Thursday, June 7
Scout at The Statler is throwing a birthday party for the dearly beloved, sadly departed Prince. Some usual and reliably effusive suspects are on the bill— Blake Ward, Ronnie Heart— and there’s another name which you’ll likely be seeing more often: DJ Smooth Jazz (Jasmine Blake), a visual artist whose solo show at Cultivar Coffee opens in Oak Cliff Friday, and who’s been repping women and non-binary artists on her KUZU 92.9 show FEM. Read about Scout if you haven’t been yet and celebrate Prince there between 8 p.m. and 2 a.m. Purple attire is encouraged.
Re-up from TTD This Week:
A photography exhibition at the Ana G. Méndez University System’s newly opened art gallery brings visitors into the physical, tactile world of need after Hurricane Maria. Amara Abdal Figueroa, a graduate of RISD’s architecture program, shows photographs of her biomediation process in Raw Material | Materia Prima. Read more about her approach in this piece by Avi Varma.
Friday, June 8
Ray LaMontagne and Neko Case are at Toyota Music Factory just after Case released her latest, Hell-On, the first day of this month. There are some keepers; “Bad Luck” arm wrestles with Alanis Morissette’s “Hand In My Pocket.” Brutally cynical lines like “so I died and went to work” prove Case’s knack for getting so much right in few words. “Last Lion of Albion” carries a wistful melody, the lightest moment amid much numb resignation.
Saturday, June 9
I’ve been following SMU’s current masters of fine arts cohort closely this year. The students came to the school as standouts and have developed under artist and visiting lecturer Lauren Woods. She has challenged them to create resonant work that could open possibilities of historical honesty in the art world. (That was the school’s goal in hiring her and other boundary pushers, as Peter Simek wrote in 2016.) Xxavier Carter, a multidisciplinarian among them, is performing (sort of) at Our Stories: Building Trust Through Community which continues today at the Latino Cultural Center. In other SMU MFA news, Nida Bangash is contending for money Sunday in the very democratic Contemporary Art Dealers of Dallas CADD FUNd dinner and lightning pitch session. Read more about that here.
Sunday, June 10
Sure to be a blockbuster favorite of children and kids-at-heart, Takashi Murakami’s The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg opens at The Modern. The museum’s transcendent architecture— even the cafe windows facing the reflecting pool—is not spared from jubilant color, cheeky flowers, and snaggle-fanged characters. Immersive installations are truly taking over DFW these days. Check it out.
