moderndallas | ed.46 / june2023

howard sherman, turning yourself into a war machine, 2023 acrylic, marker and spray paint on canvas 70 x 60 x 2 in

Building for Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow:

Michael Turner’s Tribute to Tom Greico

by J. Claiborne Bowdon

Building for yesterday, today, and tomorrow- Michael Turner’s tribute to Tom Greico by J. Claiborne Bowdon

A house is a big responsibility, for those that live in it, but certainly for those that are thinking about the lives lived within it. What will the days and years be like based on the shape of the home? Should the sink be the first thing you encounter in the kitchen? What are the benefits of the type of flooring used? How will natural light potentially

improve someone’s morning? Michael Turner has been asking these questions, and finding answers to them, with his design firm, Classic Urban Homes for almost twenty years now. It’s “Building for the way people really live,” as the maxim on the website reads. “Most clients are referrals, or live in neighborhoods where we have built. They typically have a strong idea of what they are looking for, and a strong opinion about the materials they want to use.

We are fortunate to have a fairly large portfolio of homes with many different finishes and styles that gets the conversation started.”

Michael has been designing and building in Dallas for decades now, and responding to the changing nature of methods, trends, and the business itself is as much a part of it as the intuition of what makes a great home. “We definitely try to start with smart design, as the cost

to build continues to increase due to mostly labor and also materials. It’s important to pick materials that will be sustainable and not costly to maintain long term. Materials and methods have definitely changed over the last two decades, so has our climate and rainfall. It’s more important than ever to make sure you are paying attention to the details behind the walls and not just what cladding you are putting on them.”

As much thought has to be given to the process of building as the building itself. As a designer and builder Michael has to anticipate issues that a design, or the location, present, and then respond to that. “There are always changes and edits along the process. Sometimes a client needs to see and feel a space to know if it will work for the way the live. 3D models are really changing the way we design before we build. I tell clients it is much less expensive to make changes on paper.” Bringing together all of

the elements, from the client’s vision to every component of construction, requires as much skill as the design process, and client’s descriptions of Michael as diligent and patient point to how he manages this aspect of the work.

A home is an even bigger responsibility when you’re building it for a friend, or, rather, when you’re building the home that your friend would have liked to have built. Tom Greico was a beloved part of the Dallas architecture community,

and a friend and mentor to Michael since he was a student in high school. Tom himself had begun designing in high school, and knew Michael’s uncle from the University of Texas at Arlington. Michael worked with Tom in every capacity, from drafting projects to sweeping up job sites in those early days, and they remained friends thereafter. Tom was no different than the many clients that would come to him to help build their dream home. He owned a

lot in Midway Hollows, between Walnut Hill and Midway, just behind St. Monica’s, and had planned to build his own home there. Here and there, once a month or whenever the mood struck, he would put out different ideas for the house and renderings on Facebook to see what his friends and colleagues thought. When Tom passed in January of 2019 his brother came to Michael about buying the lot that Tom had planned to build his home

on. After looking through Tom’s computer Michael found the plans for the home he had planned to build, and its construction was completed just this year.

The design has all the hallmarks of Tom’s approach to designing homes, with lots of natural lighting, an open living plan, and the outside and inside seamlessly engaging with each other. The look and feel captures Tom himself with a calm, understated, and easygoing floor

plan that allows you to move through it and interact with it without obstacles- no walls or posts to navigate around or block your view or conversation. It’s a design that lets you live effortlessly. Tom’s signature design approach begins right at the entry to the house with a pivot front door and a side light window. The way the door swings out with its other end turning around into the house immediately signals this isn’t just a house with a modern look, but a modern space.

