Today at the Museum

Capturing Motion

March 31, 2006–February 21, 2007

Swirl. Sway. Scoot.

Capturing Motion, a newly installed exhibition of works from the Museum’s collections, explores various ways artists capture a sense of motion in their art. See how artists manipulate their materials to produce the illusion of a dancer twirling or of shapes scooting across a surface. Other artists cause forms to actually dance and glide or allow us to follow the videoed motion of a winding journey through a Dallas neighborhood.

Unique experiences are available for visitors as they explore this experimental exhibition on the first level of the Museum. Note your own motion in mirrors as you swirl and sway. Contemplate the uniting of science and art in Berenice Abbott’s photographs of physical laws of motion made especially for a science textbook. Consider a poem that embodies the motion of a Calder mobile in both its words and its form. Watch videos of artists such as Jackson Pollock or John Pomara as they create and comment on their work. You may choose to sketch the motion of colored stainless steel strips as they dance within the frame of George Rickey’s U.N. II or of mannequins you have arranged in poses suggested by Abraham Walkowitz’s ink and watercolor drawings of dancer Isadora Duncan. Try your hand at manipulating the signs of motion used by cartoonists or make your own mobiles.

Families with younger children will enjoy Capturing Motion for Kids, where they will find opportunities to play with motion using gears or Slinkies, observe mobiles and the interior of a clock, or follow suggestions to reach, hop, or wiggle in front of a rounded mirrored wall.

In Capturing Motion, the Museum is experimenting with different ways to engage visitors with a cross-cultural selection of works of art that accommodate various learning styles and provide opportunities for interaction and creative response. We hope you will visit, perhaps leave your drawings for others to see, and tell us what you think.

Image: George Rickey, U.N. II, 1954–60, stainless steel and paint, Dallas Museum of Art, Foundation for the Arts Collection, 1963.100.FA, © Estate of George Rickey/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

The Dallas Museum of Art is supported in part by the generosity of Museum members and donors and by the citizens of Dallas through the City of Dallas/Office of Cultural Affairs and the Texas Commission on the Arts.

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