972. During the major exhibitions that the Kimbell presents on a regular basis, the gallery space available for the display of its world-renowned permanent collection has been severely restricted; for periods each year, much of the collection has had to be kept in storage. The main purpose of the new building is to provide extra galleries to be used primarily for exhibitions, allowing the Kahn building to be devoted to the permanent collection. The new building also provides the classrooms and studios that are essential to a full-scale museum education department, as well as an auditorium considerably larger than the one in the Kahn building, an expanded library, and generous underground parking.

The siting of the new building and its parking garage will correct the tendency of most visitors to enter Kahn’s building by what he considered the back entrance, directing them naturally to his front entrance in the west facade. Commented Kay Fortson, President of the Board of Directors of the Kimbell Art Foundation, “One of the most wonderful things about Renzo’s design is the gracefulness with which it refocuses attention on the original main entrance of the Kahn building. Now visitors will enter the Kahn building as he intended.”

As Kimbell director Eric Lee explains, the expansion roughly doubles the Museum’s gallery space: “The Kimbell has never been able to present a major exhibition and a full display of the permanent collection at the same time. With the Piano building in place, this becomes possible. And with the Piano building serving as a showcase for changing exhibitions, the Kahn building becomes home to our own extraordinary collections. The new building also includes much-expanded facilities for our education program and library, and a larger auditorium that has good acoustics for music as well as lectures.”

Piano’s new building acknowledges its older companion in its respectful scale and general plan while at the same time asserting its own more open, transparent character. It is physically quite separate from the Kahn building, at what Piano calls “the right distance for a conversation, not too close and not too far away.” The area between the two buildings will be largely occupied by a shallow pool (flanked by pathways), which will provide reflections of the facades and nearby trees and serve as a focal point in the landscape and a pleasant, cooler transition for visitors walking from one facility to the other.

The new building consists of two connected structures, the first and more prominent a pavilion that faces and to some degree mirrors the Kahn building. Here, on a tripartite facade, robust concrete walls flank a recessed entrance bay of glass. The pavilion houses a large lobby in the center, with café, exhibition store, and coat-check, and exhibition galleries to either side, all naturally lit from an elaborately engineered roof. In the galleries, Renzo Piano has striven for an even more exquisite light quality than he has achieved before: his roof system incorporates aluminum louvers, glass, photovoltaic cells, wood beams, and stretched fabric scrims. The north and south walls of the pavilion are glass, with colonnades outside to support the roof, which overhangs generously for shade. On its north side (on Camp Bowie Boulevard) it houses a loading dock. Below grade is a lower level with art storage, preparatory areas, mechanical systems, a service tunnel to the Kahn building, and other back-of-house functions.

Most visitors will enter the new museum campus from the underground parking, which is between the Kahn and Piano buildings, with stairs and a glass elevator to take them up to the Piano building’s entrance. Once inside the lobby, they may enter either of the galleries to the sides or go straight ahead, through a glass passageway, into the building’s second structure. In contrast to the pavilion, this rear element of the building is self-effacing from the outside, covered by a grassy roof that gives the appearance of an earthwork or archaeological site. It contains a third gallery that is not top-lit and therefore suitable for especially light-sensitive works, as well as the auditorium, library, and education center. The double-height auditorium is on axis with the entrance, and there is a view through various spaces and layers of glass from front to back—from the front door to the glass wall and lightwell behind the auditorium stage. Equally clear from the lobby of the Kahn building, this becomes the main axis of the new Kimbell Art Museum complex, emphasizing Piano’s themes of transparency and openness.

The new facility will be highly energy-efficient, requiring only a fourth of the energy consumed by the Kahn building. “I see designing for energy savings as the only proper, contemporary way to build, not as an ‘add on,’ ” says Piano. In his design he has achieved important energy savings by means of 140 geothermal wells, dug 300 feet into the earth; rain and condensate water collection to supplement the city water used for flushing toilets and urinals; robust glazing systems for the curtain walls and glass roof; photo-voltaic cells; LED lights; low-velocity air supply through the wood floors; louvered and sod roofs; and light-filtering window-shade systems.

The Kimbell breaks ground for the RPBW building over the summer of 2010. When completed in 2013, the new building will complement the Kahn building and add stature to the already architecturally impressive Cultural District of Fort Worth, joining Philip Johnson’s Amon Carter Museum (1961/2001), Tadao Ando’s Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2002), and Legorreta + Legorreta’s Fort Worth Museum of Science and History (2009). The total project cost is $125 million.

“An awesome challenge” is how Piano has described the effort to complement Kahn’s masterpiece. The Kimbell’s Board of Directors believed that if any architect were up to the task, it was Renzo Piano, who worked for a time in Kahn’s office as a young man and has already designed three great museum buildings in Texas: the Menil Collection and Cy Twombly Gallery in Houston, and the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. Piano brings impressive experience and credentials to the undertaking, and the museums he has built in various parts of the world are celebrated for their deft handling of forms and materials, expressive use of natural light, and sensitivity to their surroundings. His best-known early project is the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, known popularly as the Beaubourg, which he designed with Richard Rogers. In Europe, he is also celebrated for such later projects as the Beyeler Museum in Basel and the Klee Museum in nearby Bern; in the United States, for the recently opened California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. Other notable commissions include the expansions of the Art Institute of Chicago, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and the Morgan Library & Museum in New York.

Renzo Piano

Renzo Piano was born in Genoa (Italy) on September 14, 1937. He graduated in 1964 from the School of Architecture of the Milan Polytechnic. As a student he worked under the design guidance of Franco Albini, while also regularly attending his contractor father’s building sites, where he gained valuable practical experience. Between 1965 and 1970, he completed his training, work experiments, and study travels in Britain and America. One of the formative influences of his early professional life was his friendship with the French designer Jean Prouvé.

In 1971, Piano founded the Piano & Rogers agency with Richard Rogers, his partner on the Centre Pompidou project in Paris. In 1977, he founded the Atelier Piano & Rice along with the engineer Peter Rice, a professional of great stature who worked with him on many projects until his death in 1993. He founded the Renzo Piano Building Workshop in 1981 with offices in Paris, Genoa, and New York. Some 100 people work with him including architects, engineers, and building specialists. He is also involved in close collaboration with many associated architects, linked to him by years of experience.

Kimbell Art Museum

The Kimbell Art Museum, owned and operated by the Kimbell Art Foundation, is as renowned for its collections as for its architecture. The Kimbell’s collections range in period from antiquity to the 20th century, including European masterpieces from Fra Angelico, Michelangelo, and Caravaggio to Cézanne and Matisse, and important collections of Egyptian, Near Eastern, Greek, and Roman antiquities, as well as Asian, Mesoamerican, and African arts.

The Museum possesses a core of works that not only epitomize their eras and styles, but also touch individual high points of aesthetic beauty and historical importance that assure them a place among the masterpieces of world art.