La Reunion TX, the developing artists’ residency program in west Oak Cliff, has announced the artists who will participate this fall in its new Art Chicos program and its highly successful Art Chicas program. Art Chicas brings together artists and high-school age students in an extraordinary art-making experience at an outdoor location in west Oak Cliff. The purpose of Art Chicas is to expose students to the possibilities of art, art-making and the career of an artist, while giving them the opportunity to be inspired by the natural world. This year, County Commissioner Dr. Elba Garcia will serve as Honorary Chair.

The LRTX guest jurors selected the eight artists, which are Bernardo Diaz, Art Garcia, and Frankie Garcia for Art Chicos and Aralyn McGregor, Lyndsey Rieple, Emily Riggert, and Jennifer Sereno for Art Chicas. The jurors were Anne Bothwell of Art + Seek, Michael Corris of SMU’s Division of Art, and Katherine Owens of Undermain Theatre.

Thirty high school students have been invited to participate, half of each gender. The program will take place each Saturday in October 2011 on the LRTX site: 35 privately-owned, heavily-wooded acres that serve as an outdoor gallery.  During a 90-minute orientation session the first Saturday, participants will meet, match up (four students per artist of the same gender), and talk about the creative process.  The work will be created in full-day sessions, one for girls and one for boys, the second and third Saturdays.  During lunch that day, a representative of the Dallas Art Dealers Association will speak to the students about careers in art.  On the final Saturday, October 29, from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. artists and students will exhibit their work during a FREE reception to which family, friends and LRTX supporters are invited. In the previous four years of the program, student teams have come from the Girl Scouts of Northeast Texas, the Deaf Action Center, Buckner, DISD, Uplift Education and Pegasus Charter School.

Art Chicas and Art Chicos give these students the opportunity to participate in the creative process with an established professional artist, gaining a new outlook on art and artists and their life in general.  Research by the National Endowment for the Arts has shown that being involved in an art-making experience will make students better audiences for the arts in the future and greatly increase the possibility that they will become artists themselves.  It transforms the participating artists as well.

La Reunion TX is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to establish an artists’ residency in Dallas, inspired by nature, which will sustain and renew artists and community through art, education and outreach.

For application and other information, contact Catherine Horsey at LRTX: info@lareuniontx.org or 214 394-3150 or Lisa Taylor at Dallas Art Dealers Association: info@dallasartdealers.org or 214 914-1099

SELECTED ARTISTS

ART CHICAS

Aralyn McGregor is a Dallas based artist specializing in oil, acrylic, watercolor and dry media.  Aralyn holds a BFA in Studio Art from the University of North Texas School of Visual Arts.  She has taught middle and high school art at Williams Preparatory in Dallas and currently teaches AP studio art. Aralyn also creates freelance commission work for venues and individuals. Her most recent series of paintings deal with the flaws of memory and perception through atmospheric and figurative juxtaposition.

Lindsey Rieple always has drawn people and utilized the resources around her to design and create two and three-dimensional art. She lets materials and the human form direct and inspire her to create jewelry, drawings, and paintings. She is currently finishing her degree in Jewelry and Metalsmithing at the University of North Texas. Her work decorates the body with organic forms and mixtures of materials such as brass, silver, wood, leather, and found or overlooked objects.

Emily Riggert was born in Dallas, Texas in 1986. She studied art at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, and the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland. Her work explores the persistent forces of growth and decay in the natural world, and has been seen at the Dallas Museum of Art, The San Antonio Art League, and the Michael and Noemi Neidorff Gallery at Trinity University. She currently lives and works in Oak Cliff.

Jennifer Sereno is a married mother of two who has dedicated her life to art. Born in Tacoma, WA she came to Texas as a child and has lived in Dallas for 11 years. Her original works are created using an amalgamation of nature’s offerings in a combination of stone, clay, glass and found objects. Her works are primarily additive in nature and are best described as earth’s elemental antiquity, represented in modern art. Her art is both tactile and visually stunning, tapping into the geology of the human soul.

ART CHICOS

Bernardo Diaz is a MFA Graduate from Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University and is currently serving as artist in residency with the Division of Art. Diaz’s studio work is a reflection of the synthesis of mainstream and alternative aesthetics, materials, concepts, and artistic processes. Additionally, Diaz currently is working with four undergraduate artists in developing a cultural arts curriculum by engaging with students at the Bataan and McMillan Community Centers of West Dallas.

Art Garcia is an artist and designer with 24 years of design and illustration experience.  Since 1990, Garcia’s artwork has been featured in national and international publications, and has been honored with numerous awards.  He has created art for the City of Dallas, the city of Southlake, the Meadows School of the Arts, The University of Texas at Dallas and The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.  He recently completed a solar installation for BRW Architects and the Dallas Fire Departments’ Station 33, a seating element at The Dallas Farmers Market and two murals for the Grawyler Park Branch of the Dallas Public Library.

Frankie Garcia is a self-taught artist, originally from southern California, but was raised in the inner city of Dallas.  He is a philanthropist, creative director and interior designer.  He has worked with Rutherford’s Designs and the Nasher Sculpture Center.  His style is abstract constructivism that uses numerous elements such as canvas, metals, wood, paper, mixed media and an array of industrial hardware.

