By Rachel Hawkins NDG Staff Writer
In the early morning of Thursday, April 12, art lovers, philanthropists, collectors, dealers, artists, and socialites of all types gathered at The Fashion Industry Gallery, in Dallas to celebrate Dallas Arts Month.
Dallas Art Fest, an annual arts festival celebrated their 10th year by holding a press conference and a preview of the collector’s artwork. The fair ran from April 13 to 15. This event also marked the third year of the Dallas Art Fair Acquisition Program. This program was designed to establish a partnership and encourage the Dallas Museum of Art to look in new directions by using funds to acquire select selections of artworks from the exhibiting galleries for the museum’s permanent collection.
“The art fair is composed of 95 dealers from around the world,” John Sughrue, co-founder, and chairman said. “There are around 40 dealers from overseas representing five different continents from more than 30 cities. This is a celebration of the contemporary visual arts and it’s what’s happening right now. It’s not a museum experience. The artists that are being shown here this weekend either will be or are in museums. But at the same time, these are the artist who is building careers and hope that someday they will be in the museums.”
This year’s art fest also marked the largest acquisition program reserve to date, with a generous fund of $150,000. The artists who works were chosen from were: Sanford Biggers, Matthew Ronay, Brie Ruais, Tony Lewis, Shara Hughes, Alicia Henry, and Geraldo de Barros.
“I strongly encourage those who don’t know anything about art to come and look,” Sughrue said. “It’s a discovery process. You learn by seeing and I think the arts have the ability to expose us to different ideas, concepts, and broadens the mind. It doesn’t mean that you’re going to like everything you see, perhaps you’re going to not like much of what you see. But my own personal experience was when I walked through an exhibition of contemporary art, there would be one to five things that could completely captivate my imagination. That discovery process to me is what life’s all about.”
The Dallas Art Fair continues its support to benefit the Dallas Contemporary, the Nasher Sculpture Center, and the Dallas Museum of Art.
“Art is so important in our everyday lives because vernacular and a vocabulary that spans generations and ethnics and languages is something that we all respond to universally,” Sughrue said.
The collector’s preview that followed the press conference, gave Dallas art patrons an opportunity to buy artwork earlier than the general public.
“Dallas Arts Month started years ago as Dallas Arts Week when we decided that we would do art inspired things for a full week,” Mike Rawlings, Mayor of Dallas said. “It started to grow and it started to be something that everyone wanted to participate in. This year we have jazz, poetry, theater and great conversations. One of the key corners of this was the formation of the Dallas Arts Fair. We continue to see what this event has come, and we believe that for Dallas to become a great city, we have got to become a great art city.
“It’s also important to realize that we are giving back to the art world,” Rawlings said. “When John came and said what he was going to do to take this thing (the Dallas Art Fair) to the next level, we talked about how we would give back to the community. Dallas Arts District is the largest art district in the United States. No one has so much art in one part of the city with.”
This year’s Dallas Art Fest was filled with opportunity to bring in more diversity community engagement from around the globe. Many of the galleries feature a wide variety of work like paintings, sculptures, works on paper, photography, video and various types of installments.
