Dallas-wide textile project begins at Dallas Museum of Art

by PegNews wire

DALLAS — This fall, the Dallas Museum of Art will spearhead the first community response art project in conjunction with a single artist’s work. Susan Diachisin will lead the project, and she is the DMA's "Kelli and Allen Questrom director of the Center for Creative Connections (C3)."

Since the opening of C3 in May 2008, three earlier installations by area high school and university students have been on view. Now, a local textile artist and the DMA's staff join forces to oversee a community response work of art that will be presented in an exhibition in the C3’s cafe area, beginning in January 2010.

Diachisin selected Lesli Robertson, a Dallas-based artist known for her fiber installation pieces that have a strong history and relation to numerous cultures, to design and help execute the creative side of the project. Together, Diachisin, Robertson, and the DMA staff will work with more than 20 community groups in North Texas and with visitors to the museum to make small works of art. These will be incorporated into a larger textile-based art installation that will go on view in C3 at the start of the new year. Robertson will use the process of weaving to “connect” each participating individual and community’s work to the completed project.

“The Dallas Museum of Art and its Center for Creative Connections are delighted to bring the work of Lesli Robertson, an exciting and well-recognized textile artist, to the museum and to our community,” said Diachisin. “With this new Community Partner Response project, we are giving participants the opportunity to see how they are a part of a larger community and how their contribution to it is vital.”

For the project, participants will make 1.5” x 1.5” personal collages out of everyday materials and preserve them in a concrete base. Each person is asked to use materials in their work that can reflect a part of themselves; electronic components, natural fibers, and metal are a few of the choices. At the completion of their collages, they are asked to describe in writing how these materials represent them, along with a sketch of their collage; this documentation will be part of the final installation.

For the final installation, Robertson will weave strips of cloth into which the collages will be woven. Each element in the process of this project -- from the community involvement, to the interaction of the collages within the cloth, to the amount of cloth that is woven -- will lead to the final outcome of the installation. A video will project the documentation gathered from the community collages onto the surface of a wall-sized loom. As the community weaves the cloth from various recycled materials on the loom, they will essentially be building the video screen.

Since the project’s launch over the summer, Diachisin and Robertson have worked with more than 10 community organizations -- ranging from ARC of Dallas, Tulisoma Learning Partnership Festival and an Ice House camp facilitated by the Museum -- and have created over 270 collages. Contributions by visitors to the DMA during its Thursday Night Live Make It Take It classes and monthly Late Nights are also included.

Over the next two months, 10 more groups are scheduled to participate at community events, including an afternoon at the Cathedral Shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the Dallas Arts District; faculty from the Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts; and an activity at Avance, a Dallas-based organization that helps at-risk Hispanic families with parenting and education programs.

For details and dates on how members of the community can take part in this project, visit DallasMuseumofArt.org or call 214-922-1200.

Source: Dallas Museum of Art