In 2024, the Dallas Museum of Art offers audiences new perspectives on traditional narratives of art history and highlights the Museum’s growing collection, showcasing both beloved mainstays and new acquisitions from across the DMA’s holdings. Exhibitions this season expand and rewrite the art historical canon, from a retelling of the Impressionist movement to two major contemporary shows that foreground the perspectives of women and others whose contributions and stories are often overlooked. Rounding out the season is the largest exhibition of Cecily Brown’s work in nearly 20 years and a special installation that introduces audiences to Japanese bridal traditions from the Edo period.
The full schedule follows below:
Love Island: Japanese Weddings of the Edo Period
December 16, 2023 – October 6, 2024
Love Island: Japanese Weddings of the Edo Period features the exquisite artistry of some of the important elements included in an Edo period bridal trousseau. During the Edo period (1615-1868), Japan’s social structure was dominated by the Tokugawa shogun’s military government regime. Families of the shogunate and provincial feudal lords (daimyo) arranged strategic marriages to establish strong alliances. Once an engagement was announced, wealthy daimyo commissioned magnificent bridal trousseaus (a collection of a bride’s possessions) for their daughters that symbolized the family’s power, prestige, social rank, and political alliances. Focusing on the bride, this installation in the DMA’s Asian Art galleries showcases a black and gold lacquer toilette set that once belonged to a member of the Tokugawa ruling clan, an incense guessing game set, and a lavish wedding kimono.
He Said/She Said: Contemporary Women Artists Interject
December 17, 2023 – July 21, 2024
He Said/She Said spotlights women artists from the 1970s to today that challenge the myth of the sole male genius, bringing together artworks from the DMA and local collections, a majority of which are making their debut. The women artists featured in He Said/She Said: Contemporary Women Artists Interject strategically appropriate the contributions of male artists to create space for new, more inclusive narratives. Ranging from women working within the feminist movement of the 1970s to contemporary creatives inspired by Surrealism, these artists create work that critiques gender norms, sexism, and racism. Many artists in this exhibition, especially from the postmodern period of the 1970s to 1990s, appropriate elements from male predecessors and contemporaries, several of whose works are also included in this presentation.
The Impressionist Revolution from Monet to Matisse
February 11, 2024 – November 3, 2024
Marking the 150-year anniversary of the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874, The Impressionist Revolution from Monet to Matisse tells the story of Impressionism and its legacy within European Modernism. Featuring nearly 90 works from the DMA’s extraordinary holdings, the exhibition delves into the rebellious origins of these outcast artists and their revolutionary exhibitions, exploring the experimental techniques and subjects that set a new course for modern art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The unique innovations of its core members, including Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and Berthe Morisot, are showcased alongside the responses of successive generations of avant-garde artists, from Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh to Piet Mondrian and Henri Matisse.
From Munch to Kirchner: The Heins Collection of Modern and Expressionist Art
February 25, 2024 – January 5, 2025
This exhibition celebrates the legacy of Marie “Elinor” Heins through the recent gift of 30 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper from her heirs. Between 1967 and her death in 2018, Elinor amassed an impressive collection of modern artwork that she displayed in her home in Montreux, Switzerland. The Heins collection is divided evenly between late 19th- and early 20th-century art movements: Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and German Expressionism, Elinor’s favorite. Highlights include works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Signac, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Edvard Munch, artists who depicted contemporary subjects in an equally contemporary style.
When You See Me: Visibility in Contemporary Art/History
April 7, 2024 – April 13, 2025
When You See Me: Visibility in Contemporary Art/History brings together a selection of artists from the DMA’s contemporary art collection whose work broadens and complicates official histories and their corresponding visual strategies to allow for a richer representation of the lived experiences of those who have been excluded, often on account of their race, gender, sexual orientation, or nationality. Employing a wide range of formal and conceptual devices—from abstraction to figuration, fictional to documentary, and the shades of nuance in between—the featured artists, including Tavares Strachan, Simone Leigh, Pacita Abad, Danh Vo, David Hammons, Mark Bradford, Salman Toor, Ryan Trecartin & Lizzie Fitch, and Deborah Roberts, explore invisibility, hypervisibility, and the desire to be seen—or not seen. The multivocal nature of this show is reflected in its co-creation by a four-person curatorial team from the Museum’s Contemporary Art department.
Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations
October 6, 2024 – February 9, 2025
Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations is the largest exhibition of the influential British American artist to appear in the U.S. to date. It is also the first to fully position her groundbreaking reconfigurations of the cultural politics of painting of and by women, asking the viewer to consider the broader implications of how women are represented and understood within society. The exhibition includes paintings and related drawings organized around themes including the boudoir, the garden, the shipwreck, and the hunt. Through these themes, Brown explores gendered tropes that are prevalent in both art history and popular culture, moving between references as diverse as classic rock music and Old Master paintings. This exhibition places Brown’s painterly interrogation of how women have been portrayed as seductresses, conquests, and bodies to be policed in the context of our current sociopolitical climate. Dancing between abstraction and figuration, Brown's enigmatic work defies historical standards of singular interpretation, and invites viewers to engage in close looking and seek out their own conclusions.
On View into 2024
The following exhibitions will remain on view into 2024:
- Picasso’s Muses: Between Inspiration and Obsession (through January 7, 2024), a focused examination of Picasso’s work 50 years after his death, celebrating the women who served as muses during his lifetime.
- Abraham Ángel: Between Wonder and Seduction (through January 28, 2024), a rare retrospective on the art of the young Mexican modernist, assembling nearly all his known surviving works.
- Backs in Fashion: Mangbetu Women’s Egbe (through August 3, 2025), an exploration of the egbe, a back apron garment work by upper-class Mangbetu women, on view in the Third Floor Textiles Gallery.
- Tiffany Chung: Rise Into the Atmosphere (through August 3, 2025), a multisensorial and immersive installation—part of the Museum’s Concourse mural series—that highlights narratives of immigration and human movement.
- Looking Forward: A New DMA (ongoing), a presentation of the Museum and Dallas’ evolution, and an exploration into the planned transformation of the museum.