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Bang Dang’s winning entry

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On March 26, 2009 from 6:30pm – 8:30pm the Dallas Center for Architecture and La Reunion TX will feature a continuation of the Make Space for Art tour with a reception and book signing.  The exhibit will be on display from March 9 – April 9, 2009 in the offices of the Dallas Center for Architecture, located at 1909 Woodall Rodgers Freeway, Suite 100.  The FREE exhibition can be seen Monday-Friday, 9am-5pm. Call 214-742-3242 for information or visit www.lareuniontx.org for details.

The Make Space for Art call for entries attracted 68 designers from 19 countries who submitted ideas for a future environmentally friendly facility to be built on a 35-acre site in Oak Cliff.  The jurors for Make Space for Art are Mark Gunderson, AIA of Fort Worth; Dr. Richard Brettell of UT Dallas; Louise Harpman of UT Austin, Max Levy, FAIA of Dallas; and Rick Lowe of Project Row Houses in Houston.

The winners for MAKE SPACE FOR ART are:  First Prize: Bang Dang of Dallas; Second Prize: Michael Panacci of Brooklyn, Ontario, Canada; Third Prize: Ines Fernandez and Lucia Perez of New York, New York; Sustainable Prize: Sofia Fernandes and Tiago Carvalho of Portugal.  Honorable Mentions for MAKE SPACE FOR ART are: Simon Stahl and Emma Melin of Jonkping, Sweden; Delphine Borg of Rotterdamn, The Netherlands; Brandon Woodward of Seattle, Washington; Chris Sano of Dallas, Texas; Michael Hargens, Sophia Razzaque, Teoman Ayas of London, UK; Karl Bengzon of Chester, New Jersey.

Make Space for Art was sponsored by Perkins-Will, Barry Whistler Gallery, Preservation Tree Services, and City of Dallas Office of Cultural Affairs.  Hardcover catalogs featuring all the plans from Make Space for Art are available for purchase.

About Dallas Center for Architecture
Welcome to one of the nation’s first Centers for Architecture—a lively new convergence of the art and science of architecture—uniting architects and allied professionals with citizens concerned about good design, community sustainability and other key living-environment issues for today and tomorrow.  The Dallas Center for Architecture fills 8,000 square feet of prime urban space at 1909 Woodall Rodgers Freeway, anchoring the north end of the new Woodall Rodgers Park and providing a portal to the Dallas Arts District. Arrive via the freeway, the McKinney Avenue Trolley or the Pearl Street DART Station.

The Dallas Center for Architecture also serves to build collaborative relationships among allied organizations and the academic community; be a center of learning for the public and industry professionals; influence public policy on issues of sustainable community planning and the built environment; and promote the value of architecture and community planning in Dallas and surrounding communities.

About La Reunion TX
La Reunion TX is creating an arts residency in Dallas that will host artists in both new and traditional media for periods ranging from one week to one year. In exchange for short-term living quarters and studio space, artists will be expected to give back to the community through programs, exhibits, performances and installations. Artists working in all media will be encouraged to apply.  The residency will be built on a 35 acre site in Oak Cliff and will be as green and off-grid as possible, modeling sustainable living. In addition, the business plan has an eye toward long-term sustainability not only with the facility but also with the bottom line. La Reunion TX seeks to transform the community through art and create lasting social change in Dallas. See www.lareuniontx.org for more details.

Currently, La Reunion TX offers several programs utilizing both the land and the organization’s gallery space in the Design District of Dallas.  Art Chicas Unidas is a collaborative program with Dallas Art Dealers Association and Girl Scouts of NorthEast Texas that teams high school aged girls with female mentor artists.  Tree Carving is a program to turn dead and dying trees on the 35 acres into decomposing sculptural works.  Scriptwriting for Graphic Novels explores the relationship between writers and illustrators with Dallas’ thriving comic book community.

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photo by Sarah Jane Semrad of Allan Arp’s 08 Tree

Dallas, Texas – La Reunion TX, a not for profit artist residency, will present its second annual open house on Saturday, Feb. 7, 2009 from 12 p.m. – 4 p.m. on its donated land in Oak Cliff.  The site is located on West Jefferson Blvd, just west of Cockrell Hill Road in Dallas.  The open house will include a tree-carving reception by area artists, an exhibition of winning plans from Make Space for Art, an international juried architecture competition La Reunion TX facilitated last year for the new art space, nature tours by docents from Texas Discovery Gardens, music, food and more. A public call for entries for artists was sent out to DFW artists who will work on their trees during the month of January and reveal them for the first time to the public at a reception and Open House on the La Reunion TX land in Oak Cliff.  The La Reunion TX artist selection committee will choose the artists for this program.

La Reunion TX is a Texas non-profit established to create an artist residency program with a future home located on a generously donated 35 acre wooded property seven miles from downtown, very near the original La Reunion colony settled in Oak Cliff over 150 years ago. La Reunion TX has recently wrapped ‘Make Space for Art’ – a juried architecture exhibition – that generated 68 ideas from 19 countries for our ultimate structure which will incorporate sustainable design and renewable energy, providing a model to the community for green living. The “traditional media” studio and “new media” studio each with attached living quarters will accommodate four to one hundred artists per year with residencies ranging from one week to one year. The “Living Room” will provide intimate classroom, performance, exhibit, and installation space.

Jessica Stewart is president of the board of directors, which also includes Lisa Taylor, Allison Graham, Billy Ware, Jessica Stewart, Mark Gunderson, Dan Hughes, Katherine Owens, Noel Navarrete, and James Earl Estes. Sarah Jane Semrad is executive director.   Website: http://www.lareuniontx.org