The space is lit throughout with energy efficient LED lighting, including along the bases of the steps of the floating staircase at the entryway and the floating hearth by the fireplace, for a crisp reflection off the gallery-like white walls. It’s a perfect complement to the sun-filled areas that gives an uplifting brightness to everything within. The site the house was built on is a corner lot, and Tom cleverly took advantage of essentially having two front yards by orienting the kitchen and family room along the side of the second yard. Michael, in turn, has cleverly

compensated for this exposure by planting a living screen of hollies along the edge of the yard to ensure privacy without making it feel too walled in. The combined kitchen and family room is absolutely glowing with a wall of interlocking sliding glass patio doors along the back, and has a large inviting central island with a standout block of symmetrically laid out cabinets with wood veneer that are balanced by the rectangular forms of the ovens, ribbon windows at counter level, and refrigerator.

Beyond the look of everything are the foam-encapsulated walls, which offer better overall insulation for the house that reduces the reliance on the HVAC system to maintain temperature- drastically more energy and cost- efficient than typical insulation. Everything within, from the fixtures to the materials, is meant to improve the overall quality of every day. Even the lighting that frames the undersides of the multiple floating components has the practical

function of providing light at night so that you can easily navigate the home without needing to turn on the overhead lighting. It’s more than just looks, though everything does look great. It’s a fine and satisfying period to the story of Tom Greico, and the lives lived within it will certainly be all the better for it.

// classicurbanhomes.com

DREAM DREAM DREAM

WORKS BY CARLOS DONJUAN

UN MOMENTO

PHOTOGRAPHY EXHIBITION

CURATED BY CARLOS DONJUAN

JUNE 24–AUGUST 12

KIRK HOPPER FINE ART

1426 N. RIVERFRONT BLVD, DALLAS

KIRKHOPPERFINEART.COM

The

at William Campbell Gallery by Cinzia Franceschini

Explosive Debut of Howard Sherman

// franchise player, 2013 acrylic, acid-free paper and marker mounted on canvas 83x68x17 in

Howard Sherman’s work is frank, raw, and bold. The artist knows how to be many things at the same time. His art overlaps multiple languages. It simultaneously speaks several voices: it is as impactful and energetic as a mural; it raises questions like a collage; it makes the observer’s eye run over shapes, lines, and textural traces of color, as in front of a painting of Abstract Expressionism. Sherman’s works are a mix of directness and a sense of humor. The audience can perceive them loud and clear at first glance and, at the same time, deconstruct them little by little, lingering on the different materials. It is, therefore, a precious opportunity for the public to see Sherman’s recent works at the William Campbell Gallery in

// scorecard for vices, 2020 acrylic, canvas and marker on canvas 70 x 60 x 2 in

// the one that kicks harder than the rest, 2022 acrylic, charcoal, marker and spray paint on acid-free paper

95 x 61 in

Forth Worth (Texas). This is a special debut exhibition for the artist for the first time at the Texas Gallery. The Houston-based artist has, in fact, a solid career behind him and more than sixty national and international exhibitions to his credit. He has gained praise from specialized art critics, which defined him as “one of the most pioneering contemporary painters on the Texas art scene”. In 2023, Sherman will also have a major monograph entirely dedicated to his practice, with relevant critical contributions.

However, the solo show What it Feels Like Inside the Sun is the first exhibition of the visual artist at William Campbell Gallery in Forth Worth. Inaugurating this happy partnership is a selection of 10 works, expertly realized with different techniques: recent large-scale paintings created with mixed media on canvas, other works on paper, and wall assemblage. The exhibition at WGC, hosted in June and July 2023, is bound to amaze audiences with the physicality of Sherman’s works. The ability to overlap, to move between opposite poles, placing them at a powerful meeting point is the artist’s stylistic hallmark. His works balance figuration and abstraction, elements drawn from recognizable reality and other strongly abstract.

trap door in the sun, 2023, acrylic, canvas, spray paint and marker 70x60x2in

when the sky told humans how to live, 2020 acrylic, canvas, oil and marker on canvas 100 x 60 x 2 in

