By Suzanne Sprague, KERA 90.1 reporter
Dallas, TX – Suzanne Sprague, Reporter: By day, Brad Tucker teaches middle school students in Houston, but his real passions are music and art.
Brad Tucker, Artist: So, I wanted to find a way to seamlessly combine the two, whereas not making art about music or music about art, but kind of have an integrated system.
Sprague: This is the result - now playing at the Dallas Museum of Art.
[Drum solo recording]
Sprague: It's an album Tucker recorded using his friends, his students and other artists.
Tucker: Some of the people really are accomplished and some of the people are like tapping their chairs on the ground to a beat or something, so I didn't want it to be exclusive based on musical ability because I wanted it to be more about an artistic gesture.
Sprague: Tucker made the record from liquid plastic he poured into a mold. It skips because there were imperfections in the process. So the record itself is a unique piece of art. It plays on a working turntable and speakers Tucker built at the DMA's "Come Forward" exhibition on emerging art. Suzanne Weaver, who is the Museum's associate curator for contemporary art, says the show recognizes the DMA's century-long relationship with Texas artists.
Suzanne Weaver, DMA Associate Curator of Contemporary Art: But instead of going back and looking at the 100 years, we decided part of the museum at this time in our 100th year anniversary, birthday, we're looking at our past but we're also looking at our future. So we want to be more with it and forward-thinking and risk-taking.
Sprague: Some of the eleven artists in the show incorporated new media into their work. Others used pencil or acrylic paints. And since their subjects range from rodeos to racial identity, Suzanne Weaver says there's very little that actually ties them together.
Weaver: The one theme is that their work has definitely gone beyond just simple influences and inspiration. They all have their own vision, their own voice, very self-assured. They have conviction and clarity about what they're doing.
Sprague: And, they all launched their careers from the same platform - large university art departments. That wasn't so common a generation ago. Over the last 30 years, the number of students earning fine art degrees at American universities has jumped 88%. Lane Relyea, of Northwestern University, co-curated the DMA's show.
Lane Relyea, Assistant Professor, Northwestern University: It's just something that's generic now to how art gets made. And I just think that in order to be relevant, in order to be part of the world they live in, they have to respond to that. It doesn't make their work less serious or less intense or less meaningful or less interesting; it just makes their art relevant.
Sprague: That's because student artists go through a rigorous critique process that forces them to defend their work in their classes. Joan Davidow, who directs the Dallas Center for Contemporary Art, says today's artists are expected to have the credentials and the ability to communicate with the public and the media.
Joan Davidow, Director, Dallas Center for Contemporary Art: You want to hear it from them. How do they stack up with what else is being done? And if they have a point of view that's pretty clear, if they have a point of view that fits their work, then it gives you another reason to pay attention. It gives legitimacy to what they do. It adds validity to what they do.
Sprague: Take the work of Robyn O'Neil. She's one of the artists in the DMA's show. O'Neil makes pencil drawings of dinosaurs, speedboats and middle aged men in leisure suits. That may not sound compelling, but O'Neil, who has a BFA from Texas A&M University at Commerce, has more to say about her work. Fundamentally, it's about rebellion.
Robyn O'Neil, Artists: It's not really rebelling in that I'm running around being crazy, but rebelling against what's more prevalent in museums and galleries today which is video, very highly developed media installations.
Sprague: Still, O'Neil admits she drew each of the nine pieces on display at the DMA while watching television. Lots of bad television. So, it may not be surprising to find her middle-aged men, with names like "Miami Dave" and "Runaway Lionel," in staged situations.
O'Neil: For me, it's really the way certain B movies and soap operas and sitcoms are filmed so I am thinking of the technical aspects of video all along and it's just these very posed false realities I guess, which is what I do in my drawings, they're just posed, very choreographed, no one looks very natural.
Sprague: The Contemporary's Joan Davidow says this makes O'Neil's work "clever" and gives it context. But she's also quick to stress that there are a number of important untrained artists working today. Jay Sullivan, who chairs the art division at Southern Methodist University's Meadows School, agrees. He says what's changed over the last 50 years is the rise of art as an academic subject.
Jay Sullivan: You saw a huge influx of students after World War II because of the GI Bill coming to art schools, they had their education paid for, they had a lot of experiences. And so you saw universities begin to meet that need and so through the late 1960's, you saw a huge expansion of academic art departments outside of art schools.
Sprague: Sullivan says university art departments tend to emphasize the intellectual aspect of art more than technique. He doesn't say if that's better or worse than the older traditions of training under a master artist or attending an art academy, but he does say that universities sometimes grant degrees to people who admittedly weren't very good art students.
Sullivan: And I think that's a real danger of what's happened within the university-academy, because the university-academy is both trying to train the best professionals and it's also training everybody, and yeah, for want of a better term, you're going to have A artists and B artists and C artists coming out of a program.
Sprague: Sullivan quickly adds that grades don't necessarily predict future talent or success. Still, the Dallas Museum of Art required artists to have a university degree in order to be included in its "Come Forward" exhibition. The Contemporary's Joan Davidow believes that will help strengthen the reputation of Texas university art departments and the overall art community.
Davidow: We want these good artists to stay in Texas. So, by giving them a forum to start their careers and to develop their careers then hopefully they have reason to stay here and don't have to run away to New York or California. And that's the goal.
Sprague: "Come Forward: Emerging Art in Texas" continues at the Dallas Museum of Art through May 11th. For KERA 90.1, I'm Suzanne Sprague.
To contact Suzanne Sprague, please send emails to ssprague@kera.org.