Jerome Weeks

When it started six years ago, Southern Methodist University’s National Center for Arts Research (NCAR) already had the largest arts database in America. Since 2012, the center has used sources as the National Endowment for the Arts, the League of American Orchestras and the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies to analyze how cultural institutions work and can work better and how they benefit communities.

At Hamon Hall inside Dallas’ Winspear Opera House, volunteers sort through some 7,000 donated shoes on the floor. Sneakers, flip-flops, high heels, hiking boots, baby shoes.

Gun violence, says Bart McGeehon, “touches us all.”

Ground was broken Friday on another high-end, residential high-rise in downtown Dallas near Klyde Warren Park, but this one is different: It's designed with its neighbors in mind.

"You’re listening to the best in town," my car radio tells me, "the best around: 'The Local Mix'..."

Actually, you probably haven’t been listening to “The Local Mix” — or to “Candy's Sour Hour,” or “Electricity Comes from Other Planets,” or even to legendary Denton artist Martin Iles’ “WOODS,” a twice-monthly collage of unusual tunes, ravings, deadpan comedy, musical drones and cricket chirps.

A landmark exhibition that addresses former President Thomas Jefferson’s long-debated relationship with Sally Hemings, one of his slaves who bore six of his children, will begin its national tour in Dallas this fall.

If you’ve driven along Northwest Highway in Dallas, you’ve seen Lovers Lane United Methodist Church. It’s the large, white, rocket-ship-looking house of worship at Northwest and Inwood.

But back amongst all those trees, it’s not simply a church; it’s an entire complex of chapels, a school, a gym, a coffeehouse, various offices and ministries. It offers everything from traditional services to contemporary Christian music that can include country-western or Michael Jackson, even a jazz band.

There are also two choirs made entirely of African immigrants — one just of people from Zimbabwe.

The Dallas Symphony Orchestra has appointed Grammy-winning Fabio Luisi as its new music director. 

Luisi has a five-year contract and replaces Jaap van Zweden, who left to lead the New York Philharmonic. The new music director will take over only gradually – although his appointment wasn’t the only big news from the DSO.

The Dallas Symphony filled one of its major leadership gaps Friday morning.

Kim Noltemy, the chief operating and communications officer for the Boston Symphony since 2015, will become the DSO’s new CEO and president — and the first woman to hold both positions.

Renowned Texas sculptor Jesus Moroles died Monday in a car accident on I-35 north of Georgetown.

Last Thursday, Moroles and his crew from Rockport, near Port Aransas, delivered four giant granite columns to Dallas. Moroles’ 15-foot tall work, called Spirit Inner Columns, was installed Friday in Hall Arts. That’s the new tower complex going up in the Arts District, across from the Winspear Opera House.

Rick Lowe, the Nasher Sculpture Center’s first artist-in-residence, has won a $625,000 MacArthur Foundation fellowship – the so-called “genius” grant.

A concert hall to rival the best in the world.

In 1989, planners set the stakes high for the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas. They persevered through two bond elections, a recession and public protests.

The founder of the Bruce Wood Dance Project, perhaps the most esteemed choreographer in North Texas, has died of complications from pneumonia and heart failure. He was 53.

Poet, autobiographer, activist and essayist Maya Angelou died earlier today at her home in Winston-Salem, N.C. She was 86.

In 1992, KERA taped Angelou at her home reading her poem, “Still I Rise,” for the documentary, Kindred Spirits: Contemporary African-American Artists. (See the video below.)

Near the Bath House Cultural Center on White Rock Lake, there’s a large semi-circle of poles standing in the water. They’re part of an environmental installation designed as rest stops for birds. It sounds peaceful enough, but artists, lake activists and neighborhood groups are sharply at odds over the bird roosts.

What triggered the dispute? The city’s lack of maintenance of the artwork.

E-books and Amazon and other industry changes have battered the traditional book trade.  Which is why we don’t see many new bricks-and-mortar bookstores opening these days. But an independent bookstore just opened in Oak Cliff, and it’s an unusual one.

Jonathan Lethem’s best-selling, award-winning novel, The Fortress of Solitude, premiers this week as a musical at the Dallas Theater Center. The musical follows two boys, one white, one black, growing up in the ‘70s in a Brooklyn full of graffiti, music, drugs – and superheroes. KERA’s Jerome Weeks sat down with the novelist before his appearance at Arts & Letters Live at the Dallas Museum of Art last month.

Did you know that less than 43 percent of art museum directors are women? And the female directors, on average, are paid less than their male counterparts?

Those are among the findings of a joint study done by SMU’s National Center for Arts Research and the Association of Art Museum Directors. It found that female directors at museums with budgets of more than $15 million earn 71 cents for every $1 that male directors earn. At the same time, women who run art museums with smaller budgets do earn more than their male counterparts – annually, they earn 2 cents more.

The Kimbell Art Museum has bought a great Dutch landscape to go with its great Dutch seascape. The seascape just looked so lonely, you know? Now it’s part of a surf ‘n turf pair.

The Fort Worth museum announced that it has acquired Edge of a Forest with a Grainfield, painted around 1656 by the leading master of Dutch landscapes, Jacob van Ruisdael (he always signed, never dated, his paintings, which is why their dates of origin are usually vague).