Sherman knows how to orchestrate: he draws on more traditional painting techniques and more contemporary ones, such as collage and assemblage, mixing different styles from art history. This is no small thing nor a purely aesthetic choice: his ability to mix rather than separate, to use both the high visual languages of abstract art and the more popular ones of cartooning or street art denotes his playful spirit. It is an open attitude to mixing that distinguishes all of his artwork. Sherman can mix the gestural energy of mark-making and abstract expressionism, visible in his dense black strokes and colored acrylic brushstrokes, with the compositional logic of collage. The result is an explosive melting pot of forms and moods. Each gesture is a compromise between instinctive gesture and formal organization. Howard Sherman’s works are striking precisely because they seem driven by two

The ultimate in modern chill.

users clustering near the checkpoint, 2022 acrylic, canvas, spray paint and marker 70 x 60 x 2 in

impulses: one frenetic, and energetic, the other of visual balance. The final compositional solutions are measured and powerful. As the gallery representing him states, we are in the presence of “ultracontemporary abstract expressionism”.

The walls of the William Campbell Gallery at the hands of Sherman are transformed as if hosting a large-scale mural. One is struck by his acrylic paintings on canvas, with paint strokes drawn with explosive, aggressive energy; but also, by his smaller works on paper, which exploit different materials in more intuitive ways. Sherman loudly displays a visual repertoire that draws on his experience in cartooning: marked lines, bright colors, and exaggerat-

naked people holding guns, 2017 acrylic, canvas and marker on canvas 100 x 80 x 2 in

// concrete character anchoring the plot, 2023 acrylic, marker and spray paint on canvas 80 x 70 x 2 in.

ed, charged shapes. In his works, there are also distinctive street art tools, such as markers and spray paint. The overall effect is wild and subtly comic, a mixture of Jackson Pollock-like Abstract Expressionism and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s naive Graffiti art.

The figurative lexicon is also playful and expressive, with a strong chromatic impact. The word lexicon is not accidental: Sherman’s art is powerful not only because of the images but because of the words associated with them. The artist’s titles are long, intricate, and imaginative, sounding like excerpts from poems or punch lines from a playful joke. Through the titles, abstract images acquire new and surreal stories. This is how circular, angular shapes in Teethmarks as Souvenirs seem to refer to an image of a gaping mouth with sharp teeth; or the bursting energy of the entire exhibition echoes the explosion of heat that one could “feel inside the sun.”

Howard Sherman’s debut at the William Campbell Gallery is, therefore, a chance to get up close and personal with the layered and powerful language of this Houston (TX) native but internationally recognized artist. It is an opportunity to view a portion of the body of work of this prolific artist acclaimed by collectors, whose mixed media paintings are currently housed in several museum permanent collections, including the Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Art Museum of South Texas, and the George Bush

Intercontinental Airport in Houston. Sherman’s works invite visitors to scratch behind the surface, to discover the different layers that compose the canvas. The discovery is crystal clear: the substance of Sherman’s art is alive, active, and ready to release energy. Like the hot, central core of the star Sun.

// williamcampbellcontemporaryart.com

// fragmented thinker #21, 2023 acrylic on acid-free paper 9x6 in

The Dallas Architecture Forum is for everyone who wants to experience inspired design. The Forum presents an award-winning Lecture Series that brings outstanding architects,interior designers, landscape architects and urban planners from around the world, as well as Symposia, Receptions at architecturally significant residences, and Panel Discussions on issues impacting North Texas.

Honors For Preserving Dallas’ Past

by Hardy Haberman

// courtesy of valley house gallery & sculpture garden

I am lifelong Dallasite. Growing up here, I watched as building after building was torn down and replaced by something newer. I am old enough that some of those replacement buildings have also fallen to the wrecking ball. Because of this, as I matured, I saw Dallas as a city that was constantly trying to erase its history.

Luckily about 50 years ago a group of Dallasites who saw

the same trend moved to do something about it. Preservation Dallas is that organization and they are dedicated to the preservation and revitalization of the city’s historic buildings, neighborhoods and places.

