Move Over Hercules – A Greek Hero DIY

We invited DMA Friend and DMA Partner Breanna Cooke to give us the inside scoop on how to quickly and easily transform ourselves into Greek heroes for Friday’s Late Night on May 17 celebrating The Body Beautiful in Ancient Greece: Masterworks from the British Museum. You might remember Breanna from March’s “Wizard of Oz” Late Night when she arrived as a flying monkey. Come dressed as a Greek hero this Friday to earn the May Midnight Masquerade Badge and 450 bonus points in the DMA Friends program!

How to Create a Greek Hero Costume

Need help creating a Greek mythology costume for the DMA’s Late Night this Friday? Below are some simple steps to make your own costume without sewing or spending a lot of money. We’ll start with making a chiton (pronounced khitōn), the draped garment typically worn in ancient Greece.

Supplies
• White sheet OR 2 yards (approx.) of white or cream fabric: It should be long enough to hang from your shoulder to the floor. If you want it to be knee-length, you’ll only need about 1.5 yards or less.
• Safety pins: We’ll be pinning the fabric together, but you can also sew it together.
• Gold rope, belt, or ribbon
• 2 brooches (optional)

Making a Greek Chiton

1. Cut the Fabric
Cut the fabric lengthwise so you have two long rectangles. One rectangle is the front, and the other is the back. If you’d like to have a knee-length chiton (more common for men), this is a good time to cut it shorter. (Bonus: If you don’t like the frayed edge at the bottom of the fabric, you can glue gold ribbon along the bottom edge to cover it.)

2. Pin the Shoulders and Sides
With safety pins, fasten the top corners of the front to the top corners of the back. You’ll want to bunch the fabric together a bit as you pin it. Be sure to tuck in the edges of the fabric if it’s fraying. Next, pin the sides of fabric together along your ribcage. It doesn’t have to be perfect, this is to help keep the fabric from blowing open.

3. Tie on Your Belt
Tie your belt around your waist or rib cage. You can use any kind of belt, rope, or ribbon. You can even paint something gold if you don’t have anything.

4. Add the Brooches
Pin your brooches to your shoulders. You can use them to hide the safety pins. I didn’t have any brooches, so I bought some earrings at a thrift store, glued them together, and added a pin to the back. You could even make your own out of cardboard or craft foam and paint them. Get creative!

Accessories and Props for Your Specific Greek Character

It’s time to customize your outfit with some props. They don’t have to be complicated in order to be effective. Below are some simple ideas to help identify yourself as a specific character:
1. Lightning Bolt and Beard = Zeus, King of the Greek Gods
Lightning Bolt: Draw a lightning bolt on foam board or poster board; cut out the shape and color with silver paint.
Beard: Paint on a beard with face paint OR purchase a beard from a party or costume store.

2. Laurel Wreath = Apollo, God of Music, Arts, and Enlightenment
Laurel Wreath: Create a headband with poster board. Draw leaves and cut them out. Use hot glue to stick the leaves in place, overlapping as you go. Color with gold spray paint.

3. Feathery Wings = Eros, God of Love (Cupid!), or Nike, Goddess of Victory
Wings: Purchase wings from a costume or party store OR draw wings on poster board. Cut out the shape of the wings, attach elastic straps with hot glue, and loop over shoulders.

4. Shield, Spear, Helmet = Athena, Goddess of Warfare
Shield: Find a large plastic platter or cut a circle out of foam board. Glue on a handle made of foam board or cardboard; color with gold spray paint.
Spear: Use a broom handle or dowel and color with gold spray paint. Draw a spearhead on craft foam. cut out two spearheads from the craft foam. Glue the craft foam together at the edges, and slide the broom handle into the pocket formed by the two pieces.
Helmet: Purchase gladiator-style helmet at a costume or party store; color with gold paint OR get creative with craft foam and hot glue to make your own!

4. Shield, Spear/Sword = Hercules or Achilles, Hero of the Trojan War
Shield and Spear: Follow steps above for Athena.

6. Gold Tiara/Crown, Veil = Hera, Goddess of Marriage and wife of Zeus
Tiara/Crown: Make a crown out of poster board; color with gold spray paint.
Veil: Take a piece of sheer fabric or leftovers from your chiton; attach to tiara/crown with staples.

7. Roses and Scallop Shells = Aphrodite, Goddess of Love
Roses: Purchase some fake roses or flowers from a thrift store; color them with gold spray paint.
Scallop Shells: Draw some shells on poster board; color with gold spray paint and add the shells to your flower bouquet.

