The Nasher Sculpture Center has announced the launch of Nasher Windows, a new series of installations sited inside the Nasher’s Flora Street vestibule entrance. The exhibited sculptures can be viewed through the windows from the outside, and feature North Texas-based artists exposure and the public a way to accessible art while the building is closed. The series will swap out weekly until the museum resumes normal operating hours, from Friday to Wednesday.
The Nasher’s curatorial team — Jed Morse, Catherine Craft and Leigh Arnold — will select a roster of early- and mid-career North Texas artists with especial interest in site-specific work or work made for exhibitions previously scheduled in other art spaces but cancelled due to the pandemic lockdown. The first Nasher Windows exhibition will be viewable beginning Friday, May 22 and run until Wednesday, May 27 and feature Deviled Egg and Okra Column by Dallas-based artist Tamara Johnson. Johnson’s work was slated for exhibition at the Dallas art space ex ovo before the show was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Since moving back to Texas in 2018, Johnson says her work “has shifted to explicitly focus on a more personal iconography — my relationship to the South and the ways in which my (temporary) body moves and works within this familiar, yet unfamiliar landscape. Each of these works explore a personal terrain, embedding meaning in foods I associate with my upbringing, like deviled eggs, picked okra and Rotel. These items become condensed bouillon cubes of material meaning, holding vulnerability, sexuality, and humor in a delicate balance.”
The second installation, by Xxavier Edward Carter, will open May 29. It is titled Start Livin’ in the New World, a name pulled from the hip hop band The Roots. The work on view will be a collaged tapestry of paper receipts and the flotsam and jetsam of consumer culture, all bound together and suspended from a magnolia branch (pictured right).
“During this time of crisis, before we can reopen the Nasher doors to the public, we are compelled to imagine new ways to show art to our local audiences, and to give our region’s artists a space to show their work,” director Jeremy Strick said in a statement. “We are grateful that the beautiful building Renzo Piano designed affords us the opportunity to offer our front windows for this series of exhibitions. We hope that the effort contributes to our community’s healing, well-being and enrichment.”
— Arnold Wayne Jones
