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The art scene in Dallas has long been influenced by avant-garde women: From the The Betty McLean Gallery, which opened in 1951 as one of the first modern art galleries in Texas, to Valley House Gallery, founded by Peggy and Donald Vogel, to the visionaries of today who show no signs of slowing down...

Photographer Misty Keasler often finds subjects in vacant spaces whose emptiness has much to say about the people who normally occupy them. Trash dumps in Nigeria filled with computer debris. Fantasy-themed hot-sheet hotel rooms in Japan. Keasler’s images—often fittingly bathed in eerie light that evokes a David Lynch-like dread—capture eccentric manifestations of consumer culture that are charged with a sense of repression and fetishism...

Photographer Misty Keasler visited 13 haunted houses across the United States, exploring their architecture of horror while they were empty. Without the sound, the smells, and, of course, the spooky characters waiting to terrorize the paying guests, the photographs don’t fully capture the experience of a haunted house. However, it was that limitation that drew Keasler to her subject...

Something as simple as a line can create a range of emotional suggestions. Next, to the point, the line is the simplest expression in making visual art. Essential and at the core of nearly every work of art throughout the ages. The line helps direct our eyes through an art piece, whether implied or actual. Thick marks can give a feeling of boldness, while a thin wavy line can draw out from the viewer a feeling of nervousness and being unsure. The power of this art element can feel spiritual as well and structurally material....

Acclaimed North Texas artist Dornith Doherty has been photographing seed banks around the world since 2008, and the capstone exhibition, Dornith Doherty: Archiving Eden, has just opened at the Amon Carter. The show is a spellbindingly beautiful collection of 15 large-scale images, both of the seed banks themselves and digital collages from x-ray images Doherty took in the labs. Patron spoke with Doherty at the Museum the day before the August 12 opening.

PATRON: Your “Archiving Eden” project has consumed you for nearly 10 years—does the origin of this exploration date back to when you learned of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway, the so-called “doomsday vault”?.....

Photographer Dornith Doherty spent nine years documenting remote seed vaults around the world — and the seeds inside them. She even got inside the so-called doomsday vault, in Norway, near the North Pole, designed to help preserve samples of botanical life in case of worldwide catastrophe.

Her large, ghostly images capture life inside seeds as small as a grain of sand.  You can see them in her new book, “Archiving Eden,” and in the show by the same name at Amon Carter Museum of American Art.

For our weekly State of the Arts, I spoke Doherty about how she makes her ethereal work. Here are some excerpts from our conversation...

Dornith Doherty Sees the Future in a Seed - The photographer, whose work is featured in a new exhibition at the Amon Carter, has spent the last decade visiting seed banks around the world....

Holly Johnson Gallery in Dallas is pleased to announce the opening of, Crystal Cities: New Paintings and Sculptures by Tommy Fitzpatrick. This exhibition marks the artist's fourth solo show at the gallery. An opening reception for the artist will be held Saturday, September 9, from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. The exhibition continues through November 4.

Architecture has been the subject of Fitzpatrick's paintings for the past twenty years. The current exhibition, Crystal Cities is inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright's 1940 project of the same name set for a Washington D.C suburb that was never built. This unrealized project, bold in scale and breathtaking in its aesthetic vision inspired Fitzpatrick to create this new body of work....

In 2015, Syrian researchers made the first ever withdrawal from the Svalbard Global Seed Vaultto recover wheat, barley, and grass samples that had been lost when the Aleppo-based seed bank was destroyed in that country's civil war. That is exactly why the Svalbard "Doomsday Vault" exists. To date there are over 1,700 repositories like the one formerly based in Aleppo (which has since moved to Beirut), designed to function as natural safe deposit boxes for food crops and plant diversity in case of natural or man-made disasters....

The Amon Carter Museum of American Art presents Dornith Doherty: Archiving Eden on view August 12, 2017, through January 14, 2018. The exhibition of photographs by North Texas artist Dornith Doherty intertwines science and art, showcasing the planet’s botanical diversity through 15 images from seed banks across the world. Admission is free.