Home About Articles Books Blogs + Digital Email Marketing Social Media Contact
Photo by EVG Kowalievska on Pexels

Print Articles

Arts and Culture Texas magazine •

Homecoming: Jaime Castañeda returns to lead Dallas Theater Center

Since its founding in 1959, Dallas Theater Center has been led by only five artistic directors: Paul Baker, Adrian Hall, Ken Bryant, Richard Hamburger, and Kevin Moriarty. Now the Tony Award-winning regional theater can add one more name to the list: Jaime Castañeda, who officially assumes the position in July 2026.
“It’s been a whirlwind, but right now my mind’s on the art,” he says. “In the midst of all these interviews, we only have a short window to confirm the upcoming season.”
Castañeda ca...
Iconic Life magazine •

Modern Desert Home Design: A Stone-Clad Arizona Retreat Blending Architecture, Warmth & Timeless Style

The first thing you notice is the stone wall. It begins at the entry, extending uninterrupted through the dining room and into the kitchen, transforming seamlessly into the backsplash. In the primary suite, it reappears as a backdrop, grounding the interiors with organic permanence.  For interior designer Kristin Hazen, of Kristin Hazen Design, this single architectural gesture is the heart of this custom-built Arizona retreat. “It’s one of my favorite parts of this home,” she says. “It was th...
Arts and Culture Texas magazine •

Head West: Contemporary artists reimagine the American West at the Amon Carter

When visitors step into New Horizons: The Western Landscape at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, they won’t find sagebrush clichés, cowboys in silhouette, or sweeping vistas painted to satisfy nostalgia. Instead, the Fort Worth museum invites audiences into a far more complicated, contemporary, and kaleidoscopic vision of the American West, one shaped by 14 living artists who approach the region as a place of memory, change, identity, and contradiction.
“This exhibition really comes from a...
Arts and Culture Texas magazine •

All The World’s Their Stage: Teatro Dallas celebrates 40 years

In 1985, Jeff Hurst and Cora Cardona founded Teatro Dallas, the city’s first Latinx stage company. It debuted with two shows co-produced with ACAL de Mexico, and across the next four decades the married duo broadened their mission to embrace global theater. Works by literary giants—Molière, García Lorca, Cervantes, and Kafka—found their way onto Teatro Dallas’ stages, as did early career performances from some of DFW’s most notable artists: Christie Vela, associate artistic director at Theatre T...
Arts and Culture Texas magazine •

Texas Studio: Ballet Artist Silas Farley Makes the Joyful Leap to Dallas

Silas Farley likes to joke that he’s the “ultimate ballet nerd.” He says it with warmth and a hint of reverence, as if confessing a lifelong devotion to a beloved friend. From the time he was seven years old, Farley immersed himself in the history and evolution of ballet, reading voraciously and studying old performances while most kids his age were still figuring out what they liked. That sense of calling has never left him. He has lived many lives inside the art form—dancer, teacher, choreogra...
Arts and Culture Texas magazine •

Etched in Eternity: Mythical Torlonia Collection makes its historic debut at the Kimbell

In the Kimbell Art Museum’s Renzo Piano Pavilion, 58 ancient marble sculptures—some gods, others emperors, still others ordinary Romans—stand in commanding silence, carrying with them the weight of centuries.
“It’s difficult to overstate how rare this is,” says Jennifer Casler Price, the Kimbell’s senior curator of Asian, African, and ancient American art and curator of the exhibition. “Even if you traveled to Rome, you would not see this collection. It has been largely inaccessible for decades....
Arts and Culture Texas magazine •

Texas Studio: Amanda Reyes is Working through It Onstage

On a warm Texas night, the cicadas buzz in harmony with the actors at Hip Pocket Theatre in Fort Worth. The wooden stage, tucked beneath a blanket of stars, feels more like a secret hideaway than a performance venue. It was here—surrounded by nature, magic, and community—that Amanda Reyes rediscovered her love for acting.
That sense of homecoming is something Reyes has been chasing her entire career. Born in Denton and raised in Lewisville (“home of the fighting farmers,” she laughs), Reyes grew...
Iconic Life magazine •

Santiago Oakes: A Luxury Orange County Ranch Home Blending Modern Design, Tradition, and Nature

At the heart of the remarkable Orange County residence known as Santiago Oakes lies something unexpected: a garage. But not just any garage — this “man cave,” built before the rest of the new home even existed, was so loved by the homeowners that it became the design touchstone for everything that followed. As principal architect Amat Tajudin of EBTA Architects explains, “The site already had a particular style started a few years ago: a barn that houses bedrooms, an automotive display, a bar...
Arts and Culture Texas magazine •