Part of that mission involves rewarding people and organizations that contribute to that mission. For the past 24 years the group has presented their Preservation

// courtesy of valley house gallery & sculpture garden

// courtesy of valley house gallery & sculpture garden

Achievement Awards and along side those awards are their Special Recognition Awards.

Back in May, at their ceremony they recognized individuals and businesses who made key contributions to the Dallas preservation community, both over the past year and the past several years.

“The winners are a cross section of the hardest-working and most-committed preservationists in Dallas,” said Norman Alston, FAIA, President of Preservation Dallas.

While we are honoring them, really we are the ones who feel honored, by having the chance to publicly recognize our honorees, and thank them for their service to our community. Preservation Dallas, and Dallas as a whole, are in their debt.

// courtesy of valley house gallery & sculpture garden

// courtesy of valley house gallery & sculpture garden

Pair of Paul Evans Signed Cityscape Deep Tufted Sofas, 1970s

STEWARDSHIP AWARD

Recognizes long-term commitment to the preservation of a historic building or historic site.

2023 Honoree: Cheryl & Kevin Vogel for Valley House Gallery

The Vogels continue the legacy of their parents Don and Peggy Vogel who founded Valley House Gallery &

Sculpture Garden in 1953. They continue the seventy-year tradition of offering the highest quality fine art to collectors and museums, showcasing regional and international artists together. The Stewardship Award recognizes long-term commitment to preserving a historic building or site. Vally House Gallery is a mid-century modern structure nestled in a wooded glen off Spring Valley Road.

& Sculpture Garden

// courtesy of valley house gallery & sculpture garden

ADDITIONAL 2023 AWARDS:

DOROTHY SAVAGE AWARD

Recognizes significant and ongoing contributions to the preservation of Dallas’ neighborhoods and urban core.

2023 Honoree: Carol Roark

Roark is former manager of the Special Collections Division of the Dallas Public Library and chair of the Texas Historical Commission’s National Register State Board of Review. She is the author of Fort Worth and Tarrant County and Fort Worth Then & Now. She holds a BA in Anthropology from the University of Texas, Austin (1974), an MA in American Studies from Texas Christian University (1984), and an MLS from the University of North Texas (1993).

CRAFTSMANSHIP AWARD

Recognizes an individual dedicated to a craft for preservation purposes, helping us to further our mission.

2023 Honoree: Eric Samuelsen

Eric Samuelsen started Samuelsen Refinishing in 1981, bringing renewed life to everything from antique furniture to pianos. The Craftsmanship Award recognizes an individual dedicated to a craft for preservation purposes

SPIRIT OF PRESERVATION AWARD

Recognizes an individual who brings forth the Spirit of Preservation to inspire and lead others in our community.

2023 Honoree: the late Dr. George E. Keaton, Jr (to be accepted on Dr. Keaton’s behalf by Reggie Small)

The late Dr. George E. Keaton, Jr founded “Remembering Black Dallas”, preserving the stories of what he often referred to as the hidden history of Dallas. A DISD educator and guidance counselor for over three decades, his legacy has inspired a new generation to ensure his work lives on.

GAIL THOMAS PATTERSON AWARD

Recognizes an outstanding restoration project done to exacting standards.

2023 Honoree: Mark Martinek, Jay Baker, and Katherine D. Seale for The Rosenfield House (aka “The Blue House”)

The Rosenfield House, a Queen Anne Victorian built for Max Rosenfeld in the mid-1880s and often referred to as The Blue House, was one of the first to be built in Dallas. It was moved from 1423 Griffin St. in Dallas, to where it stands now, just blocks away, at 1419 Beaumont St. Its restoration took ook the combined efforts of the honorees, Mark Martinek, Jay Baker, and Katherine D. Seale.

PRESERVATION EDUCATION AWARD

Recognizes those who produce publications or media which help educate the general public about the value of historic preservation, or the preservation of historic resources.

