Fort Worth Public Art, Dallas Aurora to light up Will Rogers Memorial Center with public art show

If you head down I-30 in August, you can see a psychedelic light show from Fort Worth’s cultural district.

The organizers and artists ask you to come closer, spend a night on the grounds around the Pioneer Tower and challenge yourself to think differently – not only about art, but also about the future.

New Stories: New Futures is the first of four major public works of art commissioned by Fort Worth Public Art. It will take place on August 20-21 at the Will Rogers Memorial Center from 9:00 PM to 1:00 AM. The installation of the Pioneer Tower and the accompanying exhibition, both at Will Rogers, are free and open to the public.

In addition to being designed by and for the community, these great public works of art are local and tourist attractions that define a place – like Chicago’s Cloud Gate, a reflective, bean-shaped sculpture that has become synonymous with the city.

“The whole idea is not just to have such a high-level work of art, but to have art that really connects the public with Fort Worth,” said Martha Peters, director of Fort Worth Public Art, one of the arts administered by the arts Fort Worth City Council Initiative.

Fort Worth Public Art, which was founded in 2001, updated its master plan in 2017 after nearly 2,500 residents spent a year asking questions about public art, such as, “Where do people gather in Fort Worth?”

There was not one answer, but four: the Cultural District, Downtown, the Stockyards, and the Trinity River.

Public art “exists for people to meet,” so it should hit a community where it already is, said Wesley Gentle, director of funding for the Arts Council of Fort Worth. “It should create a sense of place and an experience when people interact with it.”

The 60-meter-high Pioneer Tower was a natural candidate for the first location. The building was renovated in 2018 in order to lay the data, power and lighting cables required for large-scale projections.

Dallas Aurora was advised during the redevelopment project and later partnered on the exhibition itself. Founded in 2010, the public arts organization hosts art festivals with light, sound and video every two years and will return to Dallas in 2023.

Although New Stories: New Futures is a temporary new media exhibition, it will remain with the Fort Worth Public Art collection so that projections can take place again in the future. Fort Worth Public Art will also document the event through photo and video so residents can experience it online in their free time.

“Artists using technology are the way of the future. In order for our program to really reflect what is happening in the art world, we have to move with the times, ”said Peters.

The installation in the Pioneer Tower was curated by DooEun Choi, a New York-based artist who co-curated Aurora 2018, and features Davide Quagliola, also known as Quayola, and Refik Anadol. Fort Worth City Council allocated $ 930,000 for the installation.

A rendering of Pioneer Tower Dreams, a projection by Refik Anadol made for New Stories: New Futures in Fort Worth.

Anadol was inspired by Blade Runner and a childhood love for science fiction to create Pioneer Tower Dreams, a video and audio projection of data from local archives, libraries and museums.

“In this algorithm, the past, present and future come together,” he said. “As an artist, can I dip a brush in the head of a machine and paint the memories of Fort Worth on a building? In this context, light is color and data is pigment. “

Anadol described his piece as “a data sculpture” and “synaesthetic architecture”. For him, machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence are tools of the imagination.

He called Fort Worth residents for their memories earlier this year and received more than 1,000 entries. The memories go back to the 1930s. Some are written stories about the first days of school, others are clips from local radio and television.

A native of Istanbul and a Los Angeles-based artist, Anadol said it was especially important that he dealt with Fort Worth when creating his piece. The community contributions will take up extra space in the projection.

Quayola, a native of Rome and living in London, drew from the nature that is Fort Worth to create Texas Surveys: New Pointillism, Landscape Scans and Horse Paintings.

For his piece, he built bespoke computer vision systems and graphics software to capture billions of data points from trees at the Fort Worth Botanic Garden and Fort Worth Nature Center, and from a horse show at Will Rogers, to create “impressionistic” textures. “

For example, the rhythmic gallop of a horse turns into brown, orange, and white stripes that ripple across the Pioneer Tower. His Artist Preview described the resulting “Computational Paintings” as both “totally abstract” and “completely driven” by Fort Worth.

The accompanying exhibition on the Will Rogers property was curated by Lauren Cross, a Fort Worth-based artist, and features ten artists from the Dallas-Fort Worth area. It is funded in part by $ 235,000 in grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Texas Commission on the Arts.

Cross, describing her involvement as “an easy thing”, had helped develop Fort Worth Public Art’s new master plan. For this curation process, she asked herself: “These stories that these artists present, what are they provoking us for our future?”

Jin-Ya Huang will explore the experiences of Asian and immigrant women in Fort Worth in Your Lost Asian Sister. Inspired by her work at Break Bread, Break Borders, which empowers refugee women through food and storytelling, Huang’s video projection will illuminate stories that have been “told but not heard”.

Founder Jin-Ya Huang speaks to guests ahead of the first Break Bread, Break Borders event at Cafe Momentum in Dallas. (Brian Maschino / Brian Maschino)

“People who haven’t heard from other perspectives are literally hearing these stories for the first time,” she said. “If you all have different manners, people really see these opportunities.”

Huang will include contributions from community members on what Fort Worth means to them. For them, Fort Worth is “the city of happiness and peace”, a Chinese translation that is written in calligraphy for projection.

Ciara Elle Bryant will create a projection inspired by Soul Train, Jordan commercials, and other visuals by Black creators from the 1970s and 1980s – all of which are viewed as black contributions to the zeitgeist.

“If blacks do it, it’s ghetto, but when it’s appropriated and marketed in high fashion, it’s a new cultural renaissance,” said Bryant. “I wanted to talk about something that is very specific and anchored and rooted in black culture.”

Dallas artist Ciara Elle Bryant poses for a portrait in front of her 2020 installation “Server: A Streamed Revolution”.(Jeffrey McWhorter / special article)

Eventually, in her piece, she ended up researching sneaker culture. For Bryant, a self-proclaimed “giant sneakerhead,” it is an accessible entry point to discuss the role of style in culture.

“There’s no fancy suit-and-tie guy who’ll tell you, ‘don’t touch the artwork.’ You don’t have to drive completely out of your neighborhood, ”she said.

The installation of the Pioneer Tower and the accompanying exhibition, Anadol said, act as catalysts for open and collaborative discussions – those that are intended to extend beyond the two-day event.

“My hope is,” said Anadol, “this is a campfire for the 21st century.”

Reserve tickets for New Stories: New Futures at newstoriesnewfutures.org. The Kimbell Art Museum is also hosting Artist Talks on August 18-21.

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