The Dallas Museum of Art is proud to present DallasSITES: A Developing Art Scene, Postwar to Present, which celebrates and documents 50 years of North Texas’ bold and distinctive contemporary art community. Organized by neighborhood, this digital publication focuses on seven Dallas communities— Fair Park-South Dallas, Uptown, Oak Cliff, Deep Ellum, Arts District-Downtown, Design District, and surrounding university communities—to trace the unique development of contemporary art in each geographic area and their collective contribution toward making Dallas the vibrant arts center it is today.

The current release includes chapter essays on the seven neighborhoods, two scholarly essays on the early history of collecting contemporary art in Dallas, an interactive gallery map documenting the history and locations of over 150 commercial galleries and nonprofit institutions in North Texas from the mid-1950s, and media-rich appendices that feature oral histories, interviews, and detailed listings of collections in the DMA Archives related to the DallasSITES research project. Future installments will include an interactive timeline and a checklist for the exhibition DallasSITES: Charting Contemporary Art, 1963 to Present, on view at the Dallas Museum of Art from May 26 to September 15, 2013.

We invite you to explore this unique online publication—the Dallas Museum of Art’s first to utilize the Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative (OSCI) Toolkit, an open-source suite of tools generously supported by the Getty Foundation and developed by the Indianapolis Museum of Art for publishing online scholarly art history catalogues.

Gabriel Ritter
The Nancy and Tim Hanley Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art

About the Texas Curatorial Fund for Research

The Texas Fund for Curatorial Research, administered by Dr. Richard Brettell, The Margaret McDermott Distinguished Chair, Art and Aesthetics, at the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Museums (CISM), University of Texas at Dallas, was established to promote, support, and sustain advanced curatorial scholarship in North Texas. The fund, created by a gift from Nancy B. Hamon and matching research funds from the State of Texas, promotes museum-related scholarship at the highest level by supporting specific projects of local curators and art historians, often in conjunction with national and international colleagues. It offers a framework for collaboration among regional museums, universities, and other cultural institutions and between all those institutions and the larger professional world. 

About the Dallas Museum of Art

Established in 1903, the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) ranks among the leading art institutions in the country and is distinguished by its innovative exhibitions and groundbreaking educational programs. At the heart of the Museum and its programs is its global collection, which encompasses more than 22,000 works and spans 5,000 years of history, representing a full range of world cultures. Located in the vibrant Arts District of downtown Dallas, the Museum welcomes more than half a million visitors annually and acts as a catalyst for community creativity, engaging people of all ages and backgrounds with a diverse spectrum of programming, from exhibitions and lectures to concerts, literary events, and dramatic and dance presentations. The Dallas Museum of Art is supported in part by the generosity of DMA Partners and donors, the citizens of Dallas through the City of Dallas Office of Cultural Affairs, and the Texas Commission on the Arts.

About DallasSITES

Research for this publication and the accompanying exhibition is led by Dallas Museum of Art Research Project Coordinator Leigh Arnold as part of a three-year grant from the Texas Fund for Curatorial Research. The larger goal is to uncover, document, consolidate, and bring greater public awareness to the richly variegated yet widely underrecognized history of Dallas’s contemporary art avant-garde. Research materials will be housed in the Dallas Museum of Art Archives, creating a centralized repository for the history of contemporary art in North Texas.

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