Need to look up some other characters from Greek mythology? Check out this list on Wikipedia for more ideas.

See you on Friday at Late Night at the DMA!

Breanna Cooke is a Graphic Designer, Costume Creator, and Body Painter living in Dallas. To see more of her work, visit breannacooke.com. Check out progress photos of her latest projects on Facebook.

Spotlight on Raphael Parry

Many Dallasites know Raphael Parry for his extensive work in shaping the Dallas theater scene over the last thirty years. He currently serves as Executive and Artistic Director of Shakespeare Dallas, where he has directed or performed in over twenty-five Shakespearean productions. He also serves as a founder and Chief Artistic Officer of Project X: Theatre, a producing company that focuses on new play development. Raphael has been recognized by the Dallas Theatre League and the Dallas Theater Critics Forum with the Standing Ovation Award for his continued contributions to Dallas Theater.

What you may not know is that Raphael has deep ties to the Dallas Museum of Art, serving as Director and host of Arts & Letters Live’s Texas Bound series for almost two decades. The series showcases Texas-connected actors reading short fiction and essays by Texas-connected authors to a live audience. We like to say that it is “story time for adults.”

Raphael will reprise his role as Director and host again during the 2013 season of Texas Bound on February 11 and on May 6, when he will also participate as an actor.

We caught up with Raphael for a short Q&A about his involvement with Texas Bound.

Raphael Parry, Director and host of the Texas Bound series at the DMA

How long have you been involved with Texas Bound?
My first season I was an actor reading a very short story—less than three minutes long. The next year, I was invited to serve as Director and host—that was 1995. I will be starting my 18th season this year.

What do you enjoy most about working with the series?
Getting to read a huge number of stories, as we search to select just the right ones for the series. It has really brought me a profound appreciation for the art of the short story. And our audience is so generous and eager to hear the readings. It is always a pleasure to take part in Texas Bound in performance.

Texas Bound rehearsal, 2012

Can you talk a little bit about the process of selecting the stories and casting them?
It starts with a huge collection of stories that have been sifted through after an open call for stories. Our Producer, Katie Hutton, reads through all the submissions and selects the ones that are candidates for Texas Bound. At this point, we have approximately eighty to one hundred stories that we can consider for the Texas Bound series. We meet twice weekly starting in the late summer and I read the stories out loud to Katie and her team. What works on paper can often not transfer to a successful story being read out loud. After reading each story, we discuss three to four potential actors that would be the right match for the story. After reading all of the stories over many weeks, we have a small collection of stories that are strong candidates. Then the real puzzle work begins. We have to find a combination of stories that add up to the right length for the evening and have some balance. We often use a meal as the metaphor for the evening: appetizer, main course, and dessert. We are looking to create a balance and flow.

What is your most memorable Texas Bound experience?
The most memorable experiences are when everything comes together: the actors, the stories, and the audience. There have been many evenings where the flow is fantastic, and we are all moving through the performance with each story and reading building on another. It is like floating on a cloud when it all clicks, and then it’s over—like an ephemeral dream it all dissolves and we are left with a great memory.

What story or stories are you most excited about this season?

“The Dangerous Animals Club” by Dallas native Stephen Tobolowsky

All of the stories intrigue me, as we work so hard to find just the right ones. I am looking forward to hearing Stephen Tobolowsky read his essay “F.A.Q” from his book The Dangerous Animals Club. He has such an interesting voice, and his essays are so personal yet universal. Also, John Benjamin Hickey is reading Patricia Highsmith’s “A Curious Suicide”; it is a murder mystery with a unique tone. Those two are standouts from a stellar field of stories.

 

Stephen Tobolowsky will read on February 11. Photo by Jim Britt.

Matt Bomer will read on February 11.

John Benjamin Hickey will read on May 6.

Join us for the first Texas Bound of the season on Monday, February 11. For more information on this season of Texas Bound, visit our website. You can order tickets online or call 214-922-1818.

Katie Hutton is the Program Manager for Arts & Letters Live at the DMA and Producer of Texas Bound.

Back Where It Started: Dallas Video Festival

Coming up in just ten short days, the Dallas Video Festival will launch its 25th Anniversary Festival here at the DMA. The festival will include screenings of feature-length works as well as shorts, animation, and other new media, “The Texas Show,” workshops, and more!

Recently, I spoke with Bart Weiss, DVF Artistic Director and all around “ video guy,” about the history of the festival.

So, the Video Festival is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, back at its original home venue, the DMA. How did the Video Festival start and how did it happen to start at the DMA?