Sharing the Same Rhythms: Cara Mía Theatre’s Latinidades Festival Returns to Dallas

This fall, Dallas once again becomes a crossroads of Latinx voices as Cara Mía Theatre launches its 2025–26 season with the sixth-annual Latinidades Festival & Symposium. Running Sept. 27 through Oct. 12, 2025 at the Latino Cultural Center, the festival has grown into the largest international Latino theater gathering in Dallas. As Cara Mía enters its 29th season, executive artistic director David Lozano frames the festival as a vehicle for expanding Dallas’ cultural imagination, rather than onl...
Arts and Culture Texas magazine •

Forging Admiration: Art Worth encourages Fort Worth fans to see artists in their element

If you’ve ever wanted to watch molten glass stretch and curl into a goblet while an opera aria drifts through the autumn air, Fort Worth has just the weekend for you. The free Art Worth Festival, returning for its fourth year Oct. 24–26, transforms the lawn at The Shops at Clearfork into a vibrant crossroads where artistry in all its forms—paint, clay, wood, glass, metal, and music—comes to life.
Wander the festival and you might stumble upon a woodturner coaxing a silky curve from a chunk of ma...
Arts and Culture Texas magazine •

Stage Left of Center: Four Texas Theaters Redefining Regional Performance

Texas is no stranger to theatrical prestige. Both Dallas Theater Center and Houston’s Alley Theatre have won the distinguished Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre, but to understand the full scope of the state’s creative force, you have to look beyond the conventional.
Each one is shaping the cultural identity of its community by trusting their own artistic instincts, investing in homegrown talent, and inviting audiences to take a different kind of journey. For the adventurous theatergoe...
Arts and Culture Texas magazine •

Dance with Abandon: Avant Chamber Ballet Grows a New Audience with Biggest Season Yet

Katie Puder isn’t one to do things halfway. For Avant Chamber Ballet’s 13th season, the founding artistic director is nearly doubling the company’s repertoire, launching a new subscription series for families, premiering two original ballets, and restaging a landmark production by mentor and longtime collaborator Paul Mejia. And all of it will be performed with live music, featuring full orchestras for five out of the eight productions.
The company’s largest season to date features two distinct...
Arts and Culture Texas magazine •

Big Moves Ahead: Bruce Wood Dance Dallas Leans Into Legacy for 2025–26

Bruce Wood Dance Dallas is approaching its sweet sixteen with a season that blurs boundaries between genres, generations, and creative disciplines. Artistic director Joy Bollinger, who has led the company since 2018, calls it a season built on “connection and risk,” the kind of programming that welcomes both longtime supporters and new audiences into the fold.
The season opens Aug. 9-10 at the Kalita Humphreys Theater with Imagine, a first-time collaboration with Uptown Players that Bollinger ca...
Arts and Culture Texas magazine •

The Ballad of Stage West: Fort Worth theater company’s 47th season is a matter of life and death

Stage West’s 47th season is full of wild turns: ghost machines, war-time ceasefires, financial despair, and a cottage crawling with infidelity. The six-play season is stacked with regional premieres and collaborations, all with the through-line of empathy.
The season begins with Ride the Cyclone (Oct. 16-Nov. 2, 2025), a musical about six teenagers who die in a freak roller coaster accident and find themselves in spiritual limbo, where a mechanical fortune teller gives them one last shot at life...
Arts and Culture Texas magazine •

Glitter and Be Gay: Uptown Players celebrates chosen family, queer joy, resilience, and rebellion in 2025-26 season

The theater produced by Uptown Players has always pulsed with a particular kind of energy that’s equal parts heart, wit, and daring. That pulse beats loud and clear in the Dallas theater company’s 2025-26 season, which promises a rich mix of irreverent comedy, powerful drama, and musical mayhem, all housed in the historic Kalita Humphreys Theater (with a stop at Theatre Three for good measure). Never content to play it safe, Uptown Players—Dallas’ premier LGBTQ+ theater—leans even deeper into bo...
Arts and Culture Texas magazine •

Unbind Your Imagination: TITAS/Dance Unbound invites global dance into Dallas for 2025-26 season

For TITAS/Dance Unbound’s 2025-26 season, the math is undeniably impressive: 10 companies from five different countries, among them two debuts (one U.S. and one Texas) and two world premieres.
Of equal importance is the idea of “be in the room.” TITAS developed this mantra following the pandemic to entice audiences back into the theater for shared experiences, and still asserts that nothing replaces the magic and connection of in-person performance. Santos’s tagline also generated ACTX’s March/A...
Arts and Culture Texas magazine •

