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“They’re either very big or very small,” Gael Stack says as we stand before her latest set of canvases. “In my life or in my painting, I don’t do middle ground very well.” Her latest exhibition, at Dallas’s Holly Johnson Gallery, on view through May 5, is aptly titled Tinies (her works were also on view in a show of the same name at Houston’s Moody Gallery in Spring 2017). The roughly postcard-sized paintings are precious in their smallness, but they are suffused with the same easygoing elegance as their vaster cousins...

Opening Tuesday at the Spencer Museum of Art, the exhibition “Big Botany: Conversations with the Plant World” examines the integral relationships between humans and plants through works by more than 50 historical and contemporary artists from the museum’s collection, loans and site-specific installations by four artists-in-residence.

Kicking off the exhibition is the Big Botany research symposium, beginning with the keynote lecture, “What a Plant Knows,” by Daniel Chamovitz of Tel Aviv University, at 5:30 p.m. March 27 in the museum’s auditorium. Art historian Giovanni Aloi of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and philosopher Timothy Morton of Rice University will give lectures April 11 and May 2, respectively. All lectures will be live-streamed through the museum’s YouTube channel...

For Immediate Release - Holly Johnson Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of, Geoff Hippenstiel: PURITY. The artist brings a fresh approach to expressionism with new, large-scale oils paired with a selection of small works on paper. An opening reception will be held for the artist on Saturday, April 7 from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. This exhibition marks the artist's second solo show with the gallery and will continue through June 16.

Geoff Hippenstiel pushes abstraction in a manner that reinvigorates the materiality of paint. Using diverse materials such as enamel, wax, metallic and fluorescent artist’s pigments, as well as industrial paints, he allows for an allusion of depth while affirming the importance of surface...

If you’re looking for calm before the storm of “DFW Art Month,” then I would recommend two shows to visit. First, take yourself away on a trip to the quiet abstraction of boats and the sea wave. At least many of David Aylsworth’s paintings seemed to visually reference the nautical theme. For a further strip down show of pure colors and white rectangles, head over to see Jeffrey Cortland Jones’ paintings. Both will cleanse your palate for the inevitable glut of art about to come our way with the Dallas Art Fair and all the art opening to come...

Dion Johnson’s abstract paintings inhabit hairline margins between technologic and handmade. The ten examples in “Feel the Sky,” Johnson’s decadal retrospective at Azusa Pacific University, chart his pictorial evolution while affirming his enduring interests...

Holly Johnson Gallery in Dallas pleased to announce Tinies, an exhibition of new work by Gael Stack, featuring new oil paintings on paper. A reception for the artist will be held Saturday, February 24, from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. The exhibition continues through May 5, 2018.

Gael Stack is one of the most accomplished American painters working today. Her ‘tiny’ paintings on paper are full of mystery, like intimate interior universes awash in cryptic messages and enigmatic figures. Her mark-making, both dreamy and unsettling, looks as if it could dissolve before it is fully formed - evidence of a mind in constant "shuffle" mode, randomly stumbling onto bits of the past. Every image, regardless of the medium, has a source. And while each body of work Stack creates has its own theme, the influences are fairly constant - and oddly apparent once you know them...

On the first floor of the century-old red brick building on the corner of a historic block in downtown Elgin, English artist Margo Sawyer works in her studio, a 3,000-square foot-white box. From here, she creates plans for large-scale installations of her signature powder-coated steel boxes in vibrant hues that can be seen around the world, from Kosovo to Houston, where her “Synchronicity of Color” at Discovery Green is a popular photo spot. Sawyer, an art professor at the University of Texas for almost thirty years, moved to Elgin in 1998 and in 2002 bought the building, which was once a grocery store in the early 1900s—she affectionately calls it the “Bright & Early” building after the faded hand-painted sign on the side...

“I don’t really have a fixed idea when I start a painting,” says Houston painter David Aylsworth. The exhibition Wherefore & Hence, which runs through March 24 at Holly Johnson Gallery in Dallas, showcases works from the last two years in which Aylsworth has further refined and evolved his distinct style and approach to painting while also venturing into uncharted waters.

“I end up gravitating towards certain shapes, forms, and colors. In this show, a large number of the paintings seem to have the appearance of a landscape or seascape to them in an abstract way,” he says. “Previously my paintings occupied a shallow space or depth; now I like the idea of being able to read something in the distance, like looking across a big wide ocean for miles on end.....”

Dornith Doherty’s photographic project Archiving Eden is a multi faceted approach to addressing the worlds concern of decreasing biodiversity and the extinction of natural species in the face of climate change.

For the past ten years she has collaborated with scientists at international seed banks around the world including banks in North America, England, Brazil, Italy, The Netherlands, Russia, and Australia.

Doherty’s photographs include detailed images of highly secured isolated vaults set deep within the earth; doomsday facilities that act as human kinds final chance if the worst should happen and the flora of the planet was suddenly lost. Additionally, the project includes expansive landscapes, greenhouses, incubation chambers,
various laboratory equipment, as well as highly enigmatic collages made from x-ray images recording seeds at various stages of germination....

It was 1963 in Lubbock, Texas. Coming of age in the twilight/dawn of John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier, Terry Allen and his friends generated a rite that echoed a pioneer Texas pastime, the ranch dance, when folks would travel long distances to gather and dance to a fiddle band. “A dozen carloads of us would head out to the cotton fields, loaded down with bootleg beer and whiskey,” the artist recalls. “We’d park in a perfect circle with the headlights aimed in, tune all the car radios to the same station and dance in the dirt. At 10 p.m. or so, we’d tune in ‘The Wolfman’ on XERF out of Del Rio with its massive transmitter in Ciudad Acuña, Coahuila and drink and raise the dust to that....”