A dear and longtime friend of mine, John Held, Jr., was working on a program that was going to take place at the DMA called Video as a Creative Medium. It was a two-evening program; the first evening featured local video artists and the second evening featured video art from around the world, including works from Michael Smith and other up-and-coming video artists. It was a very successful program. Afterwards, I was chatting with John and Melissa Berry, the program manager at the DMA at the time, and just blurted out, “We should do this again next year, and for four days!” Thus the idea of the Video Festival was born.

I should also mention that on the first evening of the Video as a Creative Medium program, I met a lovely woman named Susan Teegarden, who is now my wife!

The Video Festival ran the first few years basically out of the DMA’s programming office and was not its own organization. Two of the founding board members of the official new organization, The Video Association of Dallas, were those very helpful and supportive DMA staffers–Melissa Berry and Sue Graze (the DMA’s contemporary art curator at the time).

What are a couple of your fondest memories of video festivals over the years?

Of course, I have many, many fond memories of past festivals, but one that really sticks out to me was one I could have never planned for. I cannot recall the exact year, but we had John Wylie Price participating in the festival. We were doing a program that included showing clips of the television show Amos ’n’ Andy. John was part of a conversation that debated whether this show was beneficial or damaging to the African American community since it often played upon stereotypes in the story lines.

We also had Steve Allen in town and he was going to be leading the program that was to follow Price’s. Allen attended Price’s program and instead of doing the schedule program, he ended up continuing the conversation with Price about how many communities–Jewish, African American, and others–often use humor to deal with the pain they experience as part of their history.

An absolutely incredible dialogue erupted and this moment is one that I think of often.

What can we expect at this year’s festival?

There are so many great things planned for this year’s festival–to pick out just a couple would be like looking down at your hands and deciding which finger on your hand was your favorite!

In general though, this year’s festival will feature many incredible Dallas filmmakers, who this year have made some of the greatest work of their lives. Some of these major local players whose work will be featured include (but are not limited to) Julia Dyer, Alan Govenar, Mark Birnbaum, and of course Allen and Cynthia Salzman Mondell, for whom we will hold a great tribute. All of this programming coming together so wonderfully is a statement to how important video art is, and doing the festival at the Museum makes it all the more powerful.

We hope to see you at the festival, September 27-30. For more details and to buy tickets and passes, visit the Dallas Video Festival’s website.

If you need further convincing to come check out the festival, here are a few pictures from Video Fests over the years.

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Denise Helbing is the Manager of Partner Programs at the Dallas Museum of Art.

Stumbling Onto Something New

Hello there! My name is Michele Loftus, and I’m the Marketing Coordinator for The Dallas Arts District. A lot of people don’t know that my organization actually exists, so let me take the opportunity to introduce us. We are an advocacy organization for . . . you guessed it, The Dallas Arts District! Still confused? I’ll put it this way: if you’ve ever eaten at a food truck, ventured out to an artsy block party, or consulted one of our kiosks looking for directions, then you’ve crossed paths with what our organization does. We’re often the ones who close off the streets for late night parties, coordinate the programs, and most importantly, do our best to make it easy for you to be a one-stop shop for all things Dallas Arts District. We bring together all the museums, restaurants, performing arts companies, and venues to promote the neighborhood along Flora Street as a cohesive district. All this being said, we hope you’ll join us for our next big bash, the Summer Block Party, this Friday night from 6:00 p.m. to midnight.

Now in our fourth year of throwing block parties, we’ve had the fortune of attracting more and more people to our neighborhood and educating them on the various offerings of the Dallas Arts District. What’s interesting now though, as observed in our most recent block parties and art crawls, is that people will come not knowing we’re throwing these events in the first place. They’ll stumble upon them for various other reasons: food trucks, a concert at the Winspear, or just driving by. Seeing the streets all lit up with activity, it’s difficult for them to stay away. It’s become something that amazes me every time and is now one of the things I look forward to most when wandering around, sending out my usual tweets, or taking pictures of what’s going on. It’s that curious “So what’s happening over there?” look, and the subsequent “Oh, awesome!” when I tell folks that the museums are open until midnight and send them on their merry way down Flora Street, knowing they’ve caught the buzz of our neighborhood.

Often, I’ve noticed these people are the faithful food truckies who follow their favorites to the ends of the earth, and this time their journey happens to lead to the Arts District. But I’ve also met a fair share of museum-goers who are equally as surprised and excited to find out there’s an entire food court waiting for them just down the street. We even come across people who are members at one institution and have no idea there’s something going on at the others right next door.

