With its upcoming season, the Dallas Museum of Art has got a big name coming – 15 paintings, studies of the same olive grove, all done by Vincent van Gogh over six months in 1889. They’re like his version of Monet’s later, more famous Rouen Cathedral series or Monet’s haystacks — and this is the first time van Gogh’s grove of paintings will be reunited.

But it’s in much of the rest of the DMA’s schedule that the museum gets ingenious.

Juan Gris, “Guitar and Pipe,” 1913, Dallas Museum of Art, The Eugene and Margaret McDermott Art Fund, Inc.

COVID has curtailed many touring exhibitions, so elsewhere in the season, the DMA will highlight its own permanent collection, contextualizing individual artworks, showcasing new purchases. For one thing, the museum will host the first US show in 35 years to highlight the great Cubist Juan Gris — and the DMA happens to have a painting by him.

It’s also hosting the first solo US museum shows of three contemporary artists: painter Naudline Pierre, French-Swiss photographer-sculptor Julian Charrière and Dallas-born Chris Schanck.

The DMA recently purchased a painting by Pierre and commissioned a work by sculptor Schanck that’s based on a 19th-century dressing table the museum has. Too bad it doesn’t have a Charrière video like the one below, And Beneath It All Runs Liquid Fire. Charriere’s epic, apocalyptic, environmental imagery is where Matthew Barney meets Pierre Huyghe.

Something to see before the olive groves get here.

Julian Charrière, “And Beneath It All Flows Liquid Fire,” 2019, video still. Copyright the artist; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany

Dallas Museum of Art 2021 Exhibitions Schedule

Dallas, TX – October 28, 2020 – The DMA’s 2021 roster features a robust slate of exhibitions that use a range of innovative approaches to highlight the strength and breadth of the Museum’s global collection and the talents of the curatorial team. The schedule includes the first solo US museum exhibitions of contemporary artists Naudline Pierre, Chris Schanck, and Julian Charrière; two major international collaborations that reveal new insights on the legendary artists Vincent van Gogh and Juan Gris; and thematic exhibitions exploring artistic practices and movements from around the world. The full schedule follows below:

Moth to Cloth: Silk in Africa
December 20, 2020–October 24, 2021
Throughout the world, silk is used to make cloth and is associated with wealth and status. This rare natural fiber is also indigenous to sub-Saharan Africa. In this installation, cloths drawn from the DMA’s collection explore the production of silk and silk textiles in Ghana, Nigeria, and Madagascar.

Curbed Vanity: A Contemporary Foil by Chris Schanck
January 17–August 29, 2021
For his first museum commission and solo museum presentation, Dallas-native Chris Schanck is creating a contemporary work inspired by the late 19th-century Martelé dressing table in the Museum’s collection. Made of found objects from the immediate neighborhood of the artist’s Detroit studio, Schanck’s dressing table will be coated in resin and aluminum foil—a reference to the Dallas aluminum factory where, along with his father, Schanck worked when he was young. The two dressing tables will be presented together to form a conversation about craftsmanship, material, and the vanity that drives them.

Devoted: Art and Spirituality in Mexico and New Mexico
February 21, 2021–January 2, 2022
Historically, as well as in the present day, depictions of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and numerous saints and other figures have played a vital role in the ceremony and pageantry of Catholicism, acting as visual representations of beliefs and ideas, and serving as a focal point for devotion and prayer. Devoted: Art and Spirituality in Mexico and New Mexico features devotional works drawn from the DMA’s Latin American collection, exploring interrelated artistic traditions in the two regions. The exhibition spotlights the complexity and artistic qualities of these objects, which embody the active spiritual relationship between their creators, patrons, and communities.