2023 Honoree: Robert Wilonsky

Robert Wilonsky is a journalist, and the former host of Higher Definition, an interview program on the cable television network HDNet. His writing for the Dallas Times Herald and later for the Dallas Observer has provided insight into historic issues and projects like the restoration of the Rosenfield House.

VOLUNTEER HONOR AWARD

Recognizes a volunteer who has made exceptional contributions to assist Preservation Dallas

2023 Honoree: Julie Travis

Travis has been a weekly volunteer for over a decade and instrumental in organizing the Preservation Dallas resource files making it easier for researchers and the public to find information.

PRESERVATION ADVOCACY AWARD

Recognizes a specific advocacy project that advances the mission of the organization.

2023 Honoree: Preservation Dallas Education Committee for DISD Historic Schools Research Project

There was no comprehensive current single source of documentation for historic schools of the DIS. Over the course of five years, 20 Preservation Dallas members volunteered to research 112 historic schools creating an invaluable resource for the community.

HISTORIC CORNERSTONE BUSINESS AWARD

Recognizes a business that has a long-term connection of over 30 years to the Dallas community, with service to the construction/preservation community.

2023 Honoree: Texas Paint and Wallpaper

An invaluable resource for restoration , Texas Paint and Wallpaper have 75 years experience matching colors and identifying hard to find wallpapers. They offer advice on colors that conform to Conservation and Historic District homes and buildings.

Guests enjoyed an evening at the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum, emceed by Jason Wheeler

CADDALLAS.ORG

2023 MEMBERS

Carneal Simmons Contemporary Art

Conduit Gallery

Craighead Green Gallery

Cris Worley Fine Arts

Erin Cluley Gallery

Galleri Urbane Marfa+Dallas

Holly Johnson Gallery

Keijsers Koning

Kirk Hopper Fine Art

Laura Rathe Fine Art

PDNB Gallery

Pencil on Paper Gallery

RO2 Art

Valley House Gallery & Sculpture Garden

ART: Kevin Vogel - Valley House Gallery

DEVELOPER: Diane Cheatham - Urban Edge

ARCHITECTURE: Bernbaum/Magadini

// steel bench/table that makes a strong graphic statement. provides open storage beneath its flat top at dwr

// monta by cassina originally designed and used by charlotte perriand herself in her home at scottcooner

// a sarus shade perches on a hand-bent metal frame to form this piece by david weeks studio at smink

URBANISM IN DALLAS OVER THE PAST 25 YEARS

Dallas Architecture Forum

WALKING TOURS

Discover the Arts District + Fair Park Tram Tour

Ad Ex

PRESERVATION DALLAS

InTown Outings

EDUARDO SARABIA + SHEPARD FAIREY

Dallas Contemporary

MARK DI SUVERO

Nasher Sculpture Center

MOVEMENT: THE LEGACY OF KINETICISM

Dallas Museum Of Art

JAPAN, FORM & FUNCTION EXHIBITION

Crow Museum Of Asian Art

ROBERT MOTHERWELL: PURE PAINTING

The Modern Art Museum

CHRISTINA FERNANDEZ: MULTIPLE EXPOSURES

The Amon Carter Museum of American Art

Modern events and activities make for fun around the Metroplex.

art galleries

Modern art, exhibits, around the Metroplex.

UN MOMENTO

Kirk Hopper Fine Art

DON NETZER

PDNB Gallery

KATHY BOORTZ + CINDI HOLT

Valley House Gallery

NERA Ferrari Gallery

MICHAEL FRANK BLAIR + STEPHEN LAPTHISOPHON + DAN PHILLIPS

Conduit Gallery

ART OF PAPER

Laura Rathe Fine Art

HOWARD SHERMAN

William Campbell Gallery

LETITIA HUCKABY

Talley Dunn Gallery

THE RANGE 12.26

LIZ WARD + JAMES LUMSDEN

Holly Johnson Gallery

MYRA BARRAZA + MICHAEL CORRIS + TINO WARD

Liliana Bloch Gallery