Flowers are nature’s beautifiers. We’ve appropriated them as tokens of affection or apology. We cut them from their roots and place them in vases to add color to our otherwise dull lives. Oh, and for centuries, we’ve painted them. Some of the 19th century’s greatest painters, including Cezanne, Manet and…
Stop digging through files, punching numbers into your calculator, and put that Go2Meeting on mute. You’ll want to watch this video from the Dallas Zoo of an adorable baby giraffe. First-time giraffe mommy Chrystal gave birth to a 6-foot-tall baby over the weekend and the zoo released a video of…
Keanu Reeves in John WickOn this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, we welcome Village Voice contributor and filmmaker Zachary Wigon, who tells us about his paranoid thriller The Heart Machine (iTunes)…
Mixmaster presents “100 Creatives,” in which we feature cultural entrepreneurs of Dallas in random order. John Pomara exhibited artwork before the Internet. With degrees in studio art, and exhibitions on his resume dating back to the 80’s, it was more than a decade into his practice before he took an…
Most of us would much rather buy something than make it, especially if it’s hand-made by a much more creative and talented person. Fortunately, the rise of Etsy and the DIY trend has made it much easier to find unique goods crafted by individual artists and not sweatshop workers. No…
We’re just passing this information along. Apparently the city of Dallas has a list of whom they’ll commission for public art in Dallas. And apparently this list is currently accepting applicants, even those without any public art experience. And apparently these applications will no longer be accepted after October 30…
Halloween is on a Friday this year. This means your excuses are all worthless and you will have to participate in the festivities. But house parties are so 1998. Get out of the house and do something. Want to go to a haunted house? We’ve got you covered. Want to…
If you’re up on the local comedy scene, which seems to rotate around the nuclear hub of the Dallas Comedy House, you may have found yourself snort-laughing at jokes coming out of youngster, Saffy Herndon. The 9-year-old comedian, who tells jokes about everything from cartoons to her dad’s drinking habits…
Mixmaster presents “100 Creatives,” in which we feature cultural entrepreneurs of Dallas in random order. Know an artistic mind who deserves a little bit of blog love? Email lauren.smart@dallasobserver.com with the whos and whys. In 2009, Sarah Perry had an idea for a neighborhood market. She was tired of going…
Patricia Reed’s “The Two” greets visitors to Zhulong Gallery’s international group show, Systema. A pair of bright red megaphones frozen in french kiss, any amplified messages lost in the other, in what you can imagine as an echo chamber of yelling instructions. When used appropriately, megaphones can relay instruction to…
The men’s urinals are where you learn the most about an ongoing opera. The unedited state of things–the real nitty-gritty. (In all fairness, I’m sure the women’s room is equally revelatory). Inside, pre-performance, the occupants were academics and critics, dishing on a half dozen lesser-known facts concerning The Marriage of…
Some comics travel for their trade because of their love of the art form or some inner need for attention or the hope of delivering to mankind a new plateau of understanding through the power of laughter. Lavell Crawford has a brutally honest reason for what keeps him going in…
The Alamo Drafthouse is about to launch a massive invasion on the Dallas-Fort Worth area, opening several new theaters, and it starts downtown with a new movie house on South Lamar Street. Developers for the new theater announced plans to break ground on the construction next month but a gathering…
Across Dallas stages, a long ignored genre of theater seems to have taken center stage. Science fiction, with all its robots, aliens, and future societies has been seen in its intellectual (Tomorrow Come Today at Undermain Theatre) and its campy (Rocky Horror Show at Dallas Theater Center). This weekend, Ochre…
Sometimes ink is given to the artists showing at the Nasher Sculpture Center simply due to its reputation. Which is not unexpected: It’s the norm in the art world to approach a venerated institution’s offerings as more noteworthy than less high-profile spaces. Plus, with bigger marketing budgets, the Dallas Museum…
History is built on stories. Often, it’s the stories of politicians who impact the world or scientists who impact daily life, but our personal histories are built around our own stories -the ones you tell your friends and family. Those are the kind that StoryCorps is traveling across country to…
Another weekend has arrived without jamming a newly sharpened pencil into your coworker’s eye, so you deserve to celebrate your self-control. There are parties, movie screenings, dance shows, art shows, plays and operas. Get to it!…
At this year’s Whitney Biennial, the museum invited three curators from outside of the museum to work on the acclaimed exhibition. The goal of the biennial is to present the work of contemporary emerging American artists. And in 2014, only one curator was from New York; the other two brought…
Among its many attributes, Justin Simien’s exuberant debut feature, Dear White People, proves that we’re not yet living in a “post-racial America.” Forget for a moment that there are so many vexing problems entwining race, class and economics that we haven’t been able to put a Band-Aid on, let alone…
Before there was a Birdman, there was a Batman — several, in fact, though the best was played by Michael Keaton in the two Tim Burton films in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Since then, Christian Bale’s somber strutting and muttering, as seen in Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies, has…
Mathieu Amalric’s brisk, agreeably nasty thriller The Blue Room turns on a couple murders — or does it? — but rather than corpses, it’s time and space and human connection that get most memorably diced. Working from Georges Simenon’s ’64 novel of a wrong man accused — or is he…
Jazz isn’t dead. Miraculously, there’s always a small but steady stream of young people who continue to fall in love with this most dazzling and elusive American genre, spending hours, days and months running ribbons of scales and memorizing Charlie Parker solos in the hopes that some of the alto…