Cubism in Color: The Still Lifes of Juan Gris
March 14–July 25, 2021
As the first US exhibition in over 35 years dedicated to the Spanish artist Juan Gris, this exhibition reconsiders the legacy of this important yet underappreciated modernist master. Co-organized by the Dallas Museum of Art and the Baltimore Museum of Art, Cubism in Color: The Still Lifes of Juan Gris highlights the artist’s pioneering and revolutionary contributions to the Cubist movement by focusing on his fascination with subjects drawn from everyday life. Through approximately 40 paintings and collages that span all major periods of the artist’s evolving practice, the exhibition reveals the transformation of Gris’s innovative style and principal motifs from 1911 until 1926, the year before his tragically early death at age 40.

Concentrations 63: Julian Charrière, Towards No Earthly Pole
May 2–August 8, 2021
Berlin-based French-Swiss artist Julian Charrière creates work that bridges the realms of environmental science and cultural history. This focused exhibition—Charrière’s first solo museum exhibition in the US—provides immersive encounters with the artist’s both melancholic and beautiful, but ambiguous, portraits of nature in the age of the Anthropocene, culminating with his most recent video project, Towards No Earthly Pole. This large-scale cinematic environment considers glacial regions as transboundary agents and presents intertwining narratives of colonialism, environment, and the geographical imaginary.

Expressive Abstractions: A New Look at Postwar Art in the Americas and East Asia
September 5, 2021–Winter 2022
Featuring works from the Museum’s collection, Expressive Abstractions charts the seismic innovations in painting, sculpture, and performance that shaped artistic production in the Americas and East Asia in the mid-20th century. The exhibition will reevaluate the art historical legacy of the era to encompass the simultaneous and intersecting strands of international movements, including Japanese Gutai and Mono-ha, Korean Dansaekhwa, and Brazilian Neoconcretism. Expressive Abstractions also foregrounds the integral influence of Black and female artists working in abstraction in this period, complicating common understandings of the canonic Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and Color Field movements in the United States.

Naudline Pierre (working title)
September 26, 2021–May 15, 2022
The DMA is presenting the first solo museum exhibition of works by Naudline Pierre, whose vividly hued paintings portray opaque, otherworldly narratives through depictions of supernatural figures entangled
in complex scenes of struggle and intimacy. Rearticulating historical tenets of religious painting, Pierre expresses the spiritual experience of transcendence through the means of an alter-ego figure who recurs throughout her works. This exhibition, which will feature the debut of the DMA’s recent acquisition Lest You Fall, considers the possibilities of speculation and fantasy in offering love, care, and routes for escape.

Van Gogh and the Olive Groves
October 17, 2021–February 6, 2022
Co-organized by the DMA and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, Van Gogh and the Olive Groves is the first exhibition dedicated to Vincent van Gogh’s important olive grove series, created between June and December 1889 during his stay at the asylum of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. Reunited for the first time, the paintings reveal Van Gogh’s passionate investigation of the expressive powers of color and line, and his choice of the olive groves as an evocative subject. The exhibition highlights exciting new discoveries about the artist’s techniques, materials, and palette that emerged from a collaborative conservation and scientific research project covering all 15 paintings in the series.

On View Through 2021
The following exhibitions will remain on view into 2021:

Contemporary Art + Design: New Acquisitions (through March 7, 2021), a presentation of recently acquired paintings, installations, jewelry, furnishings, and design objects; For a Dreamer of Houses (through July 4, 2021), an exhibition of contemporary artworks from the DMA’s collection that evoke personal spaces and consider the politics of places we identify with; and My|gration (through October 31, 2021), an installation of works in the Center for Creative Connections (C3) that traces the migration of people, objects, and ideas in art across times and cultures.

Presentations reopening in 2020 and on view into 2021 include Not Visible to the Naked Eye: Inside a Senufo Helmet Mask; the Wendy and Emery Reves Collection, featuring over 1,400 European artworks and decorative objects; and the Keir Collection of Islamic Art, which has 30 new works on view until February, including new works by Dallas-based contemporary artist Nida Bangash.

The DMA continues to offer online programming through virtual.DMA.org, including interactive virtual tours of For a Dreamer of Houses, My|gration, and the Museum’s European art galleries, among other spaces, alongside additional activities and resources.