This kind of exchange is why we do these events and one of the many reasons we thrive on nights like the Summer Block Party. We’re fortunate to have an arts district that’s all on one street, so we can foster exciting collaborations like these and make it easy for people to stumble upon something new.

To discover something new for yourself, visit us at this Friday’s Summer Block Party. The museums will all be open until midnight. For more information, visit http://thedallasartsdistrict.org.

Michele Loftus is the Marketing Coordinator for The Dallas Arts District

Two for the Road

Uncrated recently took a “field trip” to Fort Worth to visit the Kimbell Art Museum’s  presentation of Picasso and Braque: The Cubist Experiment, 1910–1912, for which the DMA loaned its 1912 Braque painting Still Life with Bottles and Glasses. Before the exhibition opened, the Kimbell’s director of conservation, Claire Barry, took a look at our “gem of a painting” and offered us this guest post on the experience.

Georges Braque, "Still Life with Bottles and Glasses", 1912, oil on canvas, Dallas Museum of Art, The Eugene and Margaret McDermott Art Fund, Inc., given in honor of Deedie Rose and J. E. R. Chilton

X-ray of George Braque's "Still Life with Bottles and Glasses"

I was delighted to have the opportunity to examine Braque’s Still Life with Bottles and Glasses from the DMA in the Kimbell conservation studio. Fortunately, this gem of a painting is unlined, which is rare for a cubist painting from this period. As a result, the impastoed (thickly textured) surface has never been flattened through lining. As one of my teachers wisely advised, think about a painting as a sculpture in low relief. If you look at the Braque in this way, you quickly begin to appreciate the rich variety in the artist’s application of paint—from thin areas where the paint is more fluid to thicker areas of impasto where he applied paint with a heavily loaded brush. Then, in the upper left, you might notice that the paint has a crusty texture that seems totally unrelated to the composition. With the permission of the DMA curators, I x-rayed the painting, which quickly revealed that Braque completely reworked the composition of Still Life with Bottles and Glasses during the course of painting. The texture of the underlying paint layers, later covered over, can still be seen on the surface. I was fascinated to discover this, because between Picasso and Braque, I always believed that Picasso had a greater tendency to radically rework his paintings (as he did with the Kimbell’s Man with a Pipe). Braque painted the Kimbell’s Girl with a Cross without making a single revision.

Pablo Picasso, Man with a Pipe, 1911, oil on canvas, Kimbell Art Museum. Photo © MegaVision. © 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Georges Braque, Girl with a Cross, 1911, oil on canvas, Kimbell Art Museum. Photo © MegaVision. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

I was fortunate to be able to examine the two Braques, the DMA’s and the Kimbell’s, side by side in the conservation studio. Like the DMA painting, the Kimbell’s Girl with a Cross is unlined and preserved in pristine condition. In fact, it has never been varnished and retains the matte surface that the cubists intended. Both Picasso and Braque were adamant that their paintings should never be varnished. The DMA’s Braque, however, had been varnished at some point, and the varnish layer imparted a glossier surface than Braque had in mind. The unifying effect of the varnish also masked the subtle differences in surface gloss and texture that Braque created. In preparation for the exhibition, the DMA gave me permission to remove the varnish layer from Still Life with Bottles and Glasses. The fact that visitors to the exhibition can now see two unlined, unvarnished cubist paintings by Braque is really something exceptional. When you see the surfaces of these paintings, you can feel confident that this is very close to how they appeared when they left Braque’s easel some one hundred years ago.

Braque’s Still Life with Bottles and Glasses (1912) was sent to the Kimbell for spectral-image photography during the early stages of planning the exhibition Picasso and Braque: The Cubist Experiment, 1910–1912. These photographs are among the many incredible high-resolution digital images that can be explored with the iPad application iCubist in the Kimbell exhibition. If you want to experience the details in cubist paintings, brushstroke for brushstroke (the way I examine paintings in my job as a paintings conservator), I really recommend that you check out the iPads at the Kimbell. To my knowledge, this is the first time such images have been made available to the public in such an interactive way in a museum exhibition. The goal is to enrich the experience of seeing the real paintings, for which there is absolutely no substitute. My hope is that the iPad application may encourage visitors to spend even more time in the exhibition. Unlike the Acoustiguide, you cannot look at a painting and the iPad app simultaneously. So perhaps this will encourage visitors to look at the paintings first, then explore the iPad, and then return to the paintings for a second look, with greater understanding and appreciation.

Guest blogger Claire Barry is the director of conservation at the Kimbell Art Museum.