In Art&Seek's film Recapturing Cuba: An Artist's Journey, Rolando Diaz returns to Cuba for the first time since childhood.
Art&Seek
KERA volunteers to be guide to city’s art boom
The city of Dallas has been caricatured over the years as a superficial place crawling with Bible-thumpers, big-haired strivers and football fanatics — to say nothing of assassination plotters and the likes of J.R. Ewing.
But over the past decade the North Texas metropolis has aggressively worked to redefine itself as a major arts center, with new world-class museums and performance centers fueled by record philanthropic donations.
Now KERA, the region’s dominant pubcaster, is positioning itself to be the place arts consumers go to find out what’s showing.On May 28, the radio/TV licensee launched Art&Seek, a multiplatform project seeded with a $500,000 donation from board member Donna Wilhelm, that aims to blanket the local arts scene.
The online hub is artandseek.org, which serves up blogs and other original content, material adapted from broadcasts and a comprehensive calendar of North Texas arts events. Spokes extend into radio and TV, where there will be a new emphasis on arts reporting with the Art&Seek brand.
Much of the coverage will be provided by reporter/producer Jerome Weeks, a former longtime arts critic for the Dallas Morning News. He and project director Anne Bothwell were among the Morning News arts journalists who took buyouts from the paper in 2006.
Dallas spent much of its history as a sprawling “doughnut city,” with an unwelcoming, largely neglected downtown that relegated nearly everything but office work to the surrounding suburbs. But developers have begun revamping the city center with high-end residences and entertainment options.
“No community has done better at reinventing itself than Dallas,” Investors Business Daily observed in 2006.
At the heart of this would-be renaissance is a 19-block downtown arts district, touted as America’s largest urban cultural zone. The internationally renowned Nasher Sculpture Center opened in 2003, and both a new theater and an opera house are slated to open next year. Meanwhile, Fort Worth, Dallas’ smaller sister city 30 miles to the west, bolstered its arts rep with the breathtaking new Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in 2002.
“It’s clear to people that North Texas is having this amazing cultural renaissance,” KERA President Mary Anne Alhadeff told Current. “But at a time when the arts are flourishing, local commercial media is cutting back on coverage of the arts.” KERA saw an opportunity to essentially “own” one of the area’s biggest ongoing stories, she said.
At the heart of Art&Seek is the interactive calendar, searchable by date, event, venue or group — designed to offer users a one-stop resource for making sense of all the offerings. The calendar enriches the selection by giving exposure to smaller galleries and arts groups that may not have the money for widespread promotion. The database lets the arts groups update their own information, which they do avidly, Alhadeff says.
“We sent out invitations to 500 arts organizations, and we got responses from almost 800,” she said. “I’ve been in public broadcasting for more than two decades, and I’ve never seen a project embraced so quickly.” More than 900 organizations have registered to participate in the site.
KERA will continue to rely on high-profile partnerships with local cultural heavyweights such as the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and Fort Worth’s Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. But the website, especially, “increases the potential for what a partner can be,” Bothwell says.
For example, during one of Bothwell’s many introductory meetings with local artists and groups since she joined KERA, she heard about an upcoming conference and exhibit of digital artists hosted by the University of North Texas’ well-regarded college of visual arts and design. Before the conference in June, artandseek.org highlighted topics and showcased work of several artists involved.
The venue with the largest seating capacity featured in the calendar is KERA’s own TV station. In June, it aired the first official Art&Seek TV production, Conversation with Bill Lively, an interview with the founding president of the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts taped at the construction sites of the new theater and opera house.
Web page posted July 16, 2008
Copyright 2008 by Current LLC
