Curator Emily Edwards has spent the last few months sourcing six tons of salt and a highway billboard for the Dallas Contemporary’s upcoming exhibition.
Bianca Bondi: A Preservation Method is inspired by the South African artist’s research into Lady Bird Johnson’s Highway Beautification Act. It will transform the museum into a futuristic ecological experiment, allowing a collapsed billboard to interact with crystallizing salt.
“I love working with artists on crazy installations because you become an expert on the weirdest things,” Edwards says. “The idea is that over time the rust from the billboard stand will change the color of the salt.”
Ordering 12,000 pounds of salt was simple, even if its delivery confused the workers at the loading dock several weeks ago. Acquiring the billboard was more difficult. Edwards had called 35 billboard companies, scoured unused billboards, and even began touring sites for enough scrap metal to take to a fabricator. She did not find her billboard.
Just two weeks before the opening night of Bondi’s exhibition, Edwards received what she describes as an “art world miracle.” She curated this year’s Texas Vignette, the annual all women’s art fair highlighting 47 painters, sculptors, and video artists from across Texas. It was by all accounts a showstopper.
The day after opening the exhibit at Dallas Market Hall, she was chatting with a few members of the Vignette board. She shared that she was getting nervous about her hunt for scrap metal. The artist Carmen Menza stopped her. “I have a friend,” she said. A few phone calls later, Edwards was in the CMC Recycling Yard near Deep Ellum staring at a fully intact billboard. A few days after that, the billboard, which CMC donated to the exhibit, was in the museum, ready for Bondi to turn it into art.
“Everything just fell into place,” Edwards said. “There have been so many people helping to bring this together from contractors to other artists. I’ve felt especially grateful for Dallas these past two weeks.”
When Bianca Bondi: A Preservation Method opens this weekend, it will be the third major exhibition Edwards has curated in the past two months. Since joining the museum in 2018, she has curated eight exhibitions and assisted on several dozen others. At this moment in time, the 30-year-old curator is likely the most influential voice in contemporary art in Dallas. What she is picking has a lot to say.
Edwards grew up 20 miles due north of the Dallas Contemporary, where she landed on pursuing curation as a career while attending Plano West Senior High School. She credits her AP Art History teacher Douglas Darracott with the unusual idea. It combined her interest in art with her love of storytelling. She says he told her, “Curating is like writing a story but with pictures and not words.”
“I became laser-focused,” Edwards says. “It was curator or bust.”
Edwards studied art history at the University of Texas. She earned her master’s degree in art history and museum studies at Georgetown University. Throughout school, she interned in various capacities for museums in the northeast. She worked in the education department at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. She worked in the galleries at the Smithsonian Institute. She worked on exhibitions at Lehmann Maupin. Her first professional job was as a member of the curatorial team at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, which has an expansive, but little-known, art collection. Her work there set the tone for her career up to this point.
“Coming from the 9/11 museum, I dealt with trauma and loss and hate up close. We spoke about it every day at work,” Edwards says. “I tend to be drawn to socio-political art, because I think art can illuminate things that are hard to look at.”
Many of the artists she’s brought to Dallas fall in line with this philosophy. Last year, she programmed an exhibition by Gabrielle Goliath, whose “Chorus” directly addressed femicide in South Africa. Previously, she curated work by Shilpa Gupta, an Indian artist whose work addressed the silencing of poets throughout history. Even Natalie Wadlington’s seemingly whimsical paintings contained the dark underbelly of suburban life.
Edwards is the kind of curator who believes in the role of museums to drive cultural conversations. In October, the Dallas Contemporary opened Chloe Chiasson: Keep Left at the Fork, the artist’s first museum exhibition, for which she created mixed-media paintings that imagine Texas as a queer-friendly utopian state. For Edwards, the timing of this show, which remains on display through March 17, is critical.
“On the macro scale of the exhibition, Texas is at a point with passing regressive legislation that makes people unsure if they can stay here because they don’t feel safe and I think it’s important to consider what that says about the world that we’re creating,” Edwards says. “So, for Chloe this show was about creating a home that she didn’t have to leave.”
Edwards is doing her part to make Dallas a city with progressive, insightful shows, which has kept her at the museum for long days and late hours. But she has other ways to make a home for herself here. She spends weekend afternoons walking on the Katy Trail. She joined a kickball team. She spends evenings cooking dinner for her friends; she’s particularly partial to an Alison Roman recipe.
And sometimes, on what she thinks of as her luckiest days, she finds herself knee-deep in scrap metal after supervising the delivery of 12,000 pounds of salt.
Bianca Bondi: A Preservation Method will be on display at Dallas Contemporary, 161 Glass St., November 18 – March 17, 2024. Admission is free. Hours can be found at dallascontemporary.org
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