Cartoon King: The Brilliant Accessibility of KAWS at Crystal Bridges (COVER STORY)

It’s Mickey Mouse, but not. It’s The Simpsons, but twisted. It’s a shaggy Muppet, but there’s something off about the eyes…
Since the late 1990s, KAWS (legal name: Brian Donnelly) has been putting his own original twist on well-known pop-culture figures and inventing his own cast of iconic characters that are complex, familiar, and deeply relatable.
“Part of the brilliance of KAWS’ work is that he pulls from the world we know,” says Alejo Benedetti, curator of contemporary art at Crystal Bridges...
Arts and Culture Texas magazine •

Fade To Black: Week-Long Arts Festival Amplifies Black Voices in Houston

At a time when many institutions are pulling away from telling diverse stories, Houston is proudly showing its support for the Black artistic community with the Fade To Black Festival. This week-long summer celebration highlights and elevates Black voices, transforming downtown Houston into a hub of Black artistry from June 8-14.
In 2013, her organization premiered the first iteration of Fade To Black as a play festival in the 80-seat Obsidian Theater (at the time called Obsidian Art Space). The...
Arts and Culture Texas magazine •

Dance Here: Agora Artists is Planting the Seeds to Make Dallas a Dance Town

A common lament among Dallas performing arts leaders is how the city’s talent doesn’t stay in Texas. Dancers, singers, and actors are born here, train here, and then leave for New York, Chicago, or even abroad. Someone should fix that, everyone thinks, and Avery-Jai Andrews is ready to be that someone.
“I would call Dallas a traditional dance company town,” says Andrews, who graduated from Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts and later NYU, before performing in Isr...
Arts and Culture Texas magazine •

Finding His Niche: Actor/Playwright Parker Davis Gray Carves out his place

Parker Davis Gray is not afraid to be weird. The SMU theater grad has played silly, sinister, sympathetic, and sometimes just plain psychotic on basically every professional stage in Dallas-Fort Worth since 2016; if he’s not taking a risk, he’s not satisfied.
“When it seems like my calendar’s full, I’ll just go and give myself something else to do,” Gray laughs. “I’m all about stretching different muscles.”
Coming from the small Texas town of Combine, about 30 minutes southeast of Dallas, Gray a...
Arts and Culture Texas magazine •

An Enigmatic Woman: Marisol’s Big Works Get an Even Bigger Retrospective at Dallas Museum of Art

Her name was synonymous with Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and other iconic Pop artists of the 1960s. But few today remember Marisol Escobar or her ahead-of-its-time art, which provocatively explored femininity and women’s role in society.
“She was so extremely successful in her day but departed from the art-world limelight by her own choice,” says Dr. Anna Katherine Brodbeck, DMA’s senior curator of contemporary art, who assisted originating institution Buffalo AKG Art Museum with building the...
Arts and Culture Texas magazine •

Born to Lead: Circle Theatre’s New Artistic Director Ashley H. White Isn’t Afraid to Shake Things Up

When Imprint Theatreworks closed at the end of 2022, Ashley H. White found herself at a crossroads. The founding artistic director had spent the previous five years producing some of the most ambitious and original theater that Dallas audiences had experienced in a good long while, but ultimately the nonprofit just couldn’t survive the pandemic’s decimation of regional theater.
“I have a sign on my desk that says, ‘if it doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t change you,’” White laughs, adding, “and...
Arts and Culture Texas magazine •

Beauty and Repulsion, Decay and Renewal: Jessica Kruetter at Galveston Arts Center

We may be made of star stuff, according to Carl Sagan, but the way Jessica Kreutter sees it we are all made of dirt.
Kreutter’s sculptures—though she prefers to call them ceramic assemblages—literally take pieces of the earth (clay) and sometimes found objects to echo the natural cycle of decay and renewal. But for “Collapse,” her latest exhibition now running at the Galveston Arts Center through Feb. 16, 2025, Kreutter is revisiting, reviving, and reforming some of her earlier works into entire...
Arts and Culture Texas magazine •

Cheers to 15 Years: Bruce Wood Dance Dallas isn’t afraid to mix things up for 2025

For its 15th year, Bruce Wood Dance is gifting itself a new name. The contemporary dance company, which is a new iteration of the original founded in Fort Worth by Wood in 1996, has officially rebranded as Bruce Wood Dance Dallas. This is not meant to drive a wedge between the two North Texas cities, but instead broadcast a sense of place as the troupe continues to tour and bring in big-name guest talent from around the globe.
The new name is already enticing admirers, as is evidenced by its sta...
Load More