UPCOMING
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Inaugural North Texas Graduate Program Exhibition, Open University
24 January - 09 March, 2025
Dallas Contemporary is pleased to present Open University, the inaugural DC NTX Graduate Student Program exhibition opening January 24, 2025, curated by Matthew Higgs, Director and Chief Curator of White Columns in New York. The annual initiative, launched in August 2024, invites North Texas MFA students in their final year of graduate work to exhibit at Dallas Contemporary, after being selected by a visiting national curator. The program is aimed at advancing the early careers of emerging artists schooled in the region and fosters healthy interactions and connections between students and renowned curators. The DC NTX Graduate Student Program is funded with foundational five-year support from Ann and John McReynolds.
In addition to the exhibition and mentorship provided to the cohort, the DC NTX Graduate Student Program also offers an annual $8,000 award to one of the artists in the exhibition, selected by the McReynolds and Higgs, as well as a yearly curatorial fellowship to a student pursuing a Master’s degree in contemporary art history. This year, Higgs is joined by McReynolds Curatorial Fellow Abby Bryant from Texas Christian University.
Across students from Southern Methodist University, Texas Christian University, Texas Woman’s University, University of North Texas, The University of Texas at Arlington, and The University of Texas at Dallas, the inaugural DC NTX Graduate Student Program cohort includes: Courtney Broussard, Christina Childress, Lisa Clayton, Taylor Cleveland, Pablo Cruz, Veronica Ibargüengoitia Tena, Austin Lewis, Katherine Pinkham, Sarah Rainey, Elijah Ruhala, Narong Tintamusik, Sharmeen Uqaili, and Vajihe Zamaniderkani.
EJ Hill and Martin Gonzales: Velvet Faith
28 February - 31 August, 2025
Velvet Faith, curated by Emily Edwards, features artists EJ Hill and Martin Gonzales and will include works created on-site during their month-long residency, alongside new sculptures and paintings.
Velvet Faith explores the dynamics of community, emphasizing trust and faith as foundational elements. The show serves as a trust fall for both artists, who come together onsite to create new work in a collaborative process, embracing the unknown of what will emerge. In this exploration, they investigate how creating large-scale works can help assert and reclaim space typically denied to certain groups and individuals, highlighting the crucial importance of feeling worthy in a world that often refuses to see them fully. Their practices reflect a deep need to engage with the world. Despite their differing backgrounds—Hill’s rooted in durational performance and Gonzales in sculpture—their practices converge in a shared desire to honor improvisation as a tool within survival and liberation frameworks.
This exhibition invites viewers to come home—whatever or wherever that might be. Together, Hill and Gonzales celebrate the hard work of being soft, the power of living one’s truth, and the journey towards self-determination. Through Velvet Faith, Hill and Gonzales embrace the freedom of returning to themselves, embody an example of expansiveness, and ask viewers to take part in witnessing the value of their shared experience.
You Stretched Diagonally Across It: Contemporary Tapestry
04 April - 12 October 2025
Opening April 4, You Stretched Diagonally Across It: Contemporary Tapestry is a celebration of tapestry and its practitioners in the 21st century, offering a consideration of the strategies by which contemporary artists interrogate tactility and image in the age-old medium of tapestry in a current context. Featuring works by twenty-seven artists and designers, and organized by guest curator Su Wu, the exhibition depends, like the works that compel it, on an engagement with interstices specific to tapestry – between art and craft, the medium and the matter, and devotion and its technological mediation. Across monumental works of great detail, the exhibition expands our experiences of narrative and mythology in weaving, complicates traditional ethnographic associations of textile, and argues for the enduring possibility of image and memory as a physically substantive thing.
Featuring works by Caroline Achaintre, Hellen Ascoli, Yto Barrada, Diedrick Brackens, Melissa Cody, Jovencio de la Paz, Josh Faught, Christina Forrer, Yann Gerstberger, Marie Hazard, Ane Henriksen, Kira Dominguez Hultgren, Sanam Khatabi, Tomasz Kowalski, Candice Lin, Goshka Macuga, Christy Matson, Mai-Thu Perret, Analia Saban, Kiki Smith, Mika Tajima, Clarissa Tossin, Consuelo Jiménez Underwood, and Miranda Fengyuan Zhang.
To accompany the exhibition, Los Angeles-based vintage textile library and shop Kneeland Co. will take over and activate the Dallas Contemporary store, featuring specially designed ceramics, textiles, jewelry, and collectibles, for sale exclusively in the shop. All pieces are specially designed for and inspired by You Stretched Diagonally Across It, and will even include works by artists featured